Imagine: Media of Meaning
Elizabeth Thoman | Shift | Shift Issue #02: Consciousness and the Media |(1 rating)At the beginning of the 20th century, about the time the movies were invented, our visions of the future were transformed from utopian dreams into urban nightmares.
Many factors were at work. But it's likely that the new visual media played an important role in this shift. Film, and later, television producers found it easier to visualize a world of surrealistic decay than to laboriously shape entertainment that, as Gloria DeGaetano, media literacy author from Redmond, Washington, puts it, "shows people negotiating conflict and resolving it through communication, understanding and empathy."
It's time we all put our imaginations to work again.
The challenge of creating a world of peace and opportunity for all involves a massive struggle for educational opportunity, ethnic understanding, and alternatives to aggression. It won't happen overnight. But we must begin.
The effort will take place on many fronts. But we can ignore neither the media's part in creating the ideas that shape us, nor our responsibility for demanding the kinds of media we need.
Media creators must also face up to their own responsibility for molding our hopes and dreams. But it's up to all of us--as teachers, parents and caring citizens--to demand and work for a culture in which "blood and gore, horror and the basest of human instincts are not the driving storyline of prime-time entertainment and talk shows," DeGaetano continues.
And yet, media violence exists within a "circle of blame." There is an assumption that "the media" are responsible for violence when in truth, they are simply one of the points, albeit a powerful one, in the economically driven circle of media production/consumption. Viewers who elect to support, watch or pay to attend violent entertainment are also part of the equation as they drive demand.
That's why the work of the Center for Media Literacy is so important. Our media literacy workshop kit, Beyond Blame: Challenging Violence in the Media, is part of a broad range of media literacy teaching resources for schools, churches, and community groups available from the center. In the United States, our center represents a strong voice for media literacy as a means for transforming the discourse about mediated violence from one of simply blaming "the media" to promoting critical analysis and the acceptance of responsibility for today's culture of violence on the part of viewers, media professionals, networks, and advertisers.
When the Beyond Blame curriculum is introduced to students, whether elementary or high school, they gain the critical thinking and viewing skills to evaluate what they are seeing, and the personal insight to make appropriate choices. A thirteen-year-old from Kansas City, said, "I learned to separate TV violence from regular violence, and to know not to handle my decisions like they do on TV."
The center hopes that media literacy can be made available to children in schools everywhere.
Psychologists and social critics are beginning to understand that traditional therapy breaks down when it tells people to "adjust" to a pathological society. In the same way, media that merely "reflect" a troubled society are not providing the hope and new ideas we need. We need not just the "politics of meaning," but a "media of meaning."
The late physicist Frank Oppenheimer once said, "We don't live in the real world. We live in a world we make up." How media construct our reality is the first principle of media literacy. We can choose to make up a world that glorifies violence--or reinforces peace.
The word "imagine" is based on the word "image. "The effort to change our images is the first step in the creation of a caring culture. We invite your participation in the media literacy movement.
It is time to begin.
ELIZABETH THOMAN has been a pioneering leader in the US media literacy movement for more than 25 years, and is the founder of the Center for Media Literacy in Los Angeles: Elizabeth Thoman Media Literacy. She holds a degree from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.
