The Power Of Media In The Digital Age Essays - Media Studies

The Power Of Media In The Digital Age 1923 words - 8 pages The Power of Media in the Digital Age Across from my old high school, where once a pool hall seduced us away from classes, there is now a trendy bar and grill frequented by the recently-graduated. I visited this establishment to reflect upon the nature of media, culture and what it means to be literate in the 21st century. The implications for teachers, libraries and society in general may be daunting, but they hint at excitement, too. There I was, an English major, a man of the book as it were, all ready to cast aspersions left, right and center at these clearly illiterate, shallow young hipsters. Within sight of my old high school library, I was ready to join the crowd of experts and decry the decay of our culture, the inevitable devolution to a monosyllabic, non- print bunch of video heads. This was culture at its lowest brow, with no concept of canonical values or the means to access them. Media shaped these minds and what a mess had been made. Such doom and gloom scenarios are common enough. Fortunately, I paused and took a slightly deeper look at what I was really seeing. The room featured eight television sets, three of them nearly theatre size, with no two featuring the same show. There were a few sporting events, CNN Headline News on one, at least two different music videos, while a number of the sets were broadcasting an interactive trivia game played by patrons on small portable keyboards. Sprinkled throughout the bar were a variety of entertainment newspapers, some magazines and at least one person was reading a book in the relative solitude of a corner. People talked with others around them and interspersed this with cell phone calls. For someone of my generation a place like this tends to be a bit busy on the nerves, yet the more I watched, the more I noted the ease with which the young folks, those supposedly illiterate types, flowed easily from one medium to another, simultaneously tracking and processing countless streams of textual information. They were more aware of what was going on than I was and could clearly tell the scores in the games and the events in the news, as they spoke in clusters of conversation about what the media imparted. What's more to the point is that they were not dealing with text on a superficial level (though much of the content they were dealing with was trivial) but in cognitive terms they did so with far better acuity and retention than I could. So the question was, what had media added and what was lost? This one admittedly unscientific observation serves, I think, as a good allegory for those of us directly involved in sorting through ideas about culture and media literacy in the digital communications age. If one looks upon the scene with the glasses of an older, print-based paradigm, it is easy to see a sad portrait of lost reading skills. On the other hand, if one only for a moment considers the possibility that what one is seeing is in fact new literacies, then there is a whole new series of questions which need to be addressed. If we take as our definition of culture the good old Oxford Canadian Dictionary definition, that is, that culture is "the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively", then clearly new technologies inform and shape culture. Media is thus inseparable from culture, being both a manifestation of human intellect in its own right and, equally, being a means of transmission of other manifestations. Unlike this working definition of culture, literacy offers no quick, culturally-neutral or easy definition and it is on this battlefield that many of our current curricular and pedagogical battles are being fought. What does it mean to be a literate human being in 2002? If it means more than just being able to read and write to a standard set by some governmental department, just how much more? How do media inform or shape our culture? In exploring these questions, it is useful to remember that