Today for the first time in years I returned to a gathering of New York independent media producers — the Grassroots Media Conference down at the New School. I left work in the city’s media nonprofits in roughly 2002 feeling alienated, as if I’d made no good friends, and frustrated with some of the trends I saw in the orgs’ thinking. But today I saw my former boss Abby, who no longer has concrete cause to be peeved with me as she is no longer at the IPA; and I saw Arun and Ana and John T. from my IMC days — and I guess I missed out on talking to Eileen, who I used to do legal video with — and Prometheus Radio people, and a small handful of Hampshire alumns along with a few folks from my current school, and it did feel like a homecoming. I guess the friendship-building process isn’t over yet.
Which is good, because one of the big beefs I have with the activism I saw around that time was that sense of alienation, which I attributed to the agendas set by the small group of organizers who ran all over the globe to be at the center of starting things. I always felt that the relatively demanding and austere culture of activism they seemed to be establishing was bound to close people out. But after a little mental digging today, I began to feel that it wasn’t just the organizer jet-setting and the culture of activism which was so alienating.
At one point a guy speaks up in a discussion and says, Whenever I help youth make media, they bring all these archetypes from mainstream media, and I can’t get them to give them up.
This kind of attitude is the reason I’m helping start a media literacy organization at Teachers College. There’s so much literature out there which suggests that students already understand, and sometimes like to subvert, these archetypes, that I think it’s a real shame that any educator making use of media would categorically suggest his students should give up their affinity to the mainstream media products they’re so fond of. Not to mention David Buckingham’s work, which suggests that working-class students feel media literacy is yet another cultural shibboleth used against them by middle-class teachers. I want to see TC students have a more nuanced perspective on media education.
But then people kept speaking up, talking about the messages they wanted to “get out” to “these communities” (the latter term was duly problematized), and a more fundamental educational issue presented itself to me. If we’re just trying to “get messages out” to people, aren’t we acting just like lecturers? Probably I’m just being ignorant, and there’s already plenty of media organizations out there which couple their television, film, radio, and print publications with live discussion at the time of transmission. But if we want to be constructivist media educators, and really change people’s minds, transmitting messages should really never happen without some kind of dialogue.
Ostensibly, forums and other web media which allow for comments should be more constructivist than mass broadcast media. But then, a comment forum is generally too unstructured to, well… change someone’s mind, on purpose. Which is what activists want to do, even if they’ll deny it (don’t say “false consciousness” around me and then pretend you don’t care what other people believe), and it’s what teachers are paid to do. And I’m beginning to think the mediatedness of any medium — the fact that you generally aren’t there in time or space to adjust the impact the things you’re trying to say to change someone’s mind — is going to foil any attempt to make mediated change.
wait, hold on, Everett Rogers would disagree. But then, Bruno Latour disagrees with Everett Rogers…
at least I was thinking that earlier today, though it was at a moment when the panel I was in was kinda wigging me out. and now it’s late and I’m not sure I’ve captured it.
I can’t seem to go to bed before 2 a.m. lately. Past few days I’ve been lucky if I’ve made it before 3.
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