Why Americans are not media literate

I think I'll augment my use of the label “media literacy” to describe the field of media education. I thought about it after talking with Robert Kubey, Rutgers professor and director of The Center for Media Studies. Kubey is the editor of “Media Literacy in the Information Age: Current Perspectives.” The field now seems to be so much more than those two words suggest.

Kubey’s book is a collection of the best writing on what he calls “an extremely broad and unfocused area” of academia. He used to teach a course on the subject at Rutgers but no longer does. The best way to study it, he recommends, is by immersing yourself in the literature and in attending conferences where the best minds in the field are gathering.

Kubey explained that the phrase “media literacy” has lost its sparkle in the field. “It doesn’t really have good cache – it sounds babyish,” he said. Instead, scholars around the world are using terms like media analysis, media and politics and media symbolism.

He also points out that the United States has some catching up to do in media education.

“Australians are the best,” he said. “I’ve published how far behind the Americans are. They ‘re teaching kids semiotics (in Australia). It’s based on symbolic images. There are meanings attached to things like glasses and you go out from there.”

In his collection of essays, Kubey includes “Media and Arts Education: A Global View from Australia.” It’s written by Peter Greenaway, a world-renowned media education scholar who endorses the teaching of popular culture. He and others refer to American pop culture as the “Coca Cola Culture.”

The rest of the world is way ahead of Americans in media education because the rest of the world has been forced to grapple with the saturation of the “Coca Cola Culture” in their own countries. They have begun looking at ways to equip their students with tools to identify popular culture texts and their influences. We Americans, meanwhile, have very little exposure to outside cultural texts, so we’re not concerned about their effects. And we're not critical of our own cultural texts.

“Australians have been subjected to enormous amounts of information about America, whereas Americans’ exposure to Australian culture is in comparison miniscule,” Greenaway writes. He quotes another scholar, Patricia Mellemcomp, who says, “The most profitable export, the biggest industry, of the U.S. is representation.”

Kubey points to two approaches in media education. One is the protectionist approach, in which we seek to keep kids away from what we perceive as harmful media. The other is the cultural studies approach, where we teach them how to interpret meanings and effects of media texts.

“If you’re worried they’re being bamboozled by political ads, that’s not protectionist,” Kubey said. “You’re trying to teach them how to ask the critical questions – what’s left out, what isn’t said, what’s the motivation … all of that is critical in a message, in advertising …”

Kubey’s book offers some concrete starting points for the teaching of media and popular culture. Two other Austrialians, Robyn Quin and Barrie McMahon, offer a framework in their essay, "Living with the Tiger: Media Curriculum Issues for the Future." The purpose of media literacy education is to give kids an informed and critical understanding of the media, its techniques and impact," they write.

Some important discoveries that I took from their work:
• I must keep in mind that their media are a source of pleasure for kids. The last thing we want to do is denegrate their media choices.
• Data is not information, information is not knowledge and knowledge is certainly not wisdom, Quin and McMahon write. These are all distinct points on a continuum. The information explosion showers us with data, but we're getting very little wisdom. Kids need tools to move along the continuum.
• Kids are not passive recipients of media texts. They, as audience members, are active in the construction of the message's meaning. In other words, we all bring our own knowledge, prejudices and resistance to the construction of a message. Part of the teacher's job is to make students aware that their attitudes and positions help to construct the meaning of a message, and that we could all derive different meaning from the same message.

The most important discovery for me is the realization that I must change my teaching style. I must guide my students. They must make these discoveries on their own, with my help. With further research, I'll be ready to begin writing my lesson plans.

Teaching media literacy with politics

Teachers of media literacy have a great tool in the presidential campaign if they want to engage kids in the study of media symbols. The cases of “Joe the Plumber” and ‘60s radical William Ayers seem tailor-made to help kids smarten up about their media.

First, Joe the Plumber. His five minutes of fame commenced with last Wednesday’s presidential debate. Republican John McCain used Joe to hammer Democrat opponent Barack Obama. McCain asserted Joe would be harmed by Obama’s tax plan, since the plumber told Obama in a campaign video clip that he’d be making $250,000 a year in his business. Obama’s plan would force a tax hike on Joe, McCain said, and even Obama admitted the same in the clip.

The New York Times did some fact checking on Joe.
Seems he’s not quite a plumber (claims to be an apprentice, but no record at the union hall). His formal name is not Joe, but Samuel J. Wurzelbacher. He owes back taxes. One more thing: the business he wants to buy may be worth $250,000, but his income would not be nearly that high. Instead of a tax hike, he’s likely, at least in the first years of business ownership, to get a tax break under Obama’s plan.

