Tag Archives: journalism

Introducing the Media Literacy Smartphone

12 Feb

Media Literacy Remote ControlBy Jonathan Friesem

GUEST BLOGGER

Ever since the Media Education Lab moved from Temple University to the University of Rhode Island, I was looking for a chance to update the classic media literacy “remote control,” first developed by Renee Hobbs in 1993.

While the remote control presents a metaphor for the active and structured approach to the analysis of media and popular culture, the remote control is gradually being replaced by the smartphone. So when I was preparing to present our work at conferences and meetings in China and Israel, I re-designed the remote control design, changing it to a smartphone look while keeping the key questions and core concepts the same. Now the new media literacy smartphone is available for purchase in inexpensive classroom sets for educators


 Jonathan Friesem demonstrates the new MEL app for media literacyIn early January, I was invited to present the core concepts of media literacy in front of a leading group of communication researchers, media practitioners, and journalists in Israel. The Media Regulation Forum at the Israel Democracy Institute meets twice a month to talk about the role and limitations of the Israeli media regulator, the Israeli authority for television and radio. As the manager of the Media Education Lab, I was asked to present the argument that media literacy education can be more effective than regulation.

Introducing the MEL App

Introducing the Media Literacy AppI decided to introduce the new Media Education Lab App at the forum. Using the MEL App engages people in dialogue and information-sharing, showcasing to already-media literate people how media literacy can be learned through exploration of critical questions. My idea: to consider the relationship between media literacy education and media regulation, my audience needs to directly experience the pedagogical foundations of media literacy education in practice.

I chose a media text from a North Carolina television news station that featured a report about a controversial PSA against texting while driving. The two-minute news report featured a young reporter describing the graphic PSA and then interviewing three students outside their school talking about the positive effects of this PSA. Knowing that a media text with local issues could lead the conversation away from the actual activity of deconstructing a media message, I intentionally chose to use a media text which would be not so familiar to my audience.

We watched the video and then started to go through each one of the features of the MEL App. We started with the Reality Check: Does this news report represent reality? On one hand, it is a report about a real PSA. On the other hand, this report was so manipulative that it was clear to participants how much of the footage of the report was staged.

The next topic was Private Gain or Public Gain. We got into a discussion about whether the gain from the report against texting is beneficial for the viewers or for the TV network itself. This discussion led to the next feature of the App: What’s Left Out. Participants identified the calculated framing, the selection of white teens as interviewees and the reporter’s decision to talk about the problematic visuals of the PSA without showing these images to the news viewers. The latter point addressed participants’ concern that the report was not really about the effects of the PSA but rather a dramatic promotional opportunity for the network, as the anchor commented: “It is incredibly graphic so we choose not to run all the images, but you can see the entire video if you’d like to at WXII12.com.”

Then we continued to explore the topic of Values Check. Besides the obvious fact that texting is dangerous while driving, we identified two values: first, the the concept of materialism in relation to technologies like the smartphone, and the second, the decreasing value of parenting. The students who were interviewed were saying how this PSA was much more effective than their parents’ guidelines. Then we tackled the topic: Read Between the Lines. What was the actual message of this report? Is it a commercial hidden as their top local news story? Was it a message about the failure of the educational system to educate about safety? Or was it a message about white privileged teens who do not listen to their parents and get into accidents?

Structured Critical Analysis

As the discussion around the table got steamed up, we moved to the next app: Stereotype Alert. We asked ourselves why the reporter chose the three white teenagers who were filmed from high angle. Analyzing their clothing, gestures and accessories (such as the smartphones they used to watch the PSA) made it clear that there is a subtext about the culture of privileged teens. How could those three adolescents (who for some reason were not in class at that moment) be persuaded in four minutes to stop texting?

The answer for that question is the next app: Solutions too Easy. The two and a half minute report explains the problem of texting while driving and offers the quick solution: parent should go to the network’s website and show their teens the four-minute-long PSA. Using the last app – Record/Save for Later – I asked the participants if this report is important to them and if there is any value to store and show it later. There were mixed reviews and feelings about this report.

