While watching TV, two teenagers, Carol and Linda, can't take their eyes off a funny, 30-second commercial for a car. They watch a young woman in a sporty, red car drive into a huge shopping mall parking lot—completely full except for one empty parking space way up front. As she heads for the prime space, she sees that a mean, rich, old lady in a Land Rover is heading for the same spot. Racing past rows of cars, our young heroine zips triumphantly into the empty space and smiles contentedly at the reflection of her defeated opponent in her rear-view mirror.
"Yes!" cheer Carol and Linda as the logo for the sporty little car appears on the screen, unaware that they have just absorbed a message that has less to do with cars than with social and moral values.
"When you `deconstruct' this very funny commercial," says Renee Hobbs, director of the Media Literacy Project at Babson College in Wellesley,Mass., "you begin to see that it is based on the premise that other drivers are your enemies. You're in competition with them for a scarce resource, and you have to win at all costs." Hobbs notes, however, that because the "moral of the story" is masked with humor, "you accept it."
But when learners begin to see how value messages are embedded in media images in ways that they weren't conscious of, "there's a big Aha!" says Hobbs. "That's when they discover that we weren't seeing something that really was there all along." Hobbs notes that sometimes the Aha! experience makes people feel exhilarated and sometimes it makes them angry "when they discover that they have been manipulated."
Either way, learning how to analyze as well as construct images is at the heart of media literacy, a curricular approach that is gaining momentum around the globe. Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and some Latin American countries have already incorporated media education into school curriculums, according to Elizabeth Thoman, founder and president of the Center for Media Literacy in Los Angeles, Calif. She notes that in Canada, for example, students must complete 30 percent of their language arts credits in media literacy before they graduate from high school.
In the United States, Texas recently organized its language arts framework to include visual literacy—viewing and representing—along with the reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills of print and oral literacy. In other states, local school districts are joining the movement. Educators who use a media literacy approach might, for example, have 10th grade language arts students read four novels instead of eight, and use the rest of the time to study two films, a newsmagazine, and a Web site. Although media literacy seems a natural tie in with language arts, Thoman says that media literacy is not a curricular subject by itself, but a dynamic approach to everything from history to math.
Media Literacy Skills
"In literature, you learn to analyze a poem or a story," explains Thoman. "With media literacy, the same principles apply. You learn to critically analyze the visual culture that surrounds us—billboards, signs, magazines, newspapers, television, Internet, and video.
The importance of being able to analyze today's media, according to Hobbs, arises from the fact that to function as a citizen in our information age, one must be able to understand and judge the messages that are everywhere. "In our culture, almost every form of communication is promotional," she points out. "We sell soap, we sell religion, we sell values, we sell candidates. Our world is saturated with information and visual messages. If we want kids to be able to make sense of the messages in the world outside the classroom," argues Hobbs, "we have to teach kids how to do that inside the classroom."
One of the first things students need to understand about the media, Thoman points out, is that media messages are constructed by teams of people who decide what pictures and text to use, and what to leave out. That is why learning to deconstruct media images, such as television news reports or political campaigns, is a key media literacy skill. To deconstruct means to analyze a media image by asking such questions as: questions, such as:
- Who created this message?
- What techniques are being used to attract my attention?
- Who is profiting from this?
- What information or points of view are not presented?
- What ideologies and value messages are embedded in the media text?
Thoman maintains that learning to ask and explore answers to such questions empowers learners to respond more intelligently to media messages. For example, when students see news reports again and again related to crime and violence, such as shootings in schools, they may get the message that the world, and schools in particular, are not safe. "They may begin to believe," she observes, that "I have to protect myself. Maybe I need a gun." By deconstructing the news—exploring what information has not been included—Thoman says students may discover that the FBI reports that crime is actually down by 12 percent in their city, and that schools are among the safest of places.
"Students have a right to understand that what they see on the news and in the media is driven by an economic engine," she continues. "For example, how many times have you heard: `This program is brought to you by our sponsor'? A truer way of stating this would be `You have been brought to our sponsor by this program.'"
The media is packaged, insists Thoman, "to bring us to the advertisers. The real currency is our eyeballs—the attention of the viewer. The sponsor pays for the program because they know that we will be present when their commercial is on," she explains. "The hidden exchange that most of us do not know about is that it is we who are being bought and sold." By understanding economic drivers of media, suggests Thoman, students may begin to appreciate that "hyping" certain news stories, such as the Columbine massacre, is a way for television broadcasters to make more money.
Protect or Empower?
