Crossing the Information Highway: The Web of Meanings and Bias in Global Media
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| For young people, crossing the information highway involves new literacies of reading, interpreting, producing, editing, and organizing printed texts, the popular media, and the Internet. They access television, digital video, digital radio, and digital music and surf the Internet while doing homework; they listen to music and have the television turned on at the same time. Like all of us, these students find themselves in a communication society where information is available around the world almost as soon as it is created.
This world of new global media literacies, this “cyberculture” (Kellner, 2000), poses many challenges to U.S. students. Whether they like it or not, they live in an age when online live chat, Web casts, digital images, and movies compete in the classroom with textbooks and an emphasis on adherence to state-mandated standards and on high-stakes tests. In this world, media texts can literally be manipulated -- copied, pasted, excerpted, morphed, revised, annotated -- to offer a web of meanings and new opportunities for constructive engagement with them (Fetterman, 1998). What does it mean when our and our students’ lives and culture are no longer shaped by nature but by electronic media environments of our own creation? A variety of sources has become available at a click of a button -- e-books, e-advertising, digital photography, e-magazines, e-journals, newspapers, collections of stories and poems, reports, and diaries. Some require Internet access while others are available on CD-ROM. These new electronic media are powerful aids for teaching and learning, but few students are willing to accept the fact that they may contain messages that could harm them or that harbor bias, specific ideologies, or prejudices of all kinds -- racial, economic, gender, political, and moral. How can educators engage the current generation of learners in the literacies of the 21st century and in conversations about the media discourses they are experiencing? How can teachers establish learning environments that teach skillful bias detection and elicit critical responses to media messages? Is censorship or banning of Internet resources the best solution? |
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In this essay, I respond to these daunting questions that occupy the minds of many teachers and students. Calls to censor the mass media in the interest of protecting youth have been heard for many years; more recently, issues of Internet censorship have occupied the American political forum. Attempts to censor gangster movies in the 1930s, crime comics in the 1950s, and TV violence today have produced an almost unending series of laws, regulations, and proposals. But rather than resorting to solutions such as censorship or banning of literary works, movies, and websites, we can teach students the critical viewing, critical reading, and critical thinking skills that will allow them to evaluate, analyze bias, recognize textual distortion, resist manipulation, and find alternatives to the explanations given by media messages. This educational endeavor is worth pursuing and far superior to relying on television or movie ratings, Internet filters, legislation, and other efforts to censor the ideas and information available to today’s adolescents.
Such critical education involves helping students acquire a kind of healthy, inquiring skepticism that is to be distinguished from cynicism. By actively seeking to analyze biases embedded in texts and visual images, students can sort out truths from half-truths, accuracies from inaccuracies, fact from fiction, and reality from myth. This critical analysis enables teachers and students to determine whether texts of all kinds promote oppression or empowerment, whether they subordinate or empower some people according to gender, race, class, sexuality, or other criteria. This kind of critique is essentially motivated by political goals and by positive values such as equality, empowerment, and democracy, and it opposes injustice, unfairness, or negative bias.
Even with the recent flurry of increased Internet connectivity and emphasis on information technology, efforts to introduce new technologies in U.S. schools have not been free of challenges. In recent publications, scholars document the progress made so far by teachers in using technology and the Internet in classrooms (e.g., Jongsma, 2001). In these publications, however, little attention has been paid to issues of how bias, textual distortion, ethics, or manipulation of meaning to suit political, ideological, hegemonic, or ethnocentric goals have been addressed. Bias, in particular, has not been critically examined. For example, the core literary texts adolescents read in middle and high school in the United States, such as Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice or Hamlet, contain values and biases that are recognized but too often glossed over. As some of these works become available in new ways through the Internet, with soundtracks, powerful visuals, and hypermedia links, the possibility of embedding bias become even more likely.
Enabling schools to access the Internet has taken up much effort and many financial resources. However, little time has been devoted to matters related to inquiry, analysis, or interpretation of messages posted on websites that introduce teaching activities, instructional materials, and so on. At the same time, several authors have made serious efforts to define the variables and concepts that affect the integration of literacy and technology in today’s classrooms (see, e.g., Alvermann, Hagood, & Williams, 2001, online document; Choi & Ho, 2002, online document; Grisham, 2001, online document; Smith-D’Arezzo, 2002, online document). These efforts point to the need for teachers to pay attention to this growing field with its complex ramifications and new demands.
The Role of Reading Teachers
Ordinarily, language arts and literature classes have the distinction of explicitly encouraging students to think critically, not only about subject matter but also about the way content is delivered. Literary criticism is the one critical language to which most students are exposed. English class is where they learn to write, to read, and to investigate the relationship between how a literary work is constructed and what it means to them. This emphasis in their subject disciplines makes reading teachers particularly important in shaping how students learn to respond to global media and how they learn to read and interpret the kinds of texts to which they now have access via new information technologies and the Internet.
