Critical Production

            A particular focus for this past week has been rather intriguing; production of content as part of a critical focus. This is an interesting aspect to media literacy, considering we are living in The Age of The Annoying Orange and Epic Fail Blog, because it is an aspect that is so readily applicable by every day media literates. Now something that kept coming up in my own thought process with production was, how to make production a part of MLE?

            First off, a pertinent aspect to this conversation is to ask, “Why should production be a part of the critical process?” And according to most everything on this dear planet, there are simple explanations and more complex explanations. A simplistic aspect is that as individuals become more critical of their intake, they will become more critical of what they produce. A more complex discussion includes the rapidity of Internet culture absorbing, and eventually super-ceding, such traditional medians as print, film, and television, the democratization of media production/consumption, and perhaps the oversaturation of content on a media consuming society.

            Now those explanations may be a bit wordy but each one has its pros and cons as areas of interest to media literacy educators. The first explanation is easier to consider when positioned in a framework of critical action. For instance, a chain of critical action might be; intake, reflection, application, dissatisfaction, production, reflection, repeat. This certainly covers many of the media literate, especially now in the “heyday” of Youtube, Twitter, and Internet TV. In fact, a great many sensations on the Internet have become successful media producers in the traditional areas of media (Lucas Cruikshank from Fred, Lena Dunham of Girls). However, the difficulty in this type of simplistic component of the explanation is that there are consumers who never have the desire to produce, or who may believe that their media interactions can’t be reconciled as ‘production’ in any kind of professional sense. That is where the need for the more complex discussion comes into effect.

            A complex answer to why production is a part of the critical process lies in the evolving ‘culture’ (I say culture with trepidation because of the vagueness that word may denote amongst certain audiences, myself included) created by the Internet’s interactions with individuals within a societal framework. This isn’t to say that the “simplistic” explanation isn’t true in most, or all, of its assertions. But, what needs to be considered is that the Internet is creating a rapidly evolving kind of interaction with society and individuals, but that those interactions are not self sustainable for the Internet. There is a hunger and need for content that has to come from somewhere and more than likely it will spring from the minds of a consumer. Of course there are commercial aspects at play in all of this but, for the purposes of this discussion, focus shall be maintained on the non commercial aspects. Now, the simple explanation, at this point, says that if a consumer is critical in their consumption their production ought to have a critical eye itself. This type of scenario, however, is not always the case.

            In recent years there has been movements in the field of education towards incorporating media arts as an aesthetical or technical subset of interests. This addresses the individualistic desires of media consumers/producers, however, it doesn’t satisfy their role in a larger environ. For instance, a person may write a blog about Southern cooking while living in Europe. This example might have critical implications, but it is difficult to say unless the producer has critical intentions while making the effort. The individual may write the blog for such individual reasons as; an exercise in auto-biographical journalism, filling a commercialistic niche as a hive-mind for the disenfranchised Southern cuisine connoisseur, etc. However, if the producer is creating this, critically, then the content can become about alienation, acceptance, and the parts of identity that are shaped by regional influences that we treasure. The point is, creation is good and noteworthy, but critical creation is able to transcend formalism and strike a deeper chord amongst people.

            Now that there has been discussion about why there is a need for critical production, it comes to the difficult task of how to integrate this into Media Literacy Education. While there are several ideas about how to achieve such a task, one possible way is to have an individual become self critical, this might seem a bit abstract and tasking individuals with a kind of ultra-sentience; but it is also vastly important. This means that a person has to become somewhat aware of their identity and how that relates to media. Part of this self critiquing is the knowledge that our individual identities are subject to change based upon any number of permutations in life; including, but not limited to, age, religion, parenthood, livelihood, etc. Once a person can grasp (even vaguely) this concept then some question can take place concerning critical media intake. In simple terms this is about the point where the complex and simple explanations run together or come extremely close to one another. But this whole process isn’t easy, it is difficult enough having a person become acutely aware of their media intake, let alone deconstruct their identity, and then use all that knowledge to construct critical media content. This is a great challenge faced by Media Literacy Educators, and although the task is daunting, the plausible outcomes are worth going after.

Personal Media Intake Analysis

            I fear that this post, which is supposed to be multimedia, may end up being a bit monochromatic. I wanted to achieve so many things, like camera movements or a sound spike; but no matter, onward is the only way. Something that should be noted before this comes into full swing is, I don’t own a connection to any television. I have a TV, but it is relegated to DVD viewing and a partial connection to Netflix and Hulu. So a rather active medium has been done away with almost entirely from my life. Anyway, onto the rest.

