Category Archives: Media Literacy

Ford Advertisement

advertisements, Media Literacy

Ford: Bold can’t wait Ad | BRAND INFECTION » Ads, Advertisements, Commercials

I suppose Walter Jacobs would say that I am becoming more media literate, but I went looking for advertisements that specifically seemed to send strong messages about race, gender, or sex.  In this case, it’s race and gender.  The ad for the Ford Cobra features a young African American boy wearing huge boxing gloves and standing in a typical fighting stance.  His face is serious, a clear message of toughness.  He can’t wait, it seems, to take on the world.

This depiction of boldness seems to carry a racial message: African Americans show their boldness through fighting.  The background of the picture suggests an urban location, with worn chain link fence and cracked sidewalk.  Is this the face of young black men to come?  Is this a young Muhamed Ali?  Certainly, an ad that showed someone “boldly” performing surgery or “boldly” completing a degree would not really help sell a muscle car like the Cobra.  But the choices made in this print ad play on cultural stereotypes.

Independence Day

Media Literacy, Movies

In one of those odd coincidences, I finished reading Mirtzoeff’s introduction to visual culture in which he discusses science fiction, in particular the movie Independence Day.  I’ve only ever seen bits and pieces of it so it was a pleasant surprise to find it just beginning as I say down late last night.

According to Mirtzoeff, the film includes all previous forms of science fiction: “Its cueing of the audience is both a symptom of visual sophistication in an audience nurtured on video rental and a means of supplying a short-hand visual history to its target teenage audience” (p. 208).  Mirtzoeff ties the film to a present-day concern with America’s global authority.  The president in the film is modeled on Bill Clinton and the ideas of colonization and assimilation are tied to immigration reform.  But, Mirtzoeff admits, “Yet for most viewers Independence Day was not a political film” (p. 209).  In fact, as I watched what wasn’t a great film, I wondered if I would have even thought of the political angles if I hadn’t just finished reading about visual culture.  Walter Jacobs would say that I was not media literate then, if I missed the larger themes and references.   I did think it was interesting that the Africans were portrayed just for a second in tribal dress, shaking spears in the air.  It was certainly cinematic shorthand but is it racist, perpetuating images that were not even real in the 1930s, according to Mirtzoeff.

I think what bothered me about the film was the somewhat cavalier attitude towards the death of the average American.  The president kept saying little things about people dying, but if you think about the scope of this…literally millions dead…and it was just too coincidental and silly that the two women survived along with that dog.  I kept thinking…where did they get gas to drive that truck?  Maybe I’m just too realistic for the movies.

So, is this part of media literacy, the interpretation?  There is a part of me that is a little cynical: let’s kill off the fun of movies by having classes in interpretation, just as we managed to make Shakespeare dull by pulling apart every phrase and idea, hunting for Meaning.

Race, Gender, and Class on the Web

Media Literacy

From Chapter 3, Virtuality: From virtual antiquity to the pixel zone, Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture:

Mirzoeff points out, that despite its claims to equality and access, the web is really a place for the upper classes.  He also discusses the idea of desirable Internet addresses such as MIT’s Media Lab.  An AOL address is considered undesirable: “By contrast, an address at America Online is the equivalent of living in a tract home in a subdivision…New apaprtment complexes on Park Avenue in Manhattan offer high-speed access to the Internet as a standard feature, while the first town to be entirely Internet accessible will be Fremont in California’s Silicon Valey, already a very desirable address.  There are no projects in cyberspace” (p. 105).

Mirzoeff goes on to discuss the fact that while the web is gender- and race blind, there are still many electronic have nots.  He suggests that Wired, an enthusiastic chronicler of the digital age,  has “become the venue for a new form of social Darwinism, arguing that computing is a stage of social evolution, separating the higher online sections of humanity from those stuck at the lower levels of the industrial economy…this attitude turns contempt for the poor, especially those of color, into a scientific theory that would be laughable is it were not being taken seriously by significant numbers of people” (p. 107).  Here’s the thing…there are no citations, no links to Wired articles in the references, no real evidence that this is the case.  I don’t read Wired on a regular basis so have no way of judging if this is true although just browsing the headlines right now gives me a sense of upper middle class attitude…the latest gear and mostly pictures of white men.  So, which came first?  Wired or the demographic?  Are they really as racist as Mirzoeff seems to suggest or are they just trying to appeal to a certain group of people who, in this case, happen to upper class, white and males.  Is that wrong?  And where is the social Darwinism in that?  It’s mostly marketing.  Individual media outlets can’t possibly appeal to everyone.

Mass to Molecular Media

Education, Media Literacy, New Media, Tagging

"The shift is one from the mass to the molecular media." (Tapscott, Growing Up Digital, p. 300).

One important "new" media literacy skill is organization. In the late 70s, when I was in high school, someone else had done the organizing. We learned how the card catalog worked, how to use indexes to search encyclopedias, and how to use the Guide to Periodicals, even though my high school only subscribed to a small number of magazines listed. Basically, we learned how other people organized the world, and it seemed like it was mostly alphabetical by last name or title.

How is the world organized now? Increasingly by tags and keywords that can be sorted and re-sorted in a variety of ways using search techniques that may be different from the ones I learned. For instance, rather than going for the "L" volume to find stuff on Abraham Lincoln, in Google I would simply type Abraham Lincoln to search for information on our 16th president. (Actually, searching on Lincoln, Abraham gets you the same search results.)

I observed in a school a few months ago and watched the media specialist deliver a class on how to use the paper almanac.  At the time, I wondered why she was pursuing this. After all, if I want to know how far it is to the moon, I'm just going to Google or ask.com.  It occured to me, but I have never confirmed it, that using the world almanac is a testable skill.  Hmmm…really?  Shouldn't students be learning how to create efficient organizational methods for themselves?  How to develop folksonomies that help categorize.

This is a whole new way of thinking of information.  Instead of file cabinets and file folders as the metaphor to describe storage and organization, the network is a much better idea.  A constellation or cloud of keywords that can be combined and recombined to show how knowledge is related. Certainly, any media literacy should help students how to organize this new media.

Growing Wikipedia Revises Its ‘Anyone Can Edit’ Policy – New York Times

Education, Media Literacy

Growing Wikipedia Revises Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy – New York Times
"I wrote a paragraph of text and there it was," recalled Ms. Walsh. "You write all these pages for college and no one ever sees it, and you write for Wikipedia and the whole world sees it, instantly."

And there, in a nutshell, is the difference between the pre- and post-Internet worlds: the whole world can see what we create.  That has fundamental implications for educators whose job is to prepare students for this new world.  But most of those educators grew up under the old model of education with teachers and students together in a classroom sharing with themselves and, only occassionally, with the outside world.  I think an effective media literacy curriculum must include some kind of education related to these kinds of collaborative communities like Wikipedia.