To conclude the activity we went to the bottom part of the MEL App to see the different media genres content that can be analyzed. It is important to understand that this activity can be done not only with TV messages but also with newspapers, movies, tablets, radio, comics, books, music, video games, and even social networks. On the other side of the MEL App we reviewed quickly the five critical questions that reframe critical analysis using the concepts of authorship, purpose, contructedness, point of view, interpretation and omission.

Of course, the distinguished group of scholars, the executives, and the journalists knew full well how to analyze this report without the instructional scaffolding that the remote control provides. However, this activity showcased to them that media literacy education can be done in a fun and engaging way using a structured learning process.

I was asked to come and talk about media literacy as part of the debate on whether the legislators should protect the viewers by regulating the media industry or investing in media literacy education to empower viewers’ critical thinking. It seemed that the activity and the presentation of the MEL App gave participants an experience that demonstrated the efficiency of media literacy education over media legislation, which in the digital age, cannot be entirely regulated.

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Activating Young Leaders To Create a World Where Hate Cannot Flourish

16 Jul

Brianna Pescok and Renee Hobbs visit the State of Deception exhibit at the United State Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

One of the best things about my new job is the extent to which I’ve been able to think deeply about the needs of college-age students in relationship to the unknowable future we all face. In aiming to create a school of national distinction, I’ve been asked, “Who is the ideal University of Rhode Island Harrington School student?” My answer never wavers. It’s someone with three essential qualities: (1) a “doer” with intellectual curiosity, tenacity, and ambition; (2) someone eager to develop outstanding skills of expression and communication using a variety of forms (written, oral, visual, multimedia, digital, etc); and (3) someone who is relationally-oriented, full of compassion and community-mindedness, and possessing a deep sense of what it means to “do the right thing.”

This summer I was delighted to meet many young people with all these qualities and boy, was it inspiring! For the second year, I participated in a special leadership development program, held in Washington, D.C., called “What You DoMatters,” a three-day program for college students supported by the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum. Students came from more than 40 colleges and universities around the United States and across the world.

The lineup of presenters was impressive. We heard from Carl Wilkins, the last American to remain in Rwanda after the genocide began in 1994. And Eboo Patel offered wise words about the ways that religious understanding can change ourselves — and the world. Former University of Maryland wrestler Hudson Taylor inspired us all with the tale of how he grew into the role of becoming a LGBT rights activist, helping change the culture of college sports.

The conference is designed around a special exhibit at the Holocaust Museum, State of Deception, which is an exploration of the rise of German propaganda in the 20th century. To open the event, Sara J. Bloomfield, director of the Museum, welcomed the student leaders, explaining that Nazis didn’t just spread hate. They also promoted an agenda of freedom, unity and prosperity that many people found alluring, using mass communications and the ability to exploit the Germans’ hopes and fears.

JoAnna in action

JoAnna Wasserman created “What You Do Matters” as part of her work for the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Musem.

One of the things I liked best about the conference was the time allotted to dialogue and informal sharing. Conversations were real, personal and authentic.

Some sessions took a close look at contemporary propaganda. Journalist Lou Jacobson took us behind-the-scenes at Politifact.com to see how they help readers distinguish between many shades of lies and truth in the propaganda machine that is Washington, D.C. You’ll also be pleased to know that I offered a session entitled, “Lessons from KONY2012″ where we critically analyzed various perspectives from journalists, activists, critics, and social media experts on the meteoric rise and fall of the activist Jason Russell, whose creative new ways of reaching audiences with powerful messages captured the world’s attention in the spring of 2012. I’ll be sharing the lesson plan that I created for this session as part of a back-to-school suite in September. Stay tuned!

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Art, Journalism and Propaganda

24 Mar

Mike Daisy’s emotionally powerful monologue about the conditions of life in China for workers at the giant industrial plant where Apple products are manufactured has generated a lot of controversy for National Public Radio, This American Life and New York’s Public Theater, where he launched his project. But who has considered the role of the reader/viewer/listener in all this?

Mike Daisey emphasized that his show “is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection between our gorgeous devices and the brutal circumstances from which they emerge.” It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and fiction to tell its story. But when NPR’s Ira Glass discovered the inaccuracies and fabrications in the work, he issued a powerful retraction.

