In the 1990 movie Avalon, Barry Levinson's film portrait of a World War II–era immigrant family, the delivery of the family's first TV is a milestone. Three generations of Krichinskys squeeze together in front of their tiny new television set and stare vacantly at a black-and-white test pattern. "Just wait," one of the children says, "something will happen."
And it did. Throughout the '60s and '70s, television grew from a diversion in the living room into a national obsession. From moon landings to Leave It to Beaver, a president's assassination to Mr. Clean, media images moved from the background to the foreground of our daily lives.
From the clock radio that wakes us up in the morning to the late night TV talk show that lulls us to sleep, we are exposed to hundreds, even thousands, of images and ideas not only from television but also from newspaper headlines, magazine covers, movies, Web sites, photos, video games, and billboards. Some observers are calling today's young people screenagers (Rushkoff, 1996).
Until recently, few of us questioned the increasing dominance of media in our lives. Those who did were inclined to focus on content issues, like the amount of sex and violence in television and movies. Some advocated censorship, whereas others simply urged families to turn the TV off. But the fact is, though we can turn off the set, we cannot escape today's media culture. Media no longer just influence our culture. They are our culture. Media's pivotal role in our global culture is why media censorship will never work.
For 500 years, we have valued the ability to read print as a way to participate fully in society as educated citizens. Today, the family, the school, and all community institutions, including the medical and health community, share the responsibility of preparing young people for living in a world of powerful images, words, and sounds (UNESCO, 1982). Call it "media literacy."
What Is Media Literacy?
Media literacy is just what it sounds like—the ability to create personal meaning from the verbal and visual symbols we take in every day through television, radio, computers, newspapers and magazines, and, of course, advertising. It's the ability to choose and select, the ability to challenge and question, the ability to be conscious about what's going on around us—and not be passive and vulnerable.
Television and other mass media have become so ingrained in our culture that we should no longer view the task of media education as providing "protection" against unwanted messages. Our goal must be to help learners become competent, critical, and literate in all media forms so that they control the interpretation of what they see or hear, rather than let the interpretation control them.
Media literacy is not so much a finite body of knowledge as a skill, a process, a way of thinking that, like reading comprehension, is always evolving. To become media literate is not to memorize facts or statistics about the media, but rather to raise the right questions about what we are watching, reading, or listening to.
At the heart of media literacy is the principle of inquiry.
Learning What to Look For
Over the years, media educators have identified five ideas that everyone should know about media messages, whether the message comes packaged as a TV sitcom, a computer game, a music video, a magazine ad, or a movie (Davis, 1990).
- Media messages are "constructed." Whether we are watching the nightly news or passing a billboard on the street, the media message we experience was written by someone, pictures were taken, and a creative designer put it all together. But this is more than a physical process. Whatever is "constructed" by just a few people then becomes "the way it is" for the rest of us. But as the audience, we don't get to see or hear the words, pictures, or arrangements that were rejected. We see, hear, or read only what was accepted.Helping people understand how media is put together—and what is left out—as well as how the media shape what we understand about the world we live in is an important way of helping them navigate their lives in a global, technological society.
- Media messages are constructed using a creative language with its own rules. Each form of communication—whether newspapers, TV game shows, or horror movies—has its own creative language. Scary music heightens fear. Camera close-ups convey intimacy. Big headlines signal significance. Understanding the grammar, syntax, and metaphor system of media language increases our appreciation of media experiences and helps us to be less susceptible to manipulation. One of the best ways to understand how media is constructed is to do just that—make our own personal video, create a Web site for our Scout troop, or develop an ad campaign to alert kids to the dangers of smoking.
- Different people experience the same media message differently. No two people see the same movie or hear the same song on the radio. Even parents and children do not see the same TV show. This concept turns the tables on the idea of TV viewers as passive couch potatoes. We may not be conscious of it, but we are all constantly trying to make sense of what we see, hear, or read. The more questions we can ask about what we are experiencing around us, the more alert we can be about accepting or rejecting messages. Research indicates that over time, children of all ages can learn age-appropriate skills that give them a new set of "glasses" with which they can "read" their media culture (Hobbs, 1995).
- Media are primarily businesses driven by a profit motive. Newspapers lay out their pages with ads first; the space remaining is devoted to news. Likewise, we all know that commercials are part and parcel of most TV watching. What many people do not know is that what's really being sold through television is not only the advertised products to the audience—but also the audience to the advertisers! The real purpose of commercial TV, whether news or entertainment, is not just to entertain us but also to create an audience (and put them in a receptive mood) so that the network or local station can sell time to advertisers. Every second counts. Indeed, sponsors pay for the time on the basis of the number of people the station predicts will be watching. The sponsors also target their advertising message to specific kinds of viewers—for example, children ages 2 to 7 who influence their parent's spending. Most media are provided to us, as researcher George Gerbner says, by private, global corporations with something to sell rather than by the family, church, school, or even one's native country with something to tell (1994).