            During my analysis and gathering, a couple of things about my media intake caught my focus. First was, because of the lack of TV, a great deal of my media intake has gravitated over to digital/internet media. The second part that I began to consider, upon recollection, is that I tend to gravitate towards literary type of media in the day (this includes things like blogs) but as the day goes on, especially towards the evening, I start to key in on video/audio media. It is these two things that I want to primarily cover in my analysis. These particular recollections are what I want to spend the balance of my analysis upon.

             To tell a little about my day of analysis, the first thing I did, after being initially awakened by my alarm was to lay in bed for a minute. While this activity doesn’t include any media, I greatly appreciate the silence and the kind of drifting between sleep and awake. I feel as if this time is where I get to prepare for the day and much of the chaos that follows. But, once I have woken up the first bit of media I encountered was using the internet to log onto a news website and begin reading about various news articles. While I generally try to stick to news or scholastic pursuits I am a habitual social media user, particularly email and Facebook. But for the most part I was content to spend a while reading some news articles and discussive blog posts by Eric Samuelson. I believe that I prefer engaging this type of media because there is a specific subject which I can think on and try to engage with through the media.

            After that I switched over to a textbook that I was reading for a class, but at the same time, and in the same book, I was flipping through pages and enjoying cherry-picking information during small interludes of my assigned reading. I have come to the realization that I am a person who likes a singular intake of media. Unlike the MIT students from Digital Nation I cannot flit amongst media, I prefer to follow a single train of thought. While this doesn’t mean that I am immune to flights of digressive thought, I prefer to finish the digression before returning to the primary focus that I was previously attending to. And I have found that if there is a great deal of media happening around me I have a sensory overload that affects how I act and greatly disables my ability to rationalize trains of thought. After some reading I had to drive my wife to work and then returned home to finish reading and a large portion of my day was spent reading, either online or in text, scholastically or recreationally.

             The great change with this came when I had to go to a film class, watch films, and then analyze them. After this point, I returned home and then the media I engaged was audio/visual. I listened to music while I performed chores, my spouse and I gathered together to watch a particular program on Netflix for a period of time. And now as I work on my homework I find myself taking extended breaks to listen to music or to watch short snippets of video (this includes film trailers that I enjoy or scenes from particular films).

            I want to try and figure out why my media intake makes this marked change throughout the day. And thinking about it, I have a feeling that it is tied to the loss of a branch of media and my media intake is a way to try and compensate for its absence. I think that the focus on printed/literary media early on is because I have energy to make this medium the focal point of my attention. Another thing about this practice is, I feel that in print a great deal more depth can be revealed about a subject than in television programming. I believe that I understood more about a particular issue because it was in printed media because the ad space was one the same page, but I could more easily tune it out than, say, a television commercial which might interrupt a news story.

            But how does this all lead to the sudden shift in media intake later on in the day? I feel the energy and restraint to prevent myself from escaping the advertisements, or from going onto a long trail of digressive meandering, means that later on I get lazy. I think that laziness is what help brings about the shift in focus, because I find it much easier to dissect and analyze video and audio media than print. With printed media, especially from the internet, a person can get obsessed with trying to cover an issue from numerous angles and depths and trying to keep track of the intricacies involved can become a chore. However, when I am watching a trailer for The Tree of Life, I know that the trailer is supposed to get me to want to see the movie for economic reasons. But having already seen the film, and liking it a great deal, I am able to take a great deal of pleasure in not analytical engagement and enjoy the music and the moving images. It is this realization that causes me some consternation because this pertains to many of the issues discussed in Media Literacy Education, in particular, the critical and analytic consumption of media in order to create a more media literate individual overall.

Digital Media: Usage, Complications, and Education

            Last week I got an opportunity to check out a pretty interesting little documentary called Digital Nation on PBS’ Frontline series. Needless to say, it was something of a surprise to myself, as I consider myself a fairly media-savvy individual; for a couple of reasons. First, and foremost in my mind, was how there is a rising generation of people (young and old) who are becoming increasingly wired to an electronically based community, where preferences, information, personas, and even entire lives, are lived online. The second thing that caught my attention was how does a heavily digital society effectively educate itself when it comes to overall media literacy.

            First off, in the film, digital media is the area that is primarily focused on and how it affects people. It fascinated me to no end how much time people could spend on personal electronic devices and individual’s attitudes towards their interaction with digital media. It seemed as if the prevalent idea amongst people was that digital mediums were a part of life, so why not live to the greatest digital extent possible? Call it simplicity or vulgar Luddite-ism, but I found that idea to be quite fearful. Now, the great trap and issue of that opinion is that I am not a technophobe and embrace technology a great deal (for goodness sake I’m writing out a thought using electrical impulses on small slivers of conductors and semiconductors projected onto a thin film of liquid crystal display). However, how does a complex world engage with people on a deeper level, when  digital and electronic interaction equal, and maybe, eventually, outweigh tactile, personal interaction?