Journalists have been having a field day with Mike Daisey, equating him with Rush Limbaugh and FOX News. Some see him as an inept propagandist, telling fantastic and highly distorted tales that map onto people’s existing worldviews about the human cost of high-tech capitalism.

The New York Times has exercised its thought leadership on this issue with a predictable and solidly heavy hand. David Carr’s piece makes a flat assertion that it’s never OK to lie in pursuit of the truth. Similarly, Charles Isherwood claims that “nonfiction should mean just that: facts and nothing but the facts,” arguing that “theater that aims to shape public opinion by exposing the world’s inequities has no less an obligation than journalism to construct its larger truths only from an accumulation of smaller ones.”

Other journalists offer a more nuanced perspective. In “The Price of Deceit,” Rachel Manteuffel of the Washington Post acknowledges her identity as a journalist-storyteller. She reveals her own strategic use of rhetorical devices in shaping readers’ interpretation of Daisey’s personality and character. For example, when she describes his tendency to spit a little bit during a monologue performance, she uses detail selectively to promote a specific emotional response from the reader. She comforts readers by noting that the information she chooses to emphasize (selective and emotionally loaded as it is) is accurate.

No doubt about it: Artists and journalists are different kinds of truth-tellers and storytellers and always have been.

Here’s my problem with the whole affair: The critique of Mike Daisey offered up by journalists reflects a fundamental belief that meaning, authenticity and truth are solely located in the text. Based on this, it’s easy to play the blame game by setting up rigid hierarchies of truth. But Umberto Eco’s adventures in semiotics have helped us recognize that meaning is in people and contexts, not only in texts. One of the key concepts of media literacy is the idea that people interpret messages differently. It is at the interaction between reader, text and cultural context where meaning is actually created.

All works of human creativity – in both the genres of art and journalism– are ‘open’ and ‘unstable,’ susceptible to a wide range of interpretations. As readers/viewers/listeners, we are the critical agents in the meaning-making process.

David Shields explores these issues in his lyrical and highly engaging book, Reality Hunger. All the distinctions between the original and the plagiarized, the scripted and the unscripted, the fictional and the nonfictional are evaporating. Why? Humans need novelty and complexity to pay attention, and too often, standardized, familiar genres (like traditional journalism) can deaden our senses. The representation of reality needs constant renewal.

Through their work, authors seek to wake up audiences. Shields writes, “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. Art exists that we may recover the sensation of life.” Mark Nash describes artists as “double agents crossing back and forth between art and society.” And in doing this, documentary filmmakers have revealed a fundamental paradox that is true of all symbolic forms: to represent reality, you sometimes have to fake it.

In media literacy, we recognize this by emphasizing the exploration of the complex relationship between authors and audiences, messages and meanings, and representations and realities. The very soul of the rhetorical act is built on the magical relationship between authors (filmmakers, bloggers, visual artists, and journalists) who use symbols in imaginative ways to express meanings about lived experience and audiences (readers, viewers and listeners) who make interpretations.

Anthony Wing Kosner, in his fine Forbes blog post about the “almost true,” points this out: “Perhaps the almost true is potent precisely because the audience has to bridge the gap of truth and in so doing become complicit in its viral spreading. The almost true needs us in a way that the actual truth does not. This is an established principle of theatre, of art, that the audience completes the illusion—makes it more real than real.”

In a profound sense, we make our own reality by the interpretations we make of our immediate experience plus the vast array of media messages that surround us. It’s why I care more about addressing the receivers of propaganda more than berating the propagandists. As Alfredo Cramerotti explains, “To ground the idea of ‘reality’ in its reception rather than its representation is one way to retain the ability to build our own ‘truth claim’ for what is represented, instead of the material making such claims for itself.”

More than anything, I want viewers and listeners of Mike Daisey’s monologue to have the receptive, critical and interpretive skills to recognize the big ideas at the heart of a work and the competence, tenacity and drive to identify and interrogate the aesthetic and rhetorical techniques used to construct it. Ultimately, like Robert Scholes has put it, I want people to be both sympathetic and critical readers. All forms of creative expression in any medium are ultimately rooted in the essai, an attempt at understanding. Writers and readers are equally responsible here. Playing the blame game by setting up hierarchies of truth obscures this fundamental and very human process.

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