Surviving Progress trailer [video link]

Just as every month is Black History Month, every day is Earth Day. To mark this year’s passing, Alternet.org features a fabulous review of nine environmental documentaries that bring ecology to the center of our cultural awareness. In particular it led me to Surviving Progress, a necessary critique of our current notion of “progress.” Based on the book, A Short History of Progress, this film has been called a mash-up of Koyaanisqatsi and The Corporation. I’m all for anything that problematizes our notion of technological evolution.* Moreover, I feel this is an area of critique generally lacking in media education. For one, youth media educators could problematize how mediamaking devices are produced and disposed of. Media lit educators focused on textual analysis could zoom in on how technology works as a trope for a variety of values associated with consumption and unlimited growth. Along these lines, here are some more suggestions for ways media education can be greened:

Discourse analysis: Media literacy has pioneered techniques for analyzing the way media frame and discuss issues, both visually and textually. Since discourse analysis can be applied to news and propaganda, green media educators can use this tool to examine how a critical issue like climate change is covered in the news, or how to detect greenwashing. Claims makers–from BP to GreenPeace–vie for public attention. What strategies do they use, and what systems enable some voices and not others?

Semiotics: Basic media literacy is a primer for the deconstruction of symbols. Often times semiotics is used for studying representation, in particular racial, gender, and cultural stereotyping. Animals and living systems are also used and stereotyped in a variety of ways. Why and for what purpose?

Marketing: Media literacy techniques have mastered deconstruction, drawing attention to nearly 30 different persuasion techniques used to manipulate and hook our attention. The primary technique, emotional transfer, is represented by how marketers (or propagandists for that matter) generate feelings in order to transfer those sensibilities to brands. But the various emotions generated by sex, fear, and humor are tied to more ancient needs related to our connection with living systems. Media literacy could point out that when advertisers are playing with our emotions, they are trying to tap into deeper experiences of authenticity and resonance that can be fulfilled by activities that don’t require consumption, and could even tie into our primary need to connect with humans and nature.

Ideology: This is usually applied in the form of critical media literacy, and aims to challenge the claims made by corporations and governments. In the age of Occupy, much attention will be applied to the way in which economic values are propagated through media. To this extent it is absolutely necessary to examine those discourses surrounding growth and consumption, and how they lead to debt on multiple levels: personal, social, and ecological. To what extent are both economics and ecology ultimately two sides of the same coin?

An additional dimension can be explored: different media promote a range of environmental ideologies–beliefs about how we act upon the world– spanning from anthropocentric to ecocentric perspectives. What implications do these different worldviews have for ecology? Moreover, given that most media literacy aspires to greater democratic participation, it would be good to examine the kind of democracy we believe in. Is it anthropocentric, or could we work towards what Vandana Shiva calls Earth Democracy, which incorporates living systems?

The Cultural Commons: Educators pushing for media justice can link the enclosure of the techno-communication system by telecoms and media corporations with the enclosure of culture. IP law, anti-piracy legislation, and corporate mergers all have the effect of limiting democratic participation and access to cultural resources. This process began with colonization and witch hunts, which eliminated indigenous and female participation in order to promote patriarchal control. Now these processes are extending to the enclosure of all ideas: it is the colonization of our interpersonal realities. This can be challenged by highlighting the importance of open culture, reformed copyright laws, and a less restrictive approach to sharing.

Intertextuality: People should not just think about ecosystems, but think like ecosystems. This means looking at our mental models and learning to think in terms of systems, relationships, and connectivity. Our social networks do this naturally, but what about media texts? Traditional media literacy tends to focus on single texts (like an alcohol ad), but what if we looked at texts as if they were a node in the media ecosystem? The way the web makes all texts open works does that for us. Consider how Kony 2012 became a dialog between many different texts produced by a vast range of critics and supporters. Or how a WikiLeaks document becomes linked to a Web of ideas and practices. Or look how we make sense of a film like Avatar, with its linkages to various genres and tropes from other films, and then how fans and activists remixed and spread various memes from the film.

Gadgets: As mentioned, media education programs rarely critically engage the tools used to make media. We should celebrate the creative process and promote the empowerment of media making, yet we should not take our eye off the fact that the gadgets we use have an increasingly negative impact on global ecology and social justice. Can we get away with making critical documentaries without also examining our own complicity within this production system?

Phenomenology: Most media literacy looks outwardly to ask questions about what media do to us. Sometimes the question is changed to focus on what we do with media. But what about the manner in which media influence our cognition–for better or for worse? How does media engagement impact our sense of space, place, and time? What are the “splaces” we are engaging? How might this experience of extending ourselves into media networks impact our sense of planet? How can we become more mindful of our attention so as to not lose ourselves in the dreamworlds of other people’s design (Kony 2012 seemed to be quite hypnotic in that sense)?

Alternative Cultural Practices: There is a tendency among many media educators to focus on the negative aspects of media. But we also need to support positive media practices. After all, media are a necessary means for solving problems. While I fully endorse critical approaches, I also would like to warn against too much negativity that leads to learners feeling powerless and victimized. We need to pull people towards aspirational solutions. This is a slightly different take on problem-solving pedagogies that focus on how to fix problems. Rather, we should encourages learners to create solutions. The difference is subtle but important. What we are aiming for is supporting lifelong learning skills that build towards sustainable cultural practices that can envision a positive response to a very wicked problem.

