Tag Archives: media literacy

Do You Believe in Facebook?

7 Sep

I had some fun asking a new discussion question to my introductory mass communication class last week: “Do you believe in Facebook?”

Not in Facebook’s business model, nor its overall success as a concept. Not in whether it was addictive or not (though the consensus was that yes, it’s addictive). Rather, did the students believe in the fundamental assumptions underlying the creation and use of Facebook?

by Flickr user Luis Perez

by Flickr user Luis Perez

One of those assumptions, we decided as a class, was that Facebook assumes that we are willing to give up a good measure of the privacy of our daily lives and affiliations in exchange for the benefits of participation, particularly enhancing and making new friendships and associations.

To me, we ask this question too rarely of our media use, both as individuals and a society.

Personally, I’ve decided that using Facebook (and, yes, two Twitter accounts and a blog) are worth sacrificing some of my privacy. I am willing to consent to their fundamental assumptions. However, the assumptions of other media may not be as easily agreeable to me.

For example, the application of this question to entertainment media becomes challenging – especially media with violent content. When I analyze that type of content with this question, I have to acknowledge than the creators of such content assumed that I’d find enjoyment in it.

As a result, I’m forced to ask myself if I agree that I am gaining pleasure by watching murder, assault and more. The “pleasure” might take the form of mere escapism, rather than glee – I’m no psychopath – but watching something like The Bourne Identity has been enjoyable to me. This means, on that fundamental level, that I am obtaining pleasure from the violent images I’m seeing.

Am I comfortable with that? On a personal level, that’s not an easy question to face. It makes me feel bad. On a larger scale, am I comfortable with a media industry that uses the audience’s pleasure in such imagery to make money?

I certainly believe in free speech and the right to express one’s creative vision. But when our media system creates massive profits through the manufacture of crass and vulgar products that cater to the worst human urges, we can look first to ourselves to see how right this situation feels. Do we really believe it’s right, healthy, positive to consume these products for our own psychological well-being? Then, on that greater scale, do we believe in the mass production of such products? With these questions, we find some assumptions worth examining.

Confessions of a Media Professor

27 Jul
Enter the confessional...

Enter the confessional...

I wasn’t especially grabbed by anything media- or journalism-related in the news this week, and am instead going to explore a theme that occurred to me a while back: my personal “bad media habits.”

Every semester, I encourage students in my introductory mass communication course to think about their “media diets.” We talk about which media products we choose to consume, why we choose them and how the products shape their lives. But in these discussions (as well as in this blog so far), I often feel a bit self-righteous. It’s time to confess: my own media diet is sometimes not so wholesome.

Here is my confession. I have sinned.

1. I sometimes listen to music and pay zero attention to the lyrics. If it’s got a good beat, that’s often all I need. The lyrics could be about murder, mayhem or misogyny, and as long as they aren’t easily intelligible, I can boogie down quite happily.

However, if I get suspicious, I do head to the Web to read the lyrics. Songs have been deleted from the ol’ iTunes library when my suspicions are proved justified; I don’t like stuff like that seeping into my brain.

2. I don’t consistently read a wide range of news sources, unless I am especially interested in a specific story. I know I should read a couple of international English-language sources daily, along with my dose of the New York Times and the ever-shrinking Fresno Bee (which I still receive in paper form, though will probably cancel once my furlough begins, sadly). Heck, I can still read Spanish well enough that I should feel obligated to get something from the Spanish-speaking world into the mix too.

But most days, my news consumption is lamentably narrow simply due to lack of time. My RSS feed subscriptions and Twitter folks definitely help me catch things I otherwise would have missed.

3. I like cheesy TV and movies, especially sci-fi. I have spent countless hours with Heroes, Battlestar Galactica and True Blood, among others, on DVD. I don’t have TV programming at home (i.e., cable or satellite), but Netflix and streaming online video work just fine.

Because I usually knit while I’m watching my cheesy shows, I justify this time as productive anyway.

4. I still read two women’s magazines – Redbook and O. I don’t get Redbook because I find it to be deep or intellectually stimulating – far from it – but because it automatically replaced my subscription to some other magazine that folded. Redbook occasionally has an interesting article, but it mostly makes me feel worse about myself, like my clothes are all stupid and I’m too hairy.  I should cancel Redbook, but out of some weird, deeply socialized sense of “feminine” obligation, I haven’t. (I guess it does help me know which things I find at Goodwill might be closest to the current fashions, for what that’s worth.)

I actually like O – it has a much more realistic mix of content (money advice, issues of consequence, articles about dogs!, etc.), and at least five pages per issue about books! I find that component just stunning. There are real authors who write about books in there. Amazing.

5. I have on rare occasions used Wikipedia as my one and only source for tidbits of information. Never for anything of any consequence, but I still feel kind of dirty.

There you have it. Judge me as you will.

What are your bad media habits? Confession heals the soul…

Bitter News on a Sweet Day

12 Jul
My usual morning combination

My usual morning combination

Photo by Flickr user [ jRa7 ].

I wrote in a tweet (@profsivek) earlier today about catching up with five days of missed newspapers – specifically, the copies of the Fresno Bee that patiently waited for me in their unchanging paper format while I was visiting family in Texas. I noted that there weren’t many upbeat stories and that there must not have been much good news to report.

Later, I regretted writing that (though, to honor the spirit of Twitter, I won’t delete the tweet). I so often am frustrated by others’ comments that “the news is too depressing” or that “journalists just cover bad stuff to sell more papers/get higher ratings.” These are given as legitimate reasons for not keeping up with the news.

I find these comments frustrating because these are excuses – along the lines of “I don’t eat vegetables because they don’t taste good.” We would all love for our media consumption to be entirely entertaining and full of happiness and sweetness, but the reality of our world today is that there’s an awful lot of sadness and bitterness. What’s more, it’s journalists’ duty to bring us those topics, even when they might rather be covering uplifting tales of human triumph. There are some of those stories out there, too, but journalists can’t cover them exclusively; the issues that threaten our democracy and our environment must be their primary focus.

So why did I keep reading my Bee back issues, slogging through tales of California’s budget crisis (which is likely about to impact my own paycheck), water shortages, crime and (to top it all off) dog hoarding? Am I some sort of masochist?

The answer is that I read it because I have to know. I have to know what’s happening, even when it’s miserable to know, so that I can make up my own mind about what I think and what I want to do. I try to communicate to my students every semester that they have to know about media so they can make truly free decisions, unencumbered by what celebrities, advertisers and media producers want them to believe and do. Same goes for knowing about contemporary events and issues.

This reasoning underlies my consumption of even the most bitter news: if I don’t know what’s going on in the community and the world, I am powerless. And what’s more, others are given power over me to do things in my name and with my implied blessing.

That’s why, even on a day of relaxation and recovery from my travels, even on a bright Sunday morning, I plowed through a six-inch stack of newspapers (and then also spent a couple of hours online catching up with my usual reading list). It was worth it to me; but then, I also eat my vegetables. Almost always.

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