The statement issued this past August by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) urging parents to avoid television viewing for children under two years old (See http://www.aap.org/policy/re9911.html) is what media educators would call a protectionist policy. Most educators would probably agree that the AAP's recommendation is developmentally appropriate because, as the AAP points out, infants and toddlers require direct interactions with parents and other significant caregivers, rather than television, for healthy brain growth and the development of appropriate social, emotional, and cognitive skills.
But as children grow up, it becomes less and less possible to protect them from the potentially harmful effects of media. For students and adults, the best response to media is not protective censorship, say media educators, but empowerment—that is, providing children with the critical thinking skills to make their own wise judgements and decisions about media use.
Learning Activities
Christine Honeyman, a counselor in the Irvine (Calif.) Unified School District, uses an empowerment approach with students K-12. Honeyman believes, however, that TV news is inappropriate for children under six—and that even for children six and older, the news "is inappropriate unless they have the skills to understand how it's constructed." To help learners of all ages begin to understand how the media functions, Honeyman makes presentations in classes, at PTA meetings, and at parent nights. Her activities include
- Guiding elementary students to identify typical elements of TV news videos such as bumper, tease, outro, live stand-in, and donuts. "Children are delighted to discover how this works," she says
- Organizing older students and parent groups into news teams that create videotaped news segments. She observes that as the teams make decisions about which stories to feature and which ones to drop, and how to create interest, they gain a greater appreciation for the pressure news teams are under to keep people watching. "It really drives home the point that news is a business," she says.
- Helping middle school students understand target audiences and and enculturation through watching a series of Saturday morning toy advertisements. Students discover that girls' ads are awash in pink and purple, while ads for boys use primary colors. Ads for girls use soft closeups, usually in bedrooms, while boys' ads use outdoor action shots. "I really like it when kids discover this on their own," says Honeyman. "All it takes is getting them to question what they are seeing."
- Leading high school students to identify sexist advertising. Teams of students search through magazines targeted at teenagers to find what kinds of masculine and feminine images are most commonly presented. Besides discovering that some magazines consist of up to 80 percent advertising, students find that men are most often portrayed as alone, aloof, in charge, athletic, and rich. By contrast, women in magazines are often seen canting (posing in off-balance postures), clowning (looking silly rather than powerful), and superior (where they are placed in the ad). Honeyman adds that students also find a good deal of dismemberment in ads targeted for women. "This means showing only parts of bodies with no face or emotion to connect with," she explains. The embedded message in these ads—a message that Honeyman feels is important is discuss—is that only one type of body is okay. "I try to help them learn that they have many choices in how they can look, and that most people never will look like models.
- Showing students in health classes how the media sells tobacco and alcohol. "We know from research that simply giving kids information about tobacco doesn't stop them from using it," she concedes. "Media images showing people with tobacco are far more powerful with adolescents than merely giving them information about its health risks. But," she observes, "some of the new research is showing that kids who are taught media literacy skills acquire a long-lasting ability to say no to tobacco. The one thing kids can't stand is to feel manipulated."
Finding Relevance
"By the time students are in 7th grade, we can predict which ones are most at risk of dropping out," states Hobbs. "And the attitude we identify among those at-risk students is: School has no connection or relevance to the world I live in." Media literacy, insists Hobbs, is a bridge between the classroom and the culture that helps students make the connection between their contemporary media world and the world of ideas.
Hobbs suggests, for example, that when we see the picture of John Kennedy, Jr. on the cover of every major magazine, it's an opportunity to capture student interest in today's culture and connect it to the concept of literary archetypes, such as Sir Galahad. "Or a media literacy approach," continues Hobbs, "helps teachers say, `You see why we're studying the Reign of Terror? Because it was all about the manipulation of information, and about who was going to control information.'"
Not only can media literacy connect students with study, says Hobbs, but it's a way for teachers to connect to the lives of their students. "In our culture, where a lot of young people are feeling apathetic and powerless," concludes Hobbs, "media literacy is a way for teachers to find out just how much kids really care about governing themselves intelligently."
Perhaps the most succinct expression of the prevalence of media images in our world—one that suggests a role for media literacy—is a little television on the Website of the Center for Media Literacy. Tiny words on the screen tell a big truth: "Love it or hate it, but you can't ignore it."
The Center for Media Literacy
The Center for Media Literacy
The Center for Media Literacy http://www.medialit.org/ develops and distributes educational materials and programs that promote critical thinking about the media: from television to t-shirts, from billboards to the Internet. Functioning as a clearinghouse for media literacy publications and links from around the world, the Center also offers a listserv discussion group, fulltext online documents, a catalog of resources, and a free e-mail bulletin with announcements of conferences, work-shops, and training programs.
The Center for Media Literacy; 4727 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 403; Los Angeles, CA 90010; Telephone: 323 931-4177; Fax: 323 931-4474