These suggestions are part of a larger project I’m working on to re-orient media education towards a green worldview. These points barely scratch the surface of what I’ve been developing. If you are interested in joining me or offering feedback, please comment below.

Happy Earth Day!

* For what it’s worth, to question technology is to not be anti-technology. Hopefully people will come to realize that thinking critically about technology is not a desire to go back to the Stone Age, but rather to consider the boundaries and limits that can be placed on how technology fits within the context of ecology and human experience, and not the other way around.

From McLuhan’s infamous 1969 Playboy interview. Seems relevant as ever.

PLAYBOY: Why do you think they aren’t finding it within the educational system?

MCLUHAN: Because education, which should be helping youth to understand and adapt to their revolutionary new environments, is instead being used merely as an instrument of cultural aggression, imposing upon detribalized youth the obsolescent visual values of the dying literate age. Our entire educational system is reactionary, oriented to past values and past technologies, and will likely continue so until the old generation relinquishes power. The generation gap is actually a chasm, separating not two age groups but two vastly divergent cultures. I can understand the ferment in our schools, because our educational system is totally rearview mirror. It’s a dying and outdated system founded on literate values and fragmented and classified data totally unsuited to the needs of the first television generation.

I’ve been a media literacy educator for over a dozen years. And since participating in the punk movement during the early ‘80s, I’ve been a lifelong proponent of do-it-yourself media. Since entering the field of education I’ve worked in numerous arts programs with youths, spending considerable time in under-served communities. Consequently, working with Native Americans, Latinos and Afro-Caribbean youth has helped me to formulate a multicultural, multi-perspective approach to media literacy that has pushed me to reconceptualize cultural assumptions embedded in traditional media education.* Learners in those communities are under greater stress than mainstream Americans, and their particular needs call for attention to social justice, environmental issues and cultural citizenship, things that many privileged Americans take for granted.

While working on the rez, at one point a Native American elder said of the information highway: “any road can get you somewhere.” Unfortunately, many programs that embrace digital media tools are too enamored with the technology to think more critically about the “somewhere” we are moving towards. It was during the period when I worked on the rez that I realized the importance of appropriate applications of technology and the ethnocentrism embedded in the idea of “progress.” More importantly, I was forced to think more carefully about who or what I was ultimately serving in my work.

As a fellow media geek it might surprise you, then, to suggest that my approach since then has been to serve  the planet: humans and nonhuman alike. In particular I feel a strong calling to speak to the best of my abilities on behalf of our silent partner: nature. These days in my current role as a professor of media studies at an American university in Rome, I find myself in the unlikely position of having to argue for a greener approach to media. I have taken to heart the task of incorporating lessons I learned beyond the walled garden of academia to green the field of media studies. What follows, then, is a field report from my most recent effort, which was to green a digital media culture course.

The Root of the Problem

Last Spring, about halfway through the semester of my undergrad Digital Media Culture class I asked students to raise their hand if they expected the course to be about ecology. None did, which didn’t surprise me. But I did in fact incorporate ecology as a major element of the course material. Was I forcing an unrelated issue on an unsuspecting class? Is there a legitimate connection between environmental issues and digital media culture?

Absolutely! The impact of electronics on the biosphere is staggering. The entire production chain of our media gadgets damages the environment in several ways. Issues include:

• the toxins used to make gadgets and their impact on the health of workers and their communities;

• the CO2 emissions of fossil fuels needed to run our electronic networks (which is now equal to the global aviation industry);

• the ecological “mindprint” on our perception of time, space and our sense of “place”;

• the enabling of a destructive globalized growth economy; and

• the e-waste generated from over-consumption.

It’s not all negative. There are many positive aspects to digital media culture that may also help us prevent an impending global ecological catastrophe, in particular the emergent culture of sharing, connecting and self-organizing prevalent on the Web. I also hope that the kinds of social revolutions occurring in the Arab world and Occupied movements will translate to the environmental movement.

A holistic digital media course should make connections between cultural practice and the environment. Even if we are teaching technical skills and aptitude, reducing these skills to an isolated digital literacy encloses them within a mental bubble that is likely to repeat the mistakes of our techno-scientific revolution that have brought on our ecological crisis. Moreover, no matter how neutral our educational model is, technology always has embedded cultural attitudes that impact our pedagogical approach and are ingrained within the tools.

So, if the environment is intimately linked with digital media, why is it so rare to see the two issues connected?

One of the misconceptions concerning environmental education is that it is a topic that is outside all subjects except those pertaining to “nature” (such as the biological sciences). Even though the primary cause of our ecological crisis is cultural, few who teach culture-related courses incorporate sustainability into their material. This is not to place blame. The cause for this goes back to the origins of modern academia, and even the creation of the term “ecology.” Based on the Greek oikos, which means household, “eco” also is the root of economics. Consequently, the combined meaning of ecology and economics is “household management,” which is an appropriate and holistic approach to thinking about humans and the natural world. We need to remind ourselves that the world is our home, and that we need to treat it with as much care as the places that we inhabit on a daily basis.