            I felt that PBS’ made ardent and auspicious strides to be balanced on a complex, fluid, issue. For instance, there is a kind of duplicitous set of discussions taking place within the documentary. There is a discussion going on about how virtual/digital experiences are becoming more and more meaningful to us as organic beings; but hold on, in a discussion about virtual experiences used as recruitment devices by the military we have young people saying that virtual experiences are that, virtual, whereas tactile experiences are separate and unconnected. In a way, this dual sided discourse mirrors another issue brought up by the Digital Nation; what role does digital media have in schools? Just as in the former topic, this area is fraught with adherents and ideas from different angles on the subject. On the one hand there is the position that schools must be adaptable to society by making scholastic institutions more like personal/private practices using digital media. On the other, there is an attitude that school is an experience that must stand unique from the personal lives of the students, a distinct area of the students’ lives away from the usual distractions.

            I suppose this is where media literacy education enters the discussion. Media literacy education is something that most people don’t often consider in their consumption of media; succinctly put, it is to be literate about media in general. Perhaps this is too succinct and must be further dissected; to be “classically” literate a person is supposed to be well-read and generally knowledgeable about a subject in order to become more active in creation and discourse. So, in the modern definition, a person ought to be able to critically “read”, engage, and create media in its various forms. So, half of the goal of media literacy is to help a person be mindful, not only of what they engage with, but why they are engaging it, and it’s affect them, long after the experience has ended. The other major part of media literacy education is, getting individuals to create media using the same critical and analytic tools used in the consumption of media.

            It is this dual nature that makes media literacy education a difficult action to carry out. Creation has become easier and easier, with the mass availability of digital devices, whereas, the hard part, is trying to educate consumers how to analyze and critique their own media usage. That is what makes the conundrum of digital media usage in schools so difficult, especially for media literacy education.  It is one thing to aspire towards goal of creating media competent individuals, and a whole different kettle of fish to carry out the goal. I think an analogy that can be used is to study the public education legislation of the United States, particularly the No Child Left Behind act in the early 21^st Century. Theoretically, the idea was to reframe the educational focus onto subjects such as math, science, and literacy; by testing the knowledge of students on those subjects and slowly raising the expectations of the students’ overall competency in those specific fields. All well and good, however, most any educator (teacher or administrator) will attest this legislation was a horrendous, if not a complete, debacle for public education; setting American public schools back decades behind the educational systems of other leading nations.  One of the reasons for that was because the legislation assumed that successful students were production units birthed from a process that given the right amount of time spent on a subject and tempered by the threat of financial impediments to their institution, would cause students to become critically engaged, highly educated members of society. However, people aren’t units of product; people are people, with all the foibles that phrase entails. Without the ability to address the needs of students as individuals, institutions began to falter, deteriorate, and, for some, fail in trying to abide by this legislation. How does this relate to media literacy education?

            The way that the previous analogy relates to media literacy is that there is a similar predicament at the center of media literacy education and public education. That is, the varied demographic that has to be addressed by the educators. This is especially difficult, now, for media literacy. This is mainly because of the explosion of digital media into multiple facets of life previously dominated, exclusively, by other mediums (writing, films, television, etc.). This, seemingly, sudden arrival of mass digital media creates a unique dynamic. There are older people, who have lived many of, if not most, of their years without this technology and access to media that, suddenly, is heavily integrated into the fabric of their interactions. Then there are a kind of in-between set of people, like myself, who are quite comfortable with media usage in this digital realm, however, we might remember a time when there was not ready public access to the internet, nor digital saturation (I know I remember times like that). And finally, there are people who are saturated with digital media, and always have been. From the time they are born they have a digital/online presence, even if it is controlled by their parents, up to now as young people confronting the difficulties of impending biological/social change. With such a varied set of experiences, besides the individuality of people, it suddenly becomes difficult to confront such an amoebous concept as media literacy.

            Fortunately, as Americans now seem to be a bit behind Asia and Europe in dealing with digital saturation,  much of the heavy lifting has been done to enact individualistic efforts towards media literacy. One of the foremost places is in Britain, where a group of media producers, theoreticians, sociologists, and every day educators, have tried to create a collective manifesto for media literacy education. A huge part of their manifesto is to address the issues of mass digital media usage by individuals. One of the most mentioned aspects to the various subsets of the manifesto is trying to get individuals to think about the root of their media usage. Mainly, what media do they use, and then why? Once an individual is able to understand what media they primarily use and why, then some analysis and critical thinking about what is being consumed can more easily be encouraged by the educators. If a consumer can become more self analytic, and become comfortable with critical intake of media then it stands to reason that the critical audience will attempt to become the critical creators; with a cycle in place it should become easier to adapt and engage an ever changing landscape of media. That is, of course, until we have the next media revolution, then it will all have to start all over again.