- Media have embedded values and points of view. Media, because they are constructed, carry a subtext of who and what is important—at least to the person or persons creating the media. Media are also storytellers (even commercials tell a quick and simple story), and stories require characters, settings, and a plot. The choice of a character's age, gender, or race mixed in with the lifestyles, attitudes, and behaviors that are portrayed, the selection of a setting (urban? rural? affluent? poor?), and the actions and reactions in the plot are just some ways that values become embedded in a TV show, a movie, or an ad. We must learn how to "read" all kinds of media messages to discover the points of view embedded in them. Only then can we judge whether to accept or reject these messages as we negotiate our way through our mediated environment.
Learning What to Ask
- Who created this message and why?
- What techniques are being used to attract my attention?
- What lifestyles, values, and points of view are represented?
- How might different people understand this message differently?
- What is omitted from this message?
Usually the questioning process is applied to a specific media "text"—that is, an identifiable production or publication, or a part of one: an episode of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, an ad for Pepsi, an issue of Seventeen magazine, a billboard for Budweiser beer, photos and articles about a bank robbery on the front page of a newspaper, the Super Bowl telecast.
Sometimes a media text can involve multiple formats. A new animated Disney film, for example, involves not only a blockbuster movie released in thousands of theaters but also a whole campaign of advertising and merchandising—toys, clothes, lunch boxes—as well as a Web site, storybooks, games, and perhaps eventually, a ride at one of the Disney theme parks. Uncovering the many levels of meaning in a media message and the multiple answers to every question is what makes media education so engaging for kids and so enlightening for adults.
How to Question the Media
- Core questioning. To be a functioning adult in a mediated society, one needs to be able to distinguish among different media forms and to know how to ask basic questions about them. Although most adults today learned in literature classes to distinguish a poem from an essay, it's amazing how many people do not understand the difference between a daily newspaper and a supermarket tabloid.Increasingly as television and the Internet deliver information about national and world events to the public instantaneously, people will need to know how to verify information themselves, how to check sources, and how to compare and contrast different versions of the same information to detect bias or political spin control.Basic core questioning about the media can start as early as age 3, when parents can make a game of "spot the commercial" to help children learn to distinguish between entertainment or news programs and the commercial messages that support them. As children grow and become able to distinguish the world of fantasy from the real world, they can begin to explore how media are put together by turning off the sound during a cartoon and noting the difference it makes or by creating their own cereal box to demonstrate how advertisers package products to entice us to buy.
- Close analysis. Media experiences go by so quickly that we have little time for thoughtful reflection on them. Too often our senses are bombarded for hours at a time with carefully crafted images, sounds, and ideas that flow in and out of our minds, many at an unconscious level. The relentless pace of entertainment media today requires that at least once in a while, we should stop and look, really look, at how a media message has been constructed. The method is called "close analysis."The first step is to isolate a particular media message. Commercials are often good choices because they are short and tightly packed with powerful words and images, music and sounds. Find a commercial that is particularly interesting and replay it several times. First, write down everything you can about the visuals—lighting, camera angles, how the pictures are edited together. Then turn the picture off and listen to the sound track. Write down all the words that are spoken. Who says them? What kind of music is used? Does it change in the course of the commercial? How? Are there other sounds? What is their purpose?Once you become familiar with the surface level, you'll then begin to notice more and more of what the commercial is really saying underneath the surface: values expressed and unexpressed; lifestyles endorsed or rejected; points of view proposed or assumed. Write down your insights along with what's left out of the message and how different people might react differently to it. Finally, reflect on whether you will accept or reject the message of this media "text," and why. Although no one has the time to subject every media message to this kind of analysis, you need only two or three experiences with close analysis to gain the insight to see through other media messages.
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Window of Opportunity
Today's media environment offers a window of opportunity for the introduction of media education not only in schools but also throughout society. Already, over 50 percent of the viewing audience has discovered alternatives to network broadcasting. Over 80 percent of homes have VCRs, and one in four people uses the Internet at least weekly. Leisure time is on the rise, and quality-of-life issues are a major concern for young families and the social system (schools, churches, health care organizations, governments) that serves them.
More important, concern around such issues as alcohol and tobacco abuse, body image and eating disorders, teen sexual behavior, and the proliferation of violence has prompted teachers and families to examine the role that media messages play in shaping the cultural environment in which our children are growing up.
Educating young people to select their media choices, teaching people of all ages to evaluate media's underlying values, and, in general, promoting a media consciousness are the challenges for educators who recognize that for our society to flourish into the next century, we must turn the closed, one-way system of commercial mass media into a two-way process of discussion, reflection, and action with one another and with the media themselves.