Yet, due to the prejudice of the techno-industrial-scientific revolution, material and immaterial issues were divided up between the different disciplines and we are left with the famous split in Western culture between mind and body. Earth, in this case, falls under the category of “body,” albeit abstracted by mechanistic science. Culture, being a subject of the mind, is usually not taught in conjunction with environmental issues. Curiously, though, the term “culture” originates from agriculture, and has to do with the act of cultivation: we cultivate food and beliefs (food for thought!).

Finally, environmental educator David Orr has made the point that all education is environmental education. What he means is that whether acknowledged or not what we teach has a bearing on how we view the environment, especially when it is omitted altogether. When we don’t talk about it, the lesson becomes, “The environment is not relevant to what we do. This is someone else’s problem.” Or, in the example of economics, we are taught that the ecological impact of growth and consumption is irrelevant to an economy’s bottom line. Given the state of our biosphere, we cannot continue like this, nor should we assume some technological fix is awaiting on the horizon. What we need is a human fix.

Conceptual Strategy: Open and Closed Systems

So how does a digital media culture class look when ecology is incorporated into its curriculum?

For starters, as a framework we discuss open versus closed systems. In agricultural terms, a monocultural crop of genetically engineered corn is a closed system. It is governed by numerous control mechanisms and a form of science that doesn’t allow for the open ended integration of natural systems. Open systems are like permaculture gardens, which are structured in such a way as to work with the given conditions of the local environment. It is not controlled with pesticides, petroleum-based fertilizer or laboratory engineered seeds. It is open to the conditions of its local ecology and interacts with unpredictable elements, such as weather, insects and native plants. And since agriculture is humans acting upon the environment, the kind of approach one makes entails a worldview. Societies that engage in monoculture are far different in outlook than those that use permaculture.

How does this translate in the digital media world? Numerous scholars are concerned with the difference between open and closed systems, be they gadgets or the Internet. Jonathan Zittrain talks about the iPhone (“iBrick”) versus Google’s Android. Tim Wu looks into the rise and fall of media empires, examining how monopolies are essentially closed systems. James Boyle believes there is an information ecology that is threatened by enclosure. And Lawrence Lessig talks about the difference between Read-Only and Read-Write information economies.

A keystone essay I use is Benjamin Barber‘s “Pangloss, Pandora and Jefferson: Three scenarios for the future of technology and strong democracy” (published in Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age) In it he argues about potential scenarios facing the future of the Internet. Pangloss is the status quo, and has a do-nothing stance in which the Internet evolves according to the needs of governments, corporations and consumers. If this scenario continues according to its internal momentum towards closed monopolies, we end up with the Pandora scenario. Pandora is represented by two-tired Internet, DRM, Great Fire Wall of China, increased repression and surveillance, and the use of anti-piracy measures to shut off dissent and peer-to-peer sharing (as is the case with Wikileaks and ACTA). The Jeffersonian model represents hope, and would entail the active participation of users to continue developing and utilizing the Internet for opening up democratic participation.

The status quo (Pangloss) has elements of both a cautionary and hopeful future, but we are at a crossroads and it remains to be seen how open or closed the future Internet will be. In terms of the environment there are similar parallels. Closed, monopolized media systems further the interests of those powers that refuse to solve the ecological crisis. Climate change has to be resolved through democratic processes, and sustainable culture has to be cultivated through sharing and connecting. The Jeffersonian scenario goes hand-in-hand with transitioning from the centralized and closed energy system of petroleum, natural gas and nuclear power, to the decentralized and democratic potential of clean energy. One is corporate powered, the other is people powered. There also is middle ground where some corporations are choosing open systems as their primary operational model (such as many of the Web 2.0 start-ups), but it’s still not a guarantee that the climate crisis will tackled by technology users.

It’s important to not be overly Utopian or dystopian. Ultimately the key is to think systemically. Ultimately my goal is to encourage a shift from the standpoint of mere consumerism to a kind of practice based on cultural citizenship. Or, more importantly, green cultural citizenship. What follows is my experiment to move in this direction.

Design Strategy: The Four Perspectives

My design strategy is based on a four-pronged approach inspired by cultural studies’ circuit of culture model and sustainability design. The circuit of culture looks at media phenomena from as a set of iterative, interacting forces that include identity, regulation, representation, culture and consumption. It sees the development of consumer gadgets, like the Sony Walkman, as not an isolated economic practice, but coming from an interactive feedback loop between culture and economics. But it also reflects the bias described earlier: where is the environment in this matrix? Surely it needs to be part of the mix.

Enter sustainability design which is holistic and approaches problems from multiple angles. Gaia Education has developed an Ecovillage Design initiative that approaches human experience according to four dimensions: lifeworld, ecology, economics and society. I hybridized both the circuit of culture and ecovillage design approaches to divide up the course according to the following disciplinary lenses:

Worldview: the phenomenology of time and space. This section covers topics like technological determinism, the history of media technologies, and the impact of digital media gadgets on the user’s perception of time, space and place. Assignments include keeping diaries of gadget usage and to get lost in Rome (which is where I teach) without any media devices, including pens, paper or maps. Students then write and share their experiences in a class blog.

