Sympathy for the Devil: Criticizing and Criticalizing the Media
These are notes taken during Shirley Steinberg's CNIE keynote, Sympathy for the Devil: Criticizing and Criticalizing the Media:
Rolling Stones - Sympathy for the Devil - accomplishments of the devil, listeners as audience are complicit in these accomplishments.
Media is the devil
We need a "socially aware media pedagogy"
- not something that is model-driven
- we have to take it in an acknowledge our complicity
Media
- global distributors of power
- McLuhan
- notion of news has moved from documenting, entertainment is documenting
- our lives are a big brother screen
Power
- children and youth are without skill and cyniciam to understand distribution of power
- works to continue having power
- media literacy not mentioned in most families
- except for occasional banning, usually for nudity, sexual activity, profanity
- these should be the least of our worries
- children and families don't sit down to watch at the same time they way they used to
- parents don't know what narratives their children are absorbing
Entertainment
- the point is to give up control
- (espionage: what 'plausible deniability means')
- that's how we accept cartoons, etc
- first person shooters
- Bridgerton - black king, white queen
- etc
13 Reasons Why
- Hannah Baker was able to kill herself and still talk about her life after
- tapes reveal how her friends were complicit in her suicide
- there's a romanticization of self-harm, suicide
- Hannah remains forever young and forever alive, kind of manipulating things
- this show targets the teen suicide demographic (5000-6000 kids a year suicide)
- People interviewed not creeped out by suicide
- suicide is not acronymed, joked, memed, etc
- no conversation, no discussion questions at the end
- remember teens are vulnerable and fragile
Fiction
- is the news reality, or is it fiction?
- we tend to see it as either truth or untrust
- 2016 - 'post-truth' was the word of the year
- 'facts less influential for shaping opinion than appears to emotion'
- 'alternative facts'
- https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2016/
Fact
- I have difficulty with the notion of fact
- eg. in cinematography, the way
- shaping a shoot can change 'fact' and what we think we see
- media today - proverbial smoke and mirrors
- we are not able to agree on about what is a fact and what isn't
- eg. 'back to basics' of eg. numeracy
- no method to determine what is and isn't untrue
- eg. gender roles, stereotypes, etc
- tyhe idea of 'what is or isn't' is changed by media
Land Acknowledgement
- note: I refuse to read words that I am told to read unless I do believe them
- I mention that to be very clear about that, to state I believe what I just said
- post-truth - colonized societies acting as though reconciliation has occurred
- media often speaks of reconciliation as if it actually exists
- eg. Australia - John Howard 'reconciliation'
- this is known as 'sorry day' - it's on YouTube
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ffnnf-eYPKU
Coropnavirus
- eg. Calgary - 'unmaskers' protests in Crowchild bridges
- they believe the virus is a fiction
- demonstrations at Calgary city hall against wearing masks
- they are wearing stars of David
- they say they are suffering their own holocaust
Sympathy for the Devil
- the more we consume the more we are complicit
- we are media workers, we teach media, we teach technology
- this presentation is a provocation, not a set of solutions
- I hope it makes you angry
- we need to integrate the notion of critical media literacy into our work
- there needs to be a discourse, not about the content, to interrogate what is going on
- we need to slay the media dragon
- differentiate between harmful narrative and entertainment
- need equitable consciousness lenses
- no lesson plans, no cures, no prescriptions
- must be created for each person we work with
This is something that has to be a grass-roots movement. It has to come from the bottom up. It's something we need to take to our classrooms. There still needs to be a discussion of equitable consciousness.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDelete