Mediacology

As some of you know, I’m writing a book on media literacy called Media Mindfulness that hopefully will be out by the end of this year. The manuscript is due at the end of August so I’m now in southern Italy furiously trying to complete it. Over the course of the next few weeks I’ll be releasing some tidbits. Please comment and give me feedbacks because you guys are the true experts. I’m just here trying to be a good interpreter.

A Pretext: A User’s Guide to Media Mindfulness

“Language is a virus from outer space…” - William S Burroughs

The principle theme of this book is that current media literacy pedagogy is stuck in the 19th Century. Most current media education practices view media from a print literate perspective. Print has a specific history that evolved from alphabetic literacy and has a particular way of biasing the world. Viewed from the “Guttenberg Galaxy,” as Marshall McLuhan put it, people of the Western intellectual tradition see their own media as teleological. That is, coming from an evolutionary trajectory of inevitability. One of these intellectual legacies is to view reality as inherently false. Both this attitude and the remarkable technology of the alphabet were refined and codified by the Greeks. It’s astonishing that in an era of globalization when we cold learn so much from other cultures that we have so internalized these beliefs that we rarely look outside them.

In my life I have been fortunate enough to experience an alternative epistemology. As both a student and teacher in Native American communities what I have learned is that if you tune into the natural rhythms of life and nature, then life becomes very real. Part of the problem is that the Western intellectual tradition is always going against the grain and is preoccupied with theological questions that we call philosophy. Long before the rise of academia, Buddha was well aware of this problem and refused to answer philosophical questions because he viewed them as leading to more misery. Buddha was concerned with alleviating suffering, so he centered his teachings on the practical. In a sense you could say this is also true of my approach. I have suffered greatly from probing the deep philosophical problems of the West, yet I have never came closer to any kind of resolution. Moreover, as someone deeply concerned about education and the powerful impact of media on youth, I have become more and more dissatisfied with various books about the problem with media and their attendant activist approaches, because all they did was make me fearful and feel disempowered. It’s a tough pill to swallow when every critical discussion you read or hear deepens the sense that your only lot in life is to be brainwashed by the system. And the remedy is no better. The position of most media critics is just to be critical. Frankly, I’m tired of being enraged by the people that should be my allies.

My personal breakthrough came as a result of deploying what brain expert Edward de Bono calls “water logic.” In his study of the brain, he identified a faulty thought process that is literally endangering humanity and the planet. He calls it “rock logic.” This is the intellectual legacy of the West: identifying with a rigid structure and logic based on true or false, right and wrong, and keeps us spinning in circles like the center of a Tibetan mandala that depicts a cock, pig and snake going round and round because of their rigid mental attitudes. The brain, according to Bono, does not function in a linear fashion such as the old image of it containing an operator at the helm of a phone switch. Rather, the brain works on the principle of self-organization and patterning. There is no operator at the control panel, but rather there is a holistic, nonlinear, holographic process at play. Not surprisingly, theories about the universe and biology are coming to the same conclusion.

To go back to media education, consider the analogy of Euclidian geometry. It works perfectly well when applied to flat surfaces but fails when applied to spheres (as in parallel line never connect on a plane, but do so on a sphere). So though Euclidian geometry is perfectly logical and reasonable in one universe, it completely fails in another. In a sense it is like different game worlds. Pac Man would surely die quickly in World of Warcraft, and the other way around. What is necessary is to understand the operating principles of the game spaces we occupy so as to be effective strategists and players. Consequently, producing disempowered students that replicate the assumptions of the power structure as a result of our pedagogy serves nobody. It fails the underlying goal of education, which is to teach how to learn, not what to think. To paraphrase a famous Biblical passage, rather than produce miracles we must teach people how to fish.

I’m well aware of the irony that my principle criticism of media literacy is that it uses a print literacy model and that I am writing a book to explain why this is a problem. Despite my criticism, I remain one of the biggest fans of books, obsessively collecting them and spending my retirement funds to maintain an ever-growing library (too bad books don’t pay rent!). Moreover, I am also arguing that media literacy in the 21st Century requires a circular approach because digital media fits closer to this model than does print. Given the linear nature of a book, how does one proceed? I’ve chosen to break my arguments into discreet chunks, or meditations, if you will, that flow in a particular pattern like water down a drainage basin. But along the way there are some twists and turns, snags and rocks. In some cases the flow goes backwards. Rest assured, in the Appendix there are some practical tools that can be applied in the classroom.

The continued anger and fear generated by media activists is a kind of mental violence, so I think it’s worthwhile recalling what the Dalai Lama said about violent resistance to the occupation of Tibet. He remarked that the mind can justify any sort of bloodshed, but the heart would never go along with it. To pursue violence is to go to war with oneself. Thus he concludes, “They have taken everything away from us, I won’t let them take away my mind.” I’m aware that the defenders of rock logic can be vicious predators who will guard their thought system until death. Just look at the current slate of wars being waged in the name of belief and it is easy to see why a more flexible prototype of human needs cultivation. It is my hope that this book can at least be one stream that enters the flow of a greater understanding of how best to harmonize with the principles of nature and thought, and to avoid the very thing that the late-great science fiction writer Philip K. Dick warned us against: “To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is a paradox: whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies.” (p.134)