Environment: the material reality of digital media, including extraction, production, e-waste, energy and emissions. To get a picture of the environmental impact of gadget production, we watch the documentary Manufactured Landscapes. We also view the Story of Stuff and the Story of Electronics. There are a ton of videos on YouTube about e-waste. We also look at material relating to “cradle-to-cradle” design and Green IT. Additionally, we read and discuss the various reports on ecological impact created by critics such as GreenPeace, and internal communications from parent company Web sites of gadget makers.

Economy: Drawing on themes from political economy, we look at the ideological structure of the global economics system, paying attention to the reasons why designers design what they do. We compare consumer designed products (Sony’s Walkman, Motorola’s Xoom tablet, Apple gadgets) with computers designed for low-income education, such as the One Laptop Per Child project and the Open Source Ecology project. The goal here is to understand how intention influences the production process of our gadgets. During this section we watch Objectified, a documentary about industrial design.

Culture: Multiple strategies are used in this section, but predominantly it is hermeneutics. Throughout the course we look at promotional videos and advertisements to deconstruct the thinking behind the marketing of gadgetry. This reiterates the point that that though these categories are distinct sections of the course, they spiral around each other. None are completely separate, they are embedded within each other. In the culture section, however, we go more deeply into how digital media usage is impacting by cultural practice. This includes looking at Henry Jenkins‘ model of convergence culture, Lessig’s Read-Only vs. Read-Write model of cultural production, participatory/social media, and the cultural commons (intellectual property, mash-ups, etc.). None of these are isolated from economics, environment and worldview.

These zones are then explored through the perspective of a “boundary object.” For the purpose of this course a boundary object is a media gadget (iPhone, Ipad, Blackberry, laptop, etc.) that has different purposes according to how it is used and how its potential is perceived. So even though a gadget has objective properties in the sense that we all know what an iPhone is, it can also be many different things to different people. It can be a way to call your friends, an instrument of revolution, or a tool for triggering a roadside bomb. To get my students to think in terms of boundary objects, I show clips from the 1980s film The Gods Must be Crazy to demonstrate how a coke bottle, though on the surface is something fairly neutral and innocuous, can do completely different things according to people’s culture.

For their final project students analyze their personal media gadget of choice according to the four zones of experience. I also incorporate a multiliteracy approach. In addition to the content elements of the course, I also want to embed certain skill literacies. So for each section I assign a specific skill-related task. For the first section it is autoethnography and blogging. The ecology section is about tool literacy: what is the “nature” of our gadgets? The third and fourth section are a mix of information and visual literacy, i.e. how to read and deconstruct marketing and information about the gadgets, including how to research the design and production aspects of the gadgets online. Students do mixed activities ranging between collaborative, solo, writing and multimedia. The final project is a paper and a Prezi presentation.

You can only do so much in a 14 week course, and a lot is left out. Ideally this would be a year-long (let alone lifelong) process.

Conclusion

The model I offer here is experimental and not definitive. My main goal is to argue for sustainability as multidimensional, and to integrate ecological issues into a standard digital media course that typically eschews the environment. My vision for the future of education is that “green” subjects are not ghettoized and treated as distinct or off topic from those subjects that are familiar to us. I imagine that all media courses one day will incorporate sustainability, and it will be “natural” to do so.

Barriers to such a project include a lack of familiarity with ecoliteracy (pedagogy and a basic literacy of environmental issues), resistance from academic gatekeepers who don’t acknowledge the connection between the environment and social studies/humanities, and a lack of concern or desire to change cultural practice. I think all these can be overcome, but it will take concerted effort and will be up to the practitioners (i.e. teachers, scholars and learners) to push for more integrative approaches to teaching media.

Please feel free to contact me for more information. I plan to do an online training for educators to learn this model. If you are interested in participating in the training, contact me at info@worldbridgermedia.com

* My book, Mediacology: A Multicultural Approach to Media Literacy in the 21st Century deals with this topic in more detail.

It might seem like a waste of brain cells to complain about Fox News. I used to think that even though they were little better than cheese mold, a few million people watching it didn’t mean the end of the world. Yet, as the News of the World scandal has shown, Fox’s parent company, News International, is neither innocuous nor ethical in its broad influence on world politics and debates. It has a disproportionate influence on shaping the symbolic power relations of particular discourses. It’s remarkable, for example, that Obama fired Van Jones based on the lunatic rantings of Glenn Beck. Since when do insane people wield so much influence on reality?

Anyhow, this is certainly masterful propaganda. The pundits argue that schools can’t even teach kids math and reading, why in the hell should they teach about the environment using a ridiculous cartoon like Sponge Bob? (Unless, of course, Mike Huckabee does it.) What do teachers know? Perhaps Fox’s newsreaders could apply a little critical thinking to their own claims. Which science journals are they reading to make their argument? What proponents of anti-climate change scientists are a percentage of the nearly universal scientific consensus supporting the human-caused climate change thesis? Yes, some people claim the Earth is flat, but does that make discussing Earth’s shape controversial? Apparently they fail their own test: anti-science pundits should not complain about the lack of science education in schools.

But, they doth complaineth too much. Education policies like No Child Left Behind have largely produced the ignorance and lack of critical thinking Fox so cherishes. They act like abusive patriarchs, treating teachers like scum of the earth, meanwhile making sure they don’t have the tools to do their job well.

