After WWII followed a period of peace, which allowed for the development of what has come to be known as 'popular culture'. During the 1950's and 1960's especially, popular culture appealed to the younger generations, and in response to being targeted by this new way of living, the 'teenager' emerged as a defined social group. Popular culture encompassed many areas of recreational life. There were many changes in musical interests and tastes, with huge groups such as the Beatles and the Beach boys dominating the industry. Major advances in technology allowed for the advents of film and television to be brought to the masses. These advances in technology made one-way communication on a worldwide scale a reality, and therefore opened up a gate through which influences on popular culture from other countries could travel. WWII changed many of the ideas that Australians had about their standing in the world. Britain being our “Mother Country”, and the vast majority of those living in Australia being British, or of British descent, we were v
Abstract
This paper examines the development of media education in countries outside the USA, and reflects on why a form of media education ,which includes cultural literacy and social values , has not yet become a hot issue in the States. The goals and objectives of media, and art education are developing similarities especially in relation to popular culture. This paper identifies and discusses some of these common issues and their application in contemporary education.
The value of teaching popular culture
Popular culture, fed and maintained by the mass media, is probably the single most influential factor in shaping young people's perception of the world. An increasing number of educators believe media literacy is essential because it is the means by which the dominant culture is sustained and it is the source of much of our knowledge. Even though we often find ourselves saying 'I read about that somewhere', it is highly probable that we actually saw it on television or heard it on the radio. The intrusive electronic media implants ideas, expectations and aspirations without us being aware of attending to their messages.
The particular focus of this paper is popular culture, and particularly as related to youth. It reflects on the development of media education as it relate world- wide to American popular culture. It asks how best can popular culture be taught, by whom, and where in the curriculum, and suggests that there may be opportunity for creative ways of teaching about popular culture in the art room as well as in the media studies classroom, including creative production and/or the reworking of texts.
Official culture as preserved in the galleries, museums and university courses demands cultivated tastes and a formally imparted knowledge. It demands moments of attention that are separated from the run of daily life. Popular culture meanwhile, mobilises the tactile the incidental, the transitory, the expendable, the visceral. It does not involve an abstract aesthetic research amongst privileged objects of attention, but invokes mobile orders of sense, taste and desire. (Chambers 1983 page 12).
Mass media technology has had a substantial social and economic impact on contemporary society and 'by the late 1950s, ...the study of culture could no longer be reduced to an aesthetic or moral question but involved a whole way of life.' (Chambers 1986 page 203).
The Canadian media educator Barry Duncan believes that...
Once teachers confront the popular culture of young people, they find media- generated issues are one of the best bridges to the world of their students. Since access to the media is egalitarian, and young people are its biggest consumers, teachers and students are on an equal footing. Particularly with general and basic level students, mutual media experiences may be their only common ground. (Duncan 1988 ).
Teaching popular culture can be fraught with pitfalls for the unwary. One is that some students resent critical analysis in the classroom of a media text they enjoy in their leisure time, and see this as an invasion of their enjoyment of the text.
Jean-Pierre Golay, a long standing exponent for the inclusion of popular culture in art education also points out that ...
The difficulty for some teachers is to be able to realise and recognise that there is myth in subculture which they do not share with their students. It is hard for certain educated people, dealing usually with well recognised forms of art, to accept the emergence in sometimes fragile sub-cultures of new metaphors expressing the same durable truth, or of metaphors they consider low key. Sometimes it is even impossible to accept the idea that popular culture productions might be received as metaphors, and not only a noise or crazy motions and grimaces (Golay 1988 page 8).
However, by simply being aware of the likely pitfalls and sensitive to the students use of and involvement in popular culture texts, teachers can, as Barry Duncan suggests, build bridges between teacher and student.
One important strategy is to ask questions such as 'What is it about (insert the media text in question) that you respond to?' 'Why do you think this appeals to teenagers?' and 'How relevant is it to your culture?' ensuring that the discussion avoids negative criticism and value judgements by the teacher.
The influence of American popular culture
Much of the western world's popular culture emanates from the USA and is often referred to as the Coca Cola Culture. Screens throughout the world are filled with American films and television programs and in the shops there are products, such as jeans, which have infiltrated all cultures. Recent examples would include the proliferation of American baseball and basketball sportswear. In countries other than America it is only one aspect of the popular culture, although it is often a dominant influence especially on adolescents. My observations is that Australians have a vast knowledge of American culture compared with the limited knowledge Americans have of Australian culture. I suggest that this is directly related to the popular culture texts. (The preference for American sportswear by Australian youth is related to video clips and Nike ads).
