Media Is… from Lori H. Ersolmaz on Vimeo.

A few years ago I was interviewed by Lori Ersolmaz for a documentary project about media literacy. Here is a new video,”Media is…,” that she made featuring some sound bites from our original interview. I’m honored that she considers me an “expert”! The video is a nice meditation and I hope you will take a few minutes to watch it and support Lori’s work.

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.

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.

Thanks for all the love and support, and if you are so motivated, please share with likeminded folks in the network. Peace! Antonio

Mediacology: Green Media Education Website:

The Mediacology: Green Media Education Website connects media literacy with ecoliteracy. By filling a gap between media and environmental education, this resource offers sustainable and ethical media education tools for educators, community activists and cultural citizens engaged in transformative planetary change. In the spirit of sustainable communication, the final product will be open source and freely available to the global community via a Website portal. The resource will consist of free downloadable curricula, community space, online multimedia lessons and access to online trainings. This project requests help in developing a unified identity for all its materials: logo, print and Website.

The above work is the product of two my star students, Wanda and Sara Gabai. This summer they did an intensive media literacy seminar with me, creating the above video as part of their coursework. I’m impressed by the quality of the script and how they contextualized it with their own mash-up of Web imagery. It was the first video they have ever made or posted to YouTube. If you like it, please to go the video’s YouTube page and post a comment or give it a thumbs up.

In my efforts to be more holistic with my media literacy approach I’ve been moving in the direction of not just looking at the content of media, but their entire production process, from the making of content to the production of gadgets. There’s a good book,Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, which takes the “circuit of culture” approach by looking at how representation, identity, production, consumption and regulation are recursive. We need to update this model to incorporate a sense of social justice, as the above video is pushing for, and also the ecological dimension of production. It’s not just that conflict minerals are a problem in the supply chain, there is also disposal and externalization of the toxic byproduct resulting from built-in obsolescence (you know, what happens to your computer or iPod after you upgrade it).

Apparently that cute little Lunesta butterfly flapping around in a corporate induced stupor is a rather pissy drug shill. I posted the Lunesta ad on my YouTube channel because I used it for teaching purposes in my courses. Accompanying the video I posted the following comment: “Corporation is a butterfly, replaces nature.”

To my chagrin YouTube users made lots of positive comments about the commercial, one stating that it was her four-year-old daughter’s favorite ad and thanked me for posting it. In fact, this has been a common trend: I post an ad for the purposes of criticism, and the commentators end up loving it. Go figure.

Anyhow, Sepracor, the maker or Lunesta, decided that an open media system is more than it can take. Too bad for them, because ultimately I made the one mistake of culture jamming: through my efforts to critique corporate brands, I end up giving them even more attention than they deserve, and hence more “mind share.”

Hey Sepracor, didn’t you learn anything from PT Barnum, who said there’s no such thing as bad publicity?

This, too me, is what I have been fearing about the future of the Web, and particular for those of us who teach media literacy. So far there has been a “hands off” approach from advertisers when it come to us using their work as part of our teaching materials. Either the Fair Use provision has kept them away, or we’re too few to care about. But you know the saying, you have free speech as long as no one listens to you.

Or put differently, does a copyright violation happen when a deconstruction takes place in the forest?

For what it’s worth, this is what the take down notice said (click here to see the rest):

ATTENTION

We have received copyright complaint(s) regarding material you posted, as follows:

• from Sepracor Inc. about Lunesta butterfly – worldbridgermedia?Video ID: hQTexs-__Dg

Please note: Repeat incidents of copyright infringement will result in the deletion of your account and all videos you have uploaded. Please delete any videos for which you do not own the necessary rights, and refrain from uploading infringing videos.

If you are unsure what this means, it is very important that you visit our Copyright Tips guide.

If one of your postings has been misidentified as infringing, you may submit a counter-notification. Information about this process is in our Help Center.

Please note that under Section 512(f) of the Copyright Act, any person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material was disabled due to mistake or misidentification may be liable for damages.

For your reference, a copy of this message has been sent to you via email, and can also be located in your Account Warnings page.

An alternate take on media literacy that goes beyond the standard anti-media rant. It’s from Henry “Convergence Media” Jenkins’ program at MIT. They run through a mouthful of terms at the end, but I find them useful because they acknowledge that these days the line between consumer and producer is bleeding the old definitions of literacy to death.

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