Murdoch has certainly muddied the climate change debate. For example, he made his company “carbon neutral,” seemingly contradicting the anti-climate change rhetoric of his minions. It took me a while to figure out why, until it dawned on me that there was a shrewd strategy afoot. First, is the carbon neutrality claim really verifiable? According to whom? Given the parent corporation’s ethical standards and normal use of doublespeak, I find any claim of verifiability dubious (kind of like S & P giving Goldman Sachs AAA credit rating at the peak of the derivatives bubble). Secondly, how are they defining carbon neutrality? The meaning of the term is not objective. Just because there is a pledge to plant trees doesn’t mean that the real carbon footprint is offset. Moreover, getting electricity from a wind farm does not compensate for the ecological “mindprint” of Fox’s magical thinking. Likely this is actually a model of the kind of climate remediation that will be pushed by Fox (when they have no choice but to actually acknowledge that something has to be done). They will point to themselves and say that we can do it without government regulation. We can make any claim we want and it’s acceptable because we say it is so.

Yeah, just like the claim that they are “fair and balanced.”

You see, these are very tricky people. Shape-shifters, if you will. Pay close attention because they are modeling the reality of fascism that they claim to rail against. In this sense, they offer us an excellent case study for how this works. The trick is to defuse their influence, which is tough. I don’t have all the answers, but maybe the case to revoke their broadcast license based on ethical and legal violations could ultimately do them in. This seems like a vague and distant future, but then again, the swift collapse of News of the World was as sudden as the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I just wrote a case study for how I greened a digital media culture course. You can read it USC Annenberg’s Project New Media Literacies Web site. It represents a leap forward in my conceptualization for how to green media studies. I plan to develop the curriculum further this summer and to do an online training for teachers in either August or September. The curriculum will have wider application and won’t be confined to undergraduate courses. The training will be for anyone who works with new media and wants to explore ways to incorporate sustainable cultural practice into their projects.

Additionally, a few months ago I wrote a media manifesto on greening media education. As you can see, no one commented on it. I don’t know if it is because of a lack of interest, or that I failed to communicate the ideas in a way that makes sense to people. I think the current piece at the New Media Literacies site is better developed and easier to understand. I’m still trying to simplify the language, which is difficult for a subject that is so complex. Any feedback here or at the respective Web sites where these recent articles are posted would be greatly appreciated.

If you can’t see the video, you can access it through this link.

My first blog post in a while. I hope to post more soon. Here goes….

I’m pretty convinced that the iPad (or something like it) can be effectively utilized for education. In particular I think it will be a great media literacy device since it offers a good mix of interactivity and multimedia. However, the vision offered by Blackboard in this ad is hardly the kind of innovation that I imagine. For one, Blackboard is a proprietary system. It is a closed system. Though it offers additional interactivity than a traditional classroom Web platform, you are stuck with their service and would be dependent on their pedagogy and architecture (check out Douglas Rushkoff’s great rant about it here: “Blackboard is brilliant… it is written for the Blackboard company to dominate education in a particular way”).

As a grad student I really hated Blackboard. It has been a few years since, so it may have improved, but the video depicts a technological bandaid for the traditional educational approach–it is very mechanical. The interactivity shown in the ad is very limited and repeats the top-down cliches of the one-to-many educational model. If multimedia is to be incorporated into education, it should be more interactive, hackable and open to the outside world. The medium is the message.

I used to use Ning for my courses, but they switched to a paid service, so I could no longer use its platform in my classes. It was modestly good– I didn’t like the fact that it had only few plug-ins (the plug-ins that did exist were pretty bad and lacked any community or tech support). The free version required displaying google ads. The paid version is ad-free, and though not priced too exorbitantly ($19 a year per site), if you are running a site for each class, the bill can add up (I had seven sites). I didn’t qualify for the sponsore-free service for educators because I’m not based in the US.

In the end, Ning pissed me off because I learned that my students like to access course Websites after they finish the class, and now they can’t access the sites. I have some students who continue to use the sites for several years in order to access videos, notes, links and articles. In one case a student needed coursework evidence to justify a transfer credit. Unfortunately, even as the site creator I have to pay to access the site. Imagine the situation with Blackboard. What if the company were sold or went out of business? What is the access for adjuncts and students once they leave the university and no longer have registered accounts? What about the symbiotic relationship between Blackboard and expensive textbooks? Would students be locked into both?

The solution is open systems. I have always been a big fan of the open source blogging platform, WordPress, and have been relatively pleased with the BuddyPress plug-in that turns WordPress into a social network. I host my education site myself, so that means I pay for it. But I don’t pay extra because it is covered by the fees I pay for my other Websites (such as this blog), and every time I create a new course blog it doesn’t cost me anything. The only additional cost is the domain name registration. My hosting service, BlueHost, uses SimpleScripts, which makes installing sites really easy.

Using BuddyPress for my main site (Open Media Education–note I’m still building it out, so it is not that sexy–I can launch Websites for each additional class I create. I can manage all my sites through the parent network, which is a great advance made by WordPress. I can upgrade and install plugins across the network for all my course sites with the click of a mouse. The other reason I love WordPress is that there are so many fantastic plug-ins and an amazing community of support. BuddyPress also has a great community of users and developers. I have usually gotten my tech questions answered within six hours.