With the chipping away of the transmission model of education, the current climate of state-mandated standards and high-stakes tests, and the ushering in of multicultural literature, teachers are left with few choices as to what to do to achieve success with the increasingly diverse students in their classroom, the majority of whom are “cyberkids.” In some quarters, the new technologies of the Internet have become an alternative classroom resource. However, some educators argue that infusing the new technologies into instruction will not do the trick. Riel and Fulton (2001) point out that using technology in education represents a revolutionary change in the way we organize learning for all who work in the field. Curriculum developers can no longer assume that teaching will be business as usual, that knowledge is neutral and universal, and that the place called school will impart to students universal or global values. In today’s world, where events across the globe unfold in real time in front of us through technology, teachers and students are frustrated to find out that schools cannot catch up.
Furthermore, teachers notice a war of minds going on in their classrooms. Within the new media situations, powerful, implicit value messages are constantly being conveyed through such things as multimedia advertising (see, e.g., Microsoft Network’s Entertainment site) and “composigraphs,” or computer-manipulated photographs. For example, it has been well documented that popular culture can glamorize violence, irresponsible sex, junk food consumption, drugs and alcohol; it can reinforce stereotypes about race, gender, sexual orientation, and class; it can prescribe the lifestyle to which one should aspire and the products one should buy. A television situation comedy, for instance -- by nature of its characters, plot, setting, dialogue, editing, camera angles, and even laugh track -- communicates many tacit judgments about people’s relative status. But we know that bias is not easy to detect, especially when it is found in television programs that we enjoy.
How can educators sensitize learners so that they question what emerges on TV screens or in other popular media? How do we prepare students to evaluate -- not just to accept -- what is presented in textbooks? Are our K-12 learners ready to negotiate meaning critically in their media-driven world? How can students learn to detect bias in these media texts that they encounter everyday? Are they cognizant of the social issues hidden, omitted, or interwoven through images, music, and print? There is evidence emerging from classroom research indicating that teachers no longer sidestep critical issues (of racism, for example) by relying on, for example, the literary merit of such books as Huckleberry Finn. Rather, they encourage their students to ask questions of the text in a systematic manner and risk letting them discuss how the book makes them feel about racism and what issues it raises for them. Teachers can go a step further and identify bias, manipulation, stereotyping, and value messages that global media send as they peddle stories about the boring teacher, the geeky egghead male adolescent, the airhead blonde, the welfare mother, the clueless father, the minority criminal, the crime victim, the incompetent boss, the corrupt government official, and the desperate woman looking for a man.
Bias and the Hidden Media Curriculum
One way to understand bias within the school context is to examine curriculum as a political arena, a place where ideas, knowledge, rules, subject matter, and content are fashioned within the pull and push of power dynamics. By addressing the way power emanates from the values of the school, the workplace, and the courthouse, and how social conversations in these arenas are retold through coded genres of fiction, situation comedy, soap operas, action adventures, news, movies, websites, and so on, one can begin to understand the way the dominant social order reproduces itself in personal identities, cultural practices, disciplinary structures, global media, and attitudes toward authority.
Working within this contest of pull and push and of pockets of resistance that may become manifest in the dominant social order, media literacy advocates rely on questions that critically examine myths and bias to see if they stand up to reality and to reveal whose interest they legitimize. As teachers teach and guide students to read critically the myths and biases inscribed in the multimedia texts of the information age, they cannot be content that messages are innocent and harmless; neither should they assume that popular media content is evil and therefore needs to be kept from children. Instead, teachers must examine the exclusionary one-way flow of media information, through which the western news media promote Eurocentric values that marginalize those not of European background.
Bias is manifest in texts when authors present particular values as if they were universal. For example, bias can be conveyed in the media through the selection of stories, sequence, and slant in newscasts; the placement or omission of stories in newspapers; who is interviewed and left out in radio or television talk shows and news programs; the advertisements on webpages, television, magazines, radio shows targeted at specific audiences; the lyrics of commercial jingles and popular music, and the images displayed with them in broadcast commercials and music videos; the goals, procedures, and the rules of video games.
When I suggest to students that they explore the new educational media in terms of values, I refer to the hidden curriculum of myths and biases found in multimedia offering instant gratification and instant communication. For example, teachers can look at software evaluations on the Internet. Typically, they focus almost exclusively on ease of use and curriculum alignment and ignore almost completely the value-laden messages that promote race, class, and gender biases; competition versus cooperation; speed; and extrinsic rewards and penalties for risk taking and mistakes as part of learning. Unfortunately, little is done to expose such hidden curricula or to analyze it critically (Leogrande, 2001).
