MEDIA LITERACY

 

There is very little contestation to the notion that media representations help manufacture our view and understanding of the world. This affects children and adolescents the hardest.  A K-12 system of education must integrate teaching media literacy into its curriculum. How else can we in a multicultural global society teach our students about the ways in which power generates inequities and injustices. How else can we convey to the audiovisual generation that societal conditions are directly related to issues of  race, class, and gender. Recent studies by Sut Jhally, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Douglas Kellner, Henry Giroux, Robert McChesney, and Riane Eisler  among others reveal the role mainstream media play in perpetuating these unjust conditions, hence helping with maintenance of Eurocentric-capitalist systems of power. Media literacy programs will enable students to look for alternative media, which can greatly help with creating a more diverse and democratic way of constructing images and worldview that could bring us closer to a just global society. We must accept and pronounce the fact that the media  are a powerful form of pedagogy—a social force. Developing a media literacy program in K-12 schooling requires a deep understanding and a critical perspective of the pedagogical role media like television, popular music, cinema, and advertising play in our society. Consider the Internet.  The Internet assimilates various media forms (e.g., books, music, film, animation, advertising, journalism, etc.) and in this cyber paradigm we have much pedagogy. The notion of net neutrality must be taken seriously and defended by educators and concerned citizens. My research is looking into ways in which we can create empowering models of media literacy and education to help our future teachers and civic leaders.  

TECHNOLOGY & HUMANITY

 

Today we live in an epoch of highly sophisticated technological paradigm. From the Internet to the high-tech hybrid automobiles, which take us from one geographic location either virtually physically, we are in daily relationship with technology.

In some parts of the post-industrial/post-modern world of privilege in places like San Francisco Bay Area we experience technology at its most advanced level, yet like the fish in water we may not be aware of technology’s point of conception or its politics of power. We live in a “top- down” technological paradigm. As Andrew Feenberg has astutely pointed out, “ Technology can be and is configured in such a way as to reproduce the rule of the few over the many.” Heidegger had also recognized, in his History of Being, the coming of the hierarchical technological society. American corporations are configured to be top-down organizations in order to benefit the elite that actually own them.

But at its core it is humanity that designs and implements technology. But what to do with the humanity’s power relations? We have seen in science fiction literature and motion pictures where humanity wins over technology’s dominance and in the end turns the tables on the power relations. See, for example, the terminator series for an illustration of such reversal in power relations. But that is simulated reality. In physical and sensory everyday reality the challenge remains. A dramatic transformation is indeed necessary to reverse the top-down into bottom-up relationship between humanity and technology. Technology has brought us the atomic bomb, but it also has brought us the pacemaker. One destroys lives while the other saves them. If we had more of a democratic relationship between technology and humanity, we would have more pacemakers and no bombs– on a global scale. One may wonder to what extent men like Bill Gates and Steven Jobs consider such democratization. Next time you are about to purchase an I-pod think about that—will you?