One strategy is to combine the power of Wikis with BuddPress. The folks at University of British Columbia have built their entire system around this formula.

I’ve been using WordPress since the early days, so for me I find it quite intuitive and easy to use. The current version (3.1.1) is very simple to use and much more powerful and flexible than previous versions. It’s also mobile and has multilingual support. I hope more educators will discover the power of WordPress. It will empower them and their students. And you don’t need to depend on the whims and business strategy of Blackboard to develop your online classroom.

File under this shit has gone too far. As a severely underpaid teacher, I find it laughable that we are now the evil force behind the economic crisis. In a way, I hope Wall St. keeps pushing on this. I don’t think people will bend much further.

Incidentally, I read somewhere that folks in the UK are holding teach-ins at banks by entering and holding classes inside their lobbies.

Media literacy and ecoliteracy people are worlds apart. Media educators don’t prioritize sustainability because ecology is perceived to be the realm of the natural sciences. For example, education programs are often outdoors or garden oriented. Nothing wrong with those kinds of workshops, but if we continue to ignore the cultural and technological dimension of ecology, frankly we’re screwed, because the ecological crisis is a cultural crisis. We can add to that, of course, that it is also a spiritual problem. But a culture without a holistic spirituality is a dying culture, anways. So the issues are related.

Then there are the environmental educators who refuse to engage technology because of its perceived corrosiveness. At the Bioneers conference, for example, I met with anti-TV crusader Jerry Mander to discuss the possibility for incorporating media literacy into environmental education. He told me that it was a good idea but that he was against it because it would make media more interesting. But that is exactly the point: we want people to get more interested in media, not as passive consumers but as a means for understanding the “system” (however broadly we want to define it) and for learning how to be empowered practitioners.

I’m a fan of the idea that media are “institutions-to-think-with.” Play with and use them to understand human communications, technology, economy and perception. In this sense, media literacy can be a kind of homeopathy. By engaging it holistically, mindfully and holistically we stand to gain amazing insights. We can learn how the system thinks.

For those unfamiliar with homeopathy, it is a kind of healing practice in which people take small doses of the very thing that ails them in order for the immune system to learn how to adjust to the ailment. Granted, I am nervous about using medical metaphors for the “problem” of media. In many ways the kind of media literacy I’m opposed to is the kind that takes the medical approach by viewing “bad” media as a disease that needs to be excised like a cancer tumor. This is an industrial kind of medicine that views the body as a machine needing to get fixed. It lacks a holistic dimension that looks at illness from multiple perspectives, such as the mental and spiritual state of the patient. Nor does it take into account the person’s environment, including diet, pollutants and stress.

Media literacy as homeopathy has the same unintended consequence of a college degree. We forget that an education is not just about learning the liberal arts, but its also learning how the system wants us to think and what is appropriate intellectual practice. In my Peace and Conflict Studies program at Cal, the best undergrad course I ever took was on epistemology. In it we read Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and studied how the university mirrored the global economic infrastructure.

It is so meta. You can walk around UC Berkeley’s campus and see the embodiment of the world system (by this I mean the economic, political and military design mechanisms of neoliberalism). There’s the law school that trains the lawyers who draw up the biz contracts; the engineering school (named after Bechtel) that trains the dam builders; the physics department that works on weapons systems; the ROTC that prepares military officers; and so on. You can also see how the UC regents have deep ties to the military industrial complex and global petroleum oligopoly. All of a sudden the university’s image as a bastion of “free speech” becomes a misleading ruse. Sure, in a university with over 40,000 students there is a niche for peace studies, but when I graduated, there were only 12 of us in my class. There’s always a space to keep the dissidents happy.

The point is, I learned more than I bargained for when I got my degree. I learned not just the content and grammar of the liberal arts paradigm, but its form as well. This is not to say that most well-meaning university professors and administrators don’t believe in the enlightening benefits of the liberal arts. Indeed, there are many good aspects to the democratic and humanistic traditions of education, but can this structure as it exists today adequately confront the challenges of a structure encountering its material limits, poisoning its living system and gutting its social fabric? Is the university up to the task of challenging the prevailing “wisdom” that education should be reduced to a business paradigm that views itself as a factory that manufactures students to reproduce the same destructive logic that has brought us to the brink of ecological catastrophe?

Going back to the discussion of media literacy as homeopathy, what I’m getting at is that there is tremendous benefit to learning media’s “cultural form” (to barrow from media educator David Buckingham). Being a literate media practitioner enables us to be “bridgers.” After all, “media” really mean something “in-between”: they mediate. To bridge a sustainable world, we will need to mediate the past with the future. Media education, in my view, is one technique for doing so for it enables us to map paradigms in order to change them.

This is the latest salvo from Michael Wesche, who has done extraordinary work with his Digital Ethnography program at Kansas State University. I find this to be his least interesting video because it mostly hypes feel-good jargon about the digital environment without offering as much insight as his earlier work, which prompted so much attention (see his YouTube channel for more– in particular check out The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version) and An anthropological introduction to YouTube).

Wesche’s video does make the important, if not redundant, point that the digital environment is changing knowledge dissemination and education. For how this impacts academics, I’m a big fan of the Hitler Down Fall mash-up by Digital Humanities. I also highly recommend Ken Robinson’s RSA* animated talk about the disconnection between old knowledge hierarchies and the reality of contemporary students.

These are more concept-oriented videos, and barely touch upon the abundance of how-to videos that proliferate YouTube, leading some to argue that it’s possible to get a free education on the Web in the way that Ivan Illich imagined DIY education in his book Deschooling Society. I think it is a little of a stretch to presume that one can be educated in complete isolation from a learning community– there is great value in having a community of learners interact with each other. So it may work well to learn how to play guitar with Web tutorials, but it can’t teach you how to play in a band or how to jam. One Web experiment that is building learning communities of practice is Howard Rheingold’s new project, Rheingold U. (I’ll be participating to see how it goes.)

How this plays out for sustainability education remains to be seen. I think these videos make powerful arguments for how the traditional system is failing our students. You can also read into them the problems with the environment and how the old systems and its industrial models of education are closely related to the ecology crisis. There needs to be a way to reconcile the new media environment with the need for promoting sustainable behavior. This video of Lawrence Lessig’s Green Culture talk is a good start.

* Many of the RSA animations are truly amazing, in particular Jeremy Rifkin’s talk on the empathic civilization. My only complaint is that they really need to diversify their offerings– too many white guys. Why not invite Vandana Shiva? She would be perfect.

There’s a new Website publishing media education manifestos. It includes some excellent missives by the likes of Henry Jenkins, David Buckingham and David Gauntlett. They have posted my own entry on the site, Greening Media Education. I’m honored to be included among the giants of the field.

I’m posting here the complete text of the manifesto. It is a very simplified version of my current research project. More on that on a later date. Please let me know what you think.

Greening Media Education



Though there is increasing interest to guide education towards sustainability issues, so far there are very few examples of green approaches to media education. In spirit, though, many of the goals and aspirations of media education are in perfect alignment with the cause of sustainability. As John Blewitt argues, media literacy and environmental education have in common the goals of participation, action and critical engagement.

But in order to truly green media education there needs to be a radical rethinking of many underlying premises that have lead to a deficit in sustainability discourse among media education advocates (for example, take a look at the tag cloud of this Website). Part of the problem has been the lack of a sufficient bridge between ecoliteracy and media education. In important ways their approaches are epistemologically different. For example, the traditional divide between the biological sciences and the social sciences and humanities is well-reflected in the history of media studies. With the exception of Raymond Williams and the newly emerging field of environmental communication, the problems of the environment generally have not been linked to the other social justice issues taken on by media studies and cultural studies. So though racism, sexism, homophobia and postcolonialism have been tackled by media education, the environment has not received similar attention.

Another part of the problem is the assumption that environmental education is “nature”-based and is outside the task of media education. The critique of technology, which should be a primary job of media educators, is generally assumed to be the territory of so-called Neo-Luddites. I concur with Jaron Lanier who recently argued that media users, engineers and producers should be allowed to discuss the merits of media technology without being ostracized by digital utopians. It’s possible to be a media user and a critic simultaneously, as Ivan Illich’s discussion of tools for conviviality shows. He argues that there is an appropriate human scale and application for communications technology while also recognizing their limits.

While experiential nature initiatives certainly remain an important aspect of ecoliteracy, the environmental crisis, in particular climate instability, is primarily a cultural crisis. As eco-educator David Orr has argued, “all education is environmental education,” meaning our cultural attitudes and beliefs about ecology are embedded into education in the same way they are integral to economics, in particular non-sustainable beliefs. The problem is that rarely do fields like education or economics acknowledge the ecological dimension of their models of reality. Same goes for media studies. So riffing on Orr, by extension we can argue that all media are environmental education, picking up on the critical pedagogists who talk of media as a kind of cultural pedagogy, but then expanding this notion to promote a green critique.

Part of the solution is for social sciences, humanities, and media studies to take seriously the environmental implications of their work. Remaining silent about the role of culture as a primary aspect of global ecology will only further the ecological crisis. But it’s not merely a matter of changing the information. In other words, simply applying traditional media literacy tactics to environmental issues won’t be sufficient, like doing discourse analysis of news coverage of climate science or policy. Of course approaches like these are very important, but they are incomplete.

Rather, there are fundamental shifts that need to take place concerning how we engage the world. As Gregory Bateson argued, trying to solve problems with the thinking that created them results in double binds, or what CA Bowers calls the colonization of the present by the past. In this regard, media education is not immune. For instance, there is a major epistemological difference between what Bowers refers to as “ecological intelligence” and standard mechanistic educational approaches derived from Enlightenment thinking. Whereas Bateson defines a person as not simply an autonomous “self” but part of an interconnected “thinking system,” a lot of media studies still assumes the Cartesian model of the mind. The Cartesian view regards the mind as a repository of symbolic representations based on a machine metaphor: representations move through space from person to person, and as a result individuals construct an individualistic identity that is disconnected from living systems.