When I ask my students to check out the variety of software used in language and literacy or reading classes with children aged 3 to 8, they come up with examples that perpetuate stereotypes, especially of gender, race, and class. For example, in the past they have found that most characters shown in software programs are white and male; multiethnic characters appear to be middle class and speak “network English” (the language that newscasters are taught to use, with uniform features of grammar and pronunciation); non-white characters are almost never primary or main characters; and gender stereotypes are reinforced (e.g., doctors are male, nurses and teachers are female).
The rationale of critically analyzing media texts is based on the multiplicity of values, meanings, or messages encoded into the form and content of visual images, Internet sources, textbook pages, or audio sources. These media sources contain a wealth of meanings; their images function in contexts, with meanings evolving in terms of narratives, sequences, and resolutions (Kellner, 2000). A critical approach would not, therefore, reduce visual images or media texts to a single interpretation, although one could privilege a certain reading. As noted by Kellner, one also needs to know how various audiences process media texts and about the variety of ways in which images can be read.
Perhaps one way for students and teachers to explore values and attendant exploitation is to begin to question the role global media outlets play in the arenas of domestic and world affairs. The claim is made that media's purposes are to foster a sense of global community, to disseminate information, to serve political interests in order to isolate political enemies, to preserve and maintain friendships with allies, and to demoralize actual and potential enemies of national interests (Silverblatt, 1995). As I write this article, the U.S. government is trying to make a case for war against Iraq, a nation in the “axis of evil,” and news commentaries, political debates, chat rooms, and television talk shows are filled with such rhetoric. Helping students take a critical stance toward these kinds of media events empowers them to challenge systematically the exclusionary aspect of Eurocentric or one-sided ways of seeing the world (Dines & Humez, 1995).
The underlying assumption of this critical view is that popular culture as represented in films, television, websites, and so on is a site of struggle over meanings and values. Sometimes, popular culture produces meaning and regulates pleasure. At other times, it subordinates groups’ use of popular culture as means of focusing on a particular ideological reading of the world (Kellner, 1995).
To engage students and teachers in critical examination of media and values requires a sustained effort in school-based curriculum development and instruction. An understanding of values must begin with an examination of how they are constructed, legitimized in a democratic society, and distributed through mass media presentations. As an example, we could look at how the media have represented schools, teachers, or families in movies such as Stand and Deliver, Dead Poets Society, or Ordinary People. Films may represent families, for example, as traditional, tight-knit nuclear units of mother, father, child, and perhaps pet, or as torn apart by divorce and death, or as groups united by choice and love rather than biology. In contrast, think about how a single parent family is represented in Forrest Gump: not referred to as family, but despised, ridiculed, and stared at by strangers. The stories told and the images portrayed in these media samples have three things in common. They move us emotionally, they embody values, and cumulatively they construct a particular worldview. Often, that is the worldview replicated in textbooks.
When I talk about a hidden media curriculum of bias and myth, I mean to go beyond information and feeling. Teachers and students must consider the way in which these messages provide or construct the larger worldview and social attitudes. A steady diet of mythic stories about families can peddle images and concepts of love, sexuality, romance, success, popularity, and perhaps of most importance, normality. For example, a “normal” family is defined as one with a married, heterosexual couple with children. Quite often in media presentations, this idea of family is defined, reinforced, and perpetuated to the exclusion of other representations of family that might point to “dysfunction”: divorced or gay parents, or as is common in many African, Asian, and Latin American countries, extended families including grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins.
By defining the normal family, media presentations also define the abnormal. They tell us who we should be, regardless of what the reality might be. They give us a myth, a virtual reality, a story through which the world is explained to us. In this general sense, the global media reflect a mythological world, a world in which men outnumber women by almost two to one, a world in which everyone is heterosexual and living in a nuclear family in which the husband goes out to work and the wife stays home with the children. This viewpoint presents us with a dilemma that teachers must address. The media legitimize not only what is considered acceptable but also confirm ideas about what people are like and how they are to be understood, even if in a stereotypical way.
In the media literacy class that I teach every semester, I challenge students to read texts critically, to view images from advertising and clips from television shows. As an example, I present several ads found in popular print magazines and at commercial websites as artifacts for analysis. Using an initial list of questions, I encourage students to examine the picture or text carefully to begin to unravel not only its aesthetic qualities but the bias and global values, intended or unintended, portrayed. The questions include
After analysis, I ask students to create a new slogan, print advertisement, collage, video, drawing, or script using heroes (local or national) who reflect positive values. These activities generally generate hot debates and lots of discussion. At the end of the exercise, students always remark that they will never see ads the same way again.