Australians have been subjected to enormous amounts of information about America whereas Americans' exposure to Australian culture (and for Australia read most countries) is in comparison minuscule. A revealing comparison between the two countries is that in Australia there have always been regulations requiring television stations to schedule set minium hours of Australian made programs, local content is an issue which has never needed raising in America. With satellite technology, Marshall Mcluhan's vision of a global village has probably been achieved, but perhaps in not a way he would have expected it, he did not foresee that it would virtually be one way traffic from America. American produces something like 97% of the television its citizens consume. This is only surpassed by the communist eastern bloc. (The collapse of the Soviet Union will most likely change this situation and there will probably be a substantial infiltration of American programs into this new market.)
Consequently American television, like the defunct communist bloc, precludes almost entirely any outside cultural influence.
Patricia Mellemcomp writes:
While every other industry has been de regulated, representations shown in the US are still made in the US. Economics keeps the representations of other nations, on screen, on stage, and on TV, out of the US with a rigid protectionism which the GATT will not touch, at least for now, and which is not reliant on ownership, conditions of production, given the Japanese takeover of two major studios As software for their electronic hardware. Although there are increasing multi national ownership. The most profitable export, the biggest industry, of the US is representation.(Mellemcomp 1992).
Satellite technology allows Australians to watch a direct broadcast of The NBC Today Show (albeit it at 12.30 am). Like other countries around the world Australia also has a high percentage of pre- recorded popular American programs. There would hardly be a young person in Australia that did not know that 90210 is the Beverley Hills post code or a child who has not heard of Mickey Mouse or Bart Simpson. In Australia the influence of American culture, as represented in media texts, has always been viewed as a threat by some, and something to aspire to by others. Australians suffered for many years from what was called a 'cultural cringe' which was basically a belief that anything from North America or Europe would be superior to home grown products. A growing self-confidence in Australian-made cultural products has resulted in a questioning of this attitude of the past. Hence, part of the argument for media education has been made easy in Australia by media educators pointing out the influence of outside cultures introduced through media such as television.
If Australia suffered from a cultural cringe then America could be said to suffer from a cultural arrogance.
American popular culture is mirrored in and perpetuated and reinforced by the producers and writers of media texts. They are the dominant group which prescribe how 'reality' is represented, those who own the means of ideological production.
Those immersed in the dominant culture with nothing to compare it with, such as foreign cultural imputs or non-commercial institutions such as government broadcasters,1 find it extremely difficult to see the extent to which the media is structuring and informing attitudes and opinions.
Thus the argument that media education should address social values and representation is very difficult to substantiate in the United States where media education has, so far, been related largely to media technology and resources.
This situation is slowly being redressed by the efforts of an increasing number of concerned educators. For example, while I was in America the National Alliance Of Media Educators (N A M E) was formed.
Pedagogy
What is seen as a crucial element in teaching popular (or dominant) culture, is a pedagogy which includes the making of media texts in conjunction with the analysis This is not a new concept . In 1977 James Donald was calling for a pedagogy which included the making of media texts in conjunction with analysis. This duel process is now seen as integral to media education.
Practice implies initially the production of useful messages. But it is also through the practice of learning, eg how to use a video camera, record an interview, prepare a script, or reach a joint editorial decision that the first crucial step of revealing the human construction, the non-naturalness, of the products of the media will be achieved. The object is to reveal how the ideological messages of the mass media are put together, (encoded) and to seek effective codes for the students' own messages (Donald 1977 page 81).
Donald suggests this will be achieved by practical production work and teaching for visual literacy but stresses that his answers are only speculative. He refers to visual literacy as 'a clumsy and, I hope, provisional concept' and suggests that much valuable work at the time was based on the Golay and Gauthier work with images. 2
Literacy is a tricky analogy, not only because it remains largely opaque itself, but because it is probably a quite different process from making sense of an image. The point is to find a way of making images 'strange' (often by presenting material derived from the psychology of perception, such as ambiguous images and visual tricks and illusions) and thus reveal their multi layered significance (using concepts derived from semiology) The significance will depend not only on the content and internal form and the style of the image (lighting, colour, angle of shot etc,) but also on its context. This raises questions about the medium in which the image appears and the audience for which it is intended, as well as the relation to any other images and any accompanying text. The activity of 'decoding' is thus seen to depend on not just cognitive processes and sets of conventional symbols, but crucially on the social position of the receiver. Any image may be interpreted in a number of different ways. The range of possible interpretations will reflect the economic, political, and cultural struggles and contradictions present in the audience (Donald 1977 page 81).
All that has changed in the sixteen years since Donald wrote this is that there is a more general understanding of what he was proposing and significant progress in media education theory and pedagogy.
1. As is the case in the UK a large proportion of mainstream broadcasting in Australia is funded by tax-payers and is not reliant on commercial broadcasting concerns of ratings. The two non- commercial networks The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) broadcast nationally under government charter and cater for ethnic and cultural minority groups.
2. Jean Pierre Golay was the director of Centre d' Initiation aux Communications de Masse, Lausanne. He is now an honorary fellow at the school of Journalism, University of Wisconsin and still very active in promoting media education. In 1976 the British Film Institute (BFI) produced a set of slides and accompanying text entitled The Semiology of the Image which was extracted from Initiation a la Semiologie de L'Image by Guy Gauthier published in France by La Revue du CinemaImage et Son. It is probably been one of the most influencial resources in the world wide development of visual media literacy.
Core concepts of media education
One of the most significant milestones in the international development of media education has been the collaborative work done in the development of core concepts, principles, and theoretical frameworks. These vary only slightly from country to country and invariably include *representation, selection and construction; *media texts as influencing agents of culture and dominant ideology *the institutions in which a text is produced. *the function and form of media texts. *audience, (people use media, not simply consume it) *the making of competent and articulate media messages.
These core concepts have successfully focused media education and have solved the problem of trying to write a media studies program which embraces all the identified components of the media, which include, film, cinema, video, television, books, newspapers, magazines, video clips, computer games, radio and photography, and the categories and genres of all of the above.
Responsibility for media education.
British media educationalist, Cary Bazalgette, asked some basic questions. of teachers of English:
Should media education include learning to 'speak' or 'write' the language of all the different media? To understand a language, both as a listener/reader and as a speaker/writer, is to be empowered. People who can communicate well have more power over their own lives, and often over other people's also, than people who can't communicate well. Knowing several languages is obviously more empowering than knowing only one. But how realistic an inspiration is this? How many forms of communication have you learned? How many are taught in schools? How many could be taught? These are not simple questions. Once the word 'language' is extended from its everyday meaning of 'verbal' language and applied to things like drawing and photography or radio, and we start to use terms like 'reading' pictures or 'writing' audio- visual texts, then the difficulties of persisting with the literal analogy become apparent. Many media teachers - myself included- have used this analogy as a polemic; to argue that understanding and using audio-visual technologies ought to be taken seriously as reading and writing verbal language. Hence we get words like 'visual literacy' or 'media literacy (Bazalgette 1991 page 40).
Bazalgette is one of the many influential writers on media education who have an English-teaching background. Typical of her writing is the following where she uses the process of taking a photograph as an illustration of how students and teachers can think systematically about the construction and consumption of media texts, she asks:
Why am I taking this photo? What sort of photograph is it going to be? What sort of technology am I using? What choices can I make about what the photo will look like? Who is going to see the photograph? What do I want to show in the photograph (Bazalgette 1992 p202)?
The illustration is very useful and corresponds with the media core concepts of agency, category, technology, language, audience and representation. Bazalgette suggests the inclusion of snapshots, records of school events and illustrations for teaching. The interesting omission in this otherwise excellent list is that no mention is made of someone who may regard the taking of photographs as artwork. By not including the making of a photograph as art, she is denying the use of photography as artistic self-expression. (Would she also leave creative writing or poetry out of a list of categories of writing?) I believe this to be a serious omission by many media educators coming from a language or communication studies background. They appear to shy away from anything to do with creative expression, especially when related to the visual media.
Works of art, like media texts, are reliant on various institutions for their production and consumption. A painting or photograph taken as a creative response by someone who wishes to express an opinion or emotion could be displayed in a gallery or be used as part of a media text, such as the cover for a magazine. There is increasing use of photographs in newspapers which have no news value but are simply chosen because they are aesthetically pleasing. In either context, gallery or print media, the artistic merit may be the same but the way material is consumed varies. Good graphic design, layout and the illustrations in books and magazines are rarely consciously noticed; bad design is.
The role of art in the construction of media texts is being overlooked by some media educators.
Promoting visual media literacy in America, David Considine and Gail Haley observe that:
Because art is taught as a subject at school it is often left to art teachers as a result of which other teachers seldom reinforce it by integrating it into the curriculum. Paintings and other forms of art can be analysed as social artefacts and historical documents that provide evidence of the time in which they are created or the period they depict. These representations may be accurate or misleading. They may also reflect a patriarchal culture and a social mechanism that narrowly defines the role of women. Art education must provide the opportunity for students to express themselves and communicate through their own creations (Considine/ Haley 1992 p 26).
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