An example of mechanistic thinking is the magic bullet or syringe theory of communication derived from Shannon-Weaver. Though this model has been widely discredited, in my review of media education literature, there is still a large body of thought that has internalized the assumption of media effects that presumes media program human minds. They are exemplified by many of the “content analysis” approaches that assume that media literacy is a matter of changing and improving information through the deconstruction of media texts. Theories of the public sphere and democracy retain this concept of rational communication between autonomous beings, and are central to many media education strategies.

The concepts of “memes” and media “viruses” are another way mechanistic thinking enters into media education. Though the definition of a meme is contested, it is largely based on a biological view of information that assumes that ideas and concepts are like DNA: they can be copied and replicated between people. What this approach leaves out is how ideas grow from a cultural commons that draws on intergenerational dialog, specificities of place, and intercultural diversity. Moreover, as James Carey argued, thoughts are not private, but are public. Language, which comprises thoughts, is organic. Our culture is based on a complex feedback system, not the isolated musings of an autonomous character in an Ayn Rand novel.

In contrast, Bateson argues that the mind is a thinking system, eminent in the environment. A rough parallel of this concept is the theory of intertextuality, which approaches texts as communicative “utterances” that make sense based not on the meaning of a specific work, but how they dialog with other cultural artifacts. Their meanings are connected to various cultural contexts that comprise a larger “thinking system.”

The classical concept of communication has been critiqued by Carey who differentiated between a “ritual” and “transmission” view of communication. The transmission metaphor, he argued, derives from the 19th century notion that communication is moving things through space, whereas ritual places communication in real time within a cultural setting.

Mechanistic thinking—or a machine model of the mind—leads to what Bateson called an “ecology of bad ideas,” in which techno-scientific progress is viewed as part of a linear path of history, and that whatever the autonomous thinking self can invent is independent of its consequence on the environment. Consider how this has played out in terms of our communications technology. Though there is considerable evidence about the danger concerning electromagnetic pollution from our wireless devices, there is very little discussion or debate for how the use of these gadgets impacts living systems (humans included). I imagine that some reading this are prepared to dismiss this concern as irrelevant to the purpose of media education which is supposed to celebrate the creative uses of media. However, this doesn’t mean we should eschew such a critical and important discussion. After all, if the culture at large won’t engage in this discussion, who will?

There are signs that a new paradigm is emerging. The cultural studies model of the “circuit of culture,” which views media production and consumption as an interrelated circuit of representation, identity, production, consumption and regulation, is a step towards a systems approach to media. Why not extend that model to incorporate a green perspective? So if we take the example of the “Story of the Sony Walkman” and green it, perhaps updating it to look at the Blackberry or the iPhone, we’d want to include as part of the inquiry those aspects that directly concern the environment, such as the production and waste cycle of electronics, social justice issues related to resource extraction, the relationship between consumerism and the ideology of growth, and the political economy of globalization. On this last point it will be necessary to challenge the assumption that our communication technologies are necessarily a form of progress. Not all communications approaches are appropriate for all cultural contexts (ditto media literacy). Here I like to draw on Vandana Shiva’s concept of monoculture versus biocultural diversity in which she argues that many cultural attitudes emanating from the global economy are actually provincial and evolved within a specific cultural and historical context that is not applicable to many cultures in the world. Think Avatar.

Additionally, it would be important to look at the phenomenological experience of electronic gadgets and how they impact our perception of time and space. Finally, it would mean a close examination of language and concepts that emerged from the Industrial Revolution, and how they continue to carry over through the metaphors we use to describe communication and cognition today.

Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller has begun tackling some of these issues through his discussion of green cultural citizenship. My hope is that as advocates for media education that we don’t relegate sustainability for other educators to tackle. I would like to see media education be green to the core so as to not force yet again another division that makes “sustainable” or “green” approaches mere specialities or subfields. The danger is that if we simply change the object of study without challenging the double bind thinking that has brought us to our ecological crisis, then we will simply be “green washing” our field.

References

Bateson, Gregory. 2000. Steps to an ecology of mind. University of Chicago Press ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Blewitt, John. 2009. The new media literacy: Communication for sustainability. In The handbook of sustainability literacy : Skills for a changing world., ed. Arran Stibbe, 220. Totnes, UK: Green Books.

Bowers, C. A. 2009. The language of ecological intelligence. Language & Ecology 3 (1): 1-24.

Carey, James T. 2009. Communication as culture, revised edition: Essays on media and society (communication as culture)Routledge.

Cox, Robert. 2009. Environmental communication and the public sphere. Second Edition ed.Sage Publications, Inc.

Du Gay, Paul. 1997. Doing cultural studies: The story of the sony walkman. London : Sage, in association with The Open University.

Illich, Ivan. 1973. Tools for conviviality. Open forum. London: Calder and Boyars.

Lanier, Jaron. 2010. You are not a gadget : A manifesto. 1st ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Maxwell, Richard, and Toby Miller. 2009. Talking rubbish: Green citizenship, media and the environment. In Climate change and the media (global crises and the media)., eds. Justin Lewis, Tammy Boyce, 17-27. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Orr, David W. 1994. Earth in mind: On education, environment, and the human prospect. Washington, DC: Island Press.

Shiva, Vandana, and Third World Network. 1993. Monocultures of the mind: Perspectives on biodiversity and biotechnology. London; Penang, Malaysia: Zed Books; Third World Network.