Such careful analysis of media reveals the myths and biases I am talking about. The important lesson to take away from this exercise is that we are surrounded by these media presentations every day. We know media representations of family, for example, are illusions, and yet it’s difficult not to compare our own lives with these messages and images or, worse, to let these images define for us what we should believe as truth. Lasn (1999) sees today’s family as totally disconnected with the real world in many ways. He observes that
The postmodern family, out there in the woods trying to bond, can’t adapt to real time, real trees and real conversation, because real life has become an alien landscape. Mom and Dad can’t navigate in it. No one really feels they belong. No one feels any sense of purpose. The spaced-out daughter is alive when she is in front of the TV, and the mopey son is alive when he’s surfing the Net, and Mom and Dad are alive when they are at work. (p. 7)
The world captured in this image of family shapes the kinds of global values that insist on a values hierarchy dominant within the worldview of the media presentations.
In another example, students are startled when they are presented with unfamiliar texts or images. For example, while a front-page picture in a newspaper like the Philadelphia Inquirer is seen as straightforward evidence about the world -- a simple and objective mirror of reality -- it is, in effect, evidence of a much more complex, interesting, and consequential reality. It reflects as much about who is behind the lens, from photographers to newspaper editors, and graphic designers to the readers who look -- sometimes with different eyes -- through the newspaper’s institutional lens. A photograph can be seen as a cultural artifact because its makers and readers look at the world with an eye that is not universal or natural but taught to look for certain cues. It can also be seen as a commodity, because a newspaper concerned with revenue sells it.
To challenge my students to read images, I divide them into two groups. I assign each group a different photograph. First, they have to describe what is going on in the picture literally. All situated literacies emerge. Students’ comments typically focus on the image itself and not necessarily what it means. In the second stage I ask them to look for unfamiliar symbols. What might this picture evoke in their minds? I pay attention to the role of prior or background knowledge and how such knowledge is put to use in understanding what is going on in the picture.
Often, I have used one interesting front-page picture from the Philadelphia Inquirer. It was published during the U.S. intervention in Haiti. I always wonder: Do my students know anything of the history of U.S. intervention in the Caribbean -- Grenada, Panama, and once again Haiti? What preexisting understandings about the United States and the developing world do they hold that allow for their reaction to the picture? What role in forming those understandings was played by the global media, who on this day, as on most others, were uncritical -- even celebratory -- of American military intervention?
My interest is and has always been in the making and consuming of images of the non-Western world, a topic raising volatile issues of power, race, and history. What does popular education tell American youth about who non-Westerners are, what they want, and what our relationship is to them? As any other popular media source in the United States, the news outlets exist in a complex system of artifacts and communication devices: newspapers and magazines, televisions news and special reports, museum and exhibitions, geography and world history textbooks, student exchange programs, travelogues and films (from Rambo and Raiders of the Lost Art to Tarzan). At the end of the exercise, there is always the sigh of disbelief: How could such a simple photograph have such profound meaning? At a glance, it did not seem to mean much. In the debriefing process, students realize that these diverse contexts are in communication with one another to construct a web of meaning of cultural values, purveying and contesting a limited universe of ideas about cultural difference and how it can or should be interpreted. To use television network news, newspaper photographs, or websites as pedagogical tools is to study not a single cultural artifact but a powerful voice in an ongoing cultural discussion of these issues.
The visual structures represented in photographs and the reading of them rendered by audiences can tell us about the cultural, social, and historical contexts that produced them. A study of visual structures leads us to discover the ways in which meanings are offered to us and, in turn, our part in actively making sense of them. It is important to keep in mind that the assumptions we make, what we consider as common knowledge or common sense, “general” knowledge, widespread beliefs, or popular attitudes, are conventions we form as part of our cultural knowledge. My interest in bringing up these examples is to offer a critical perspective on the ways media are constructed, to point out some of the prevailing cultural ideas about others that are portrayed, and to raise questions about what could be done in the classroom and in the curriculum to develop critical perspectives. We need to know how to make knowledge and knowing meaningful to the students we teach, so that the knowing they acquire affects their lives as adults.
Conclusion
Reading images critically involves cultivating a media literacy education that enables teachers and students to situate themselves in a text and take a critical stance relative to social and political positions implicit or explicit in a given media event as expressed by the author or producer of the text. Taking such a stance directs one’s attention toward bias, manipulation, and distortions introduced by the ideological, value, and cultural positions taken by readers and authors or producers. Such critical reading acknowledges the range of meanings and effects present in the text and, consequently, taking a stance affirms one’s political position and courage to criticize texts that promote “blameworthy phenomena such as racism, sexism, or homophobia” (Kellner, 2000, p. 85).
Many educators realize that critical media literacy is important for addressing these issues. While not all bias in the media is deliberate, it is insidious, because the belief in media (particularly journalistic) objectivity is so well entrenched (Allen, 1993). In reality, in every news story, the attitudes and backgrounds of the interviewer, writer, photographer, and editor can influence the message through its tone and word choice, and the values or opinions expressed. In electronