Education Post #3 - Media Literacy

The New York Times ran an article today (4/30) about a commercial for Viagra which pitches the pill by depicting everyday scenes for the target audience, with actors speaking in gibberish. The implication being that certain features of identity don’t require language. On television, this also means that messages and meaning don’t require language. It explicitly engages the transformation of identity into a series of visual markers, which create a social truth – a new form of authorization and consent building. Gender over the Internet shows this too, making it possible to bend and break norms in new ways, to use a verbal strategy of establishing yourself as one gender, while visually appearing as another. Internet gender draws out the contradictions of two facets of knowledge: that produced textually (written/spoken, through language, that which can be transcribed), and the experiential verifications of visual culture (which would disprove the production of reality through the text). The upshot being, that there are qualities of knowledge that extend beyond anything created by texts that distinguish it from information, or whatever name is applied to manifestations of truth through screen culture.

Truths are social values, not only produced in concert in social systems, but they also require an economy of social values that prioritize truth as the most significant feature of an act, idea or experience. While perhaps an incomplete or faulty description of many political economies that supposedly operate under the regime of truth, these economies to some degree reflect the social production of knowledge. There are transformations of experience that change in whatever manner the economies of value for truth itself. If you accept the idea that truths exist as an empirical reality as well as a claim to that empirical reality (and I certainly support not accepting that idea), then TV alters the economy of value structuring the empirical reality of truth by changing the types of claims internal to creating claims to truth. Basically, television and new forms of media create truth by employing the facets of knowledge described above – the visual, the non-textual, that which cannot necessarily be written down. Necessary changes result from this process, which can be seen in the kinds of things labeled real on television The realest things are often orchestrated, but demonstrate an awareness of their orchestration and connections in a particular way. Popular TV news stages anchors against giant banks of screens and people, moving images in a sea, a sense of connection and purposeful management of the wash of potential images. Reality TV shows have a more subtle economy than many people perhaps think. Viewers of reality TV recognize its falsity, and seek to negotiate it as resistant readers to the absurdity, passing ‘their’ judgment on the text and people involved. Reality is the negotiated settlement on uneven terms between the viewer and the text, a management of images that constructs how people act.

These notions of truth in television converge around the process of dividing out perspective and bias, of creating knowledge of the world through an abstracted rationality, the transformation of ideas with histories to information that has potentially neutral content, concepts, references to the world, the essential (as in basic, skeletal) facts of a thing, all for the sake of knowing that information. Information is knowledge transformed into text and verified by its text – something that has value in any application or reader, regardless of experience or context of reading. Information is fungible and transmittable: it reduces to text, and appears through media forms which convey ideas in a regular way. Information consists of signs and symbols.

But the reading of these signs contains more than those signs. The interpretation of a text involves reading through a media form, as well as the interpretation of signs themselves. Assigning importance to certain information also prioritizes the use of whatever media form through which that information occurs. Media serves as a filter to certain messages, prioritizing certain concepts (gender, see Viagra ex). Using information also allows the user to accustom themselves to a media form as well – learning to manipulate ideas in particular ways, a way of treating them with a particular regard. The manipulation of ideas occurs as the result of media, but also how use of ideas is evaluated. Treating ideas as information, something on the front/back of flashcards, things to list on a test, erases the agent knowing, and affirms ideas as information: something with value for its own sake. Distribution of a test to hundreds of people, universalizing an evaluation, suggests that individual experience doesn’t matter as much as the ability to articulate ideas in a mutually interpretable way. The units of the system – flashcards, bubbled in blank marks erase context for ideas, make them into mere information with value as a self-interested means to advancement. The implications of prioritizing certain ideas comes from the prioritization and increased saliency of certain media forms, as well as the specific ideological implications of the content. Form and content generate meaning

This has implications for the treatment of literacy. The ability to read particular media forms – books, written words, etc. – implies an ability to interpret the world in a particular way. It prioritizes particular ideas and particular idea forms. Illiteracy can be a result of the ability to interpret particular signs without the broader skills of reading a wide variety of texts. It refers not to incompetence in interpreting all signs, but merely one kind of text, prioritized over others. Because of this, we should queqstion the economy of attention that arises in (written-media) literate people versus (written-media) illiterate people, and the implications to prioritizing written-media literacy in education. Textual illiteracy highlights in an indirect way, the influence of television or radio, which serves as an ideological filter with those media forms controlled by insulated ownership, with specific economic and political interests. Textual illiteracy has temporal implications, with written media requiring sustained focus on a particular screen or page more often than other forms, which prioritize movement and the ability to see multiple screens at once, or in quick succession. Speed influences literacy in other ways. Social pressures encourage fast moving entertainment – either through the reduction/fragmentation of leisure time, or a work environment that thrives on repetition encourages, in supplement media that repeats certain gestures regularly in new ways. Textual illiteracy creates particular types of communities. Literacy in visual and audible forms of communication highlight relationships that operate through these mediums. The ecology of these senses exists in local communities or families primarily. A culture of embodied voices prioritizes locality, physical relationships (perhaps through blood but definitely physical proximity). This gives arguments employing family metaphors particularly persuasive, and gives particular saliency to claims about family values or familial relationships.

Duncan