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The Weight of Reality Corporations are so eager to gain access to the youth market that they create and distribute “supplementary” materials free of charge to willing schools in order to help educate kids on important issues. When you need straight facts about the environment, what better teacher than Just in case the kids don’t watch enough television at home, since 1990, Channel One, the commercial news show just for tweens and teens, has been offering every classroom a free television if the school agrees to air its twelve-minute news broadcast for the class every day. Actually only about 57% of those twelve minutes can be considered “news” while the rest is comprised of ads, filler, and oh, a “pop quiz” at the end to make it all seem educational and to make sure the students were paying attention, because if they paid attention to the news, they probably also paid attention—maybe more attention—to the ads. But that’s not all Channel One is selling. They also claim, oddly, to promote media literacy. Weird, though, to subscribe to media literacy education from a company that for $200,000 a pop also sells 30-second spots to companies like Nabisco and the U.S. Armed Forces. With each new classroom it adds to its inventory, Channel One can promise its advertisers 30 or 40 new viewers. There is hardly any experience an American child can have that doesn't betray the taint of commercialism. This is why it is so important to teach children how to filter it. Media literacy is the process of analyzing and understanding mass media (television, radio, magazines—channels of communication controlled by a few but distributed to large audiences) and the structures that create them. It helps kids guard themselves against advertisers, and should not be taught to our children by the very people whose business is selling the illusion. This would be like promoting monogamy at a swingers’ bar, with all the same hypocrisy and lack of sincere intent. Media literacy, however, does urgently need to be taught to this generation of school kids. The commercial media influence dumped upon children today is so immense it requires an educational plan about how it works. Just as we teach children incrementally how to understand literature, or to solve an equation, we need to educate kids about the medium they are really most actively engaged in. This needs to serve as a sort of mental prophylactic, to guard kids against the side effects of unprotected, uncritical media exposure. We cannot be so naïve as to think that they don’t need it, nor so irresponsible as to assume that they’ll figure it out themselves. Media literacy is not a new idea. It was first developed in 1930, but the current approach of discriminating within the media has been kicking around for over forty years—around the same time television started to become a staple throughout the modern Western world, and constructed messages began to be perceived as natural ones. According to the Center for Media Literacy, a nonprofit educational organization founded in 1989, media literacy education “provides a framework to access, analyze, evaluate and create messages in a variety of forms — from print to video to the Internet. Media literacy builds an understanding of the role of media in society as well as essential skills of inquiry and self-expression necessary for citizens of a democracy.” The United States has lagged far behind other major English-speaking countries in introducing it. Australia, for example, has mandated media education in grades K-12 since the mid 1990’s. Denmark has provided it since 1970, Sweden since 1980. The U.S. has made some strides in recent years, and now 48 states have some form of media education in their curriculum. Which may lead many to think the problem is already being addressed. But the problem “in some form” can take many forms. We need to hold it to standards, to maintain an expectation; otherwise it may just be taught through some corporate-sponsored program or minimally addressed as an extra-credit assignment. It would be nice to think that kids in public education already acquire the proper critical reasoning skills needed to address these problems through the traditional public-school curriculum. But that assumption cannot be made. Somewhere along the line, the traditional methods of explicating important literature and historical events failed to produce the ability to transfer (or in some cases, even develop) the analytical skills necessary for understanding media. Perhaps the cause of this occurrence can be found in the piles of tests teachers now teach to, or in the low wages they typically earn. Or they could just as easily be found in the hand-held videogame consoles that are the constant companions for many students, or in the ever-glowing television sets in their homes. Whatever the reasons, the fact is that both parents and educators need to address the issue of commercial media saturation seriously; it has become essential to explicitly teach media literacy in education. If we don’t take responsibility for educating kids, we are tacitly agreeing to allow marketers and business interests to educate them instead. The marketing bombardment of our kids is just one of the most repugnant examples of corporate dominance and influence over our culture. I know it’s easy to blame faceless corporations for all that’s wrong in America, but there is a reason why it’s so easy. It’s about time we all put away the fantasy of “trickle-down economics.” The story that says we all benefit when the richest few get tax cuts and exemptions and that by allowing big business access to every facet of our lives, we create a strong economy— that this, indeed, is capitalism in its most successful form. That privatization will solve our healthcare system, our educational system, our social security crisis. We need to do away with the fantasy that marketers are here to better serve our preexisting needs and wants. These are myths masquerading as reality, earning credibility only because we allow them the weight of reality. And should we begin to doubt the validity of these myths and wonder why we can’t perceive the benefits, or if we should question why the income gap is so wide and why an epidemic of ADD and narcissism plagues the kids of this country, well, there is always the relentless mass of advertisements to distract us — whispering the persistent need for more in all of our American dreams. So maybe the four-year-old who memorized the Britney Spears song before she could spell her first word wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary. After all, a child’s first method of learning is through observation and imitation. I could argue that she shouldn’t have been exposed to Britney at such a young age, which is true, but exposure to inappropriate role models for kids isn’t exactly rare. In fact, because the product of Britney Spears has so saturated every component of the mass media, it would’ve been hard for the average television-viewing child not to be exposed to her. The song the preschooler chose to sing captured the condition perfectly, “Oops! You think I’m sent from above. I’m not that innocent.” The time kids are allowed to be innocent of our culture’s hang-ups is rapidly decreasing. They are thrust almost at birth into the hyper-reality of commercialism and mass media, which effectively manipulates their desires and then encourages them to relentlessly fulfill them. Perhaps here, too, Britney Spears can illuminate the situation, by providing a model for the paradox of our current culture. As a girl who attained stardom at a young age, pretty, fit, idolized and lusted after. She’s been a Mouseketeer, a pop superstar, an actress, a reality-show subject, a brand label—a complete commercial success. But once she fulfilled all those desires—of her own as well as ours—she self-destructed. At twenty-five, Spears goes in and out of rehab, neglects her kids, shaves her head in public and smashes a photographer’s car window while screaming, “Go fuck yourself!” Her downward spiral is a perfect model for what commercial excess without restraint will yield: an emotionally disturbed and misled culture that needs a better education and higher standards.
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| UCI | School of Humanities | Literary Journalism |