Take another McCain attack ad, the one that accuses Obama of palling around with 1960's violent radical William Ayers, formerly of the Weather Underground. FactCheck.org did an investigation of the McCain commercial laying out the Ayers-Obama connection and called the ad “largely untrue.”

In case you think I’m picking on the Republicans, FactCheck.org will set you straight in their book, “unSpun.” Peddlers of disinformation sit on both sides of the political aisle and their cases are spelled out in this great book, described by its authors as a handbook on how to recognize and avoid deception, not just in politics but in commercial advertising and life in general.

Like the cases of Joe the Plumber and William Ayers, “UnSpun” is a great resource for teachers who are just starting their exploration of media literacy. In it, the authors, Brooks Jackson and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, give us a list of “tricks” that advertisers and politicians use to deceive us. You can recognize these tricks in many of the ads and campaign messages that bombard us each day. The authors have attached clever names to the tricks that make them easier for kids to wrap their brains around. For instance, there’s the “Name It and Claim It” trick. Here, the deceiver renames the product to conceal some aspect of it that would otherwise turn us off.

I recently read the “unSpun” book with my high school sophomores. After learning the list of tricks to look for in their media use, they broke into groups to produce an ad (poster) for an imaginary product that uses one of the tricks. The only requirement was that the product be in a bottle.

Two students, Mike and Alex, were assigned the “Name It and Claim It” trick. They decided to rework maple syrup, this time calling their product Maple Nectar. They saw the word ‘syrup’ as a negative. It’s sticky, you can’t avoid getting it on your hands. But the word ‘nectar’ brought visions of gods bestowing a magical drink upon us all.

Lesson plans are easy to conjure with the “unSpun” book. If you try the poster project, you won’t be disappointed. In fact, "unSpun" helps us to fit media literacy into what researchers say it should now be. Since television and mass media have become so ingrained in our culture we should no longer view media education as providing "protection" against unwanted messages, according to Elizabeth Thoman in "Skills & Strategies for Media Education" at the Center for Media Literature. The goal should be "to help people become competent, critical and literate in all forms so that they control the interpretation of what they see and hear, rather than letting the interpretation control them."

Is all this media exposure harming our kids?

A glowing television set is an irresistible force in any room. We simply cannot ignore it. We know this and we live with it.

Case in point: I visited the local bar a few weeks ago to celebrate a friend's birthday. We talked and laughed about recent exploits among our group of close friends. And every once in a while, I found myself drawn to one of the five little screens that hung above us. There was a TV set everywhere I turned.

When my eyes went to the TV, I seemed to enter a trance, even if for only five seconds. The chat was lost for a few moments. Then I pulled myself back to the party. This continued as long as I sat within view of a TV.

"Television Addiction is No Mere Metaphor," according to a 2002 study of the same name by Rutgers University Professor Robert Kubey and colleague Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. We already know from EEG studies that our brains are less stimulated during TV viewing than they are when we read a book, the authors note.

But those feelings of passivity and lowered alertness continue after we pull away from the set. And the sense of relaxation we experienced as we watched? It ends quickly after the set is turned off. The authors made their findings by following test subjects, using their "Experience Sampling Method." The subjects were beeped at random intervals, prompting them to write down their TV habits and the feelings they were experiencing.

The study found that after TV, the viewer's mood is about the same or worse than before. Symptoms during and after heavy TV viewing are about the same as if the viewer were addicted to drugs, the study found.

But how do these findings apply to computers and the Internet?
Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi say the same principles often apply, and it's all about what they call our "orienting response." An infant near a TV will crane its head to see a glowing TV, they point out. It's the primitive fight-or-flight mechanism at work, a.k.a., the orienting response. The baby becomes quiet and alert to what could be danger. And this is what’s happening to us adults and kids with every video we watch and every computer game we play. Our orienting response is being hit again and again.

The authors point to work of Annie Lang at Indiana University. She found that the typical music video activates the orienting response continuously. And if you put too many scene changes and jumps within a scene in any visual media, you overwork the orienting response. Then we fail to retain any of what we saw, she found.

Other studies provide both good and bad news on the effects of Internet use. The good news: the Center for Communication Policy at UCLA found in a 2004 study that the typical Internet user is “an avid reader of books” and spends more time engaged in social activities than the non-user. It also found that TV viewing is down by as much as five hours a week by Internet users, compared to those who don’t use the Internet.

The disturbing news: in their survey of Internet users in 14 countries, they found that most Internet users generally trust the information they find online. More than half of Internet users surveyed said "most or all" of the information they find online is reliable and credible. The South Koreans are the most trusting and the Swedes are the biggest skeptics, the study found.

But are we really learning less with all of this reading and viewing, than we were before the Internet? Maryanne Wolfe, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain,” has an ominous view, as outlined in “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” by Nicholas Carr in the July/August issue of Atlantic Monthly.

When we read online, Wolfe says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information” because it’s coming at us so quickly and there’s so much information to absorb. And our ability to interpret text and make “rich mental connections” isn’t used when we merely decode, she says.

Or does all of this trouble lie in the misuse of our "orienting response"? When kids play video games for too long, for instance, they report feeling tired, dizzy and nauseous. Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi point to a 1997 incident in Japan, where 700 children were rushed to the hospital after they began suffering epileptic seizures brought on by a Pokemon video game on TV. If we could train our minds to shut off our fight-or flight response, maybe we'd rise above mere decoding. For now, we must arm our students with the tools to judge the information that they are absorbing. It's a start.

View from the front lines of media literacy

Journalism teacher Noreen Connolly recalls the day she got her “wake-up call,” as she put it, to begin teaching media literacy.
One of her students, a member of her high school newspaper staff at St. Benedict Prep in Newark, approached her with what he thought was a great story.
“It was all about 9/11 conspiracy theories. It was bazaar, what I thought was phony logic,” she remembered. “The building fell this way, therefore there had to have been a bomb inside the building. He didn’t even name his sources.
“We looked at various websites. One was a bazaar looking site in Denmark. I asked, how can you judge this as a legitimate source? He couldn’t answer,” she said.
Connolly started in earnest to build media literacy into her already crowded curriculum. Her basic credo?
“The news doesn’t just appear. Someone finds it and writes it and decides if it goes on the page,” she said. That lesson is built into everything she does.
Of course, her biggest challenge, and mine, is to get students to be inquisitive about world events and politics. We can’t help them to be critical about their media when they’re not interested in them the first place.
“Basically, they want to look at sports, games, sneakers, fashion or girls,” Connolly said.
Connolly’s school doesn’t have a formal curriculum for media literacy. Neither does mine. She’s in a private school in an urban setting, I’m in a public school in the surburbs. We follow our respective curricula. In public schools, media literacy shows up in the Core Curriculum Content Standards as a brief list of proficiencies appropriate for language arts, history or health class. Click on the Scope and Sequence prompt for more material and there’s not much there. Each clickable spot under “Grade 9-12” gives me a description of an assignment about Thoreau. I teach journalism. It seems I’m on my own to develop a good, solid program that teaches kids how to be critical media consumers.
There’s plenty of material on the Internet. Rutgers has a list of sites, having turned its own media literacy project into a gateway to get to others that are producing great material. For teachers, the best material includes research and lesson plans.
I was surprised to see that one of the best sites for teachers, the Media Education Lab at Temple University, is listed incorrectly on the Rutgers site.
Click on “Media Education Lab and you’re taken to a site called reneehobbs.com. Dr. Renee Hobbs is, indeed, the Temple professor and director of the Media Education Lab. The site you’ve been sent to, though, is apparently her personal site. Teachers beware. The correct address for the Media Education Lab is http://www.mediaeducationlab.com/.
Hobbs has done groundbreaking research in media literacy. Her biography lists her as a founding board director of the Alliance for a Media Literate America (AMLA). She wrote a scholarly article called, “Seven Great Debates in the Media Literacy Movement -- Circa 2001,” which outlined our challenges. It seems the experts can’t even agree on a way to proceed.
According to Hobbs and other writers on the subject, these experts often gather to set their agenda, then the conference degenerates into debates that rarely move beyond a statement of each side’s positions.
Hobbs’ list of the seven great debates hit on questions that Connolly and I face every day. Should media education aim to protect students from the evils of the mass media? As she points out, we do it at our peril, since kids hate the idea that they’re helpless victims of the media and need to be protected.
Should we teach media production as a part of literacy? Some educators argue that we’re just teaching kids how to imitate Hollywood with all of those bells and whistles, and not how to be critical media consumers.
Should we include political goals in our media lit instruction? For example, should we set goals to clean up commercial TV, or to boost public television?
Should we teach media literacy as a subject of its own, or add it to existing curricula? And should TV networks and newspapers finance our media literacy efforts, or do they have a conflict of interest?
Whatever we decide, we better do it quickly. Our students are in news vacuums, with little interest in entering the world of political discourse.
“I could care less if Palin is too inexperienced to be effective,” one of my students wrote for a blogging assignment. “It does not impact me personally. If a new foreign trade policy is started. . . that doesn't help me. If there is a crack down on illegal immigration. . .that doesn't help me. Even if by some miracle a politician can get gas prices to go down. . . I can't drive so that doesn't impact me!
“… Politics are pointless to everyone unless you are named Barack Obama or John McCain,” he wrote.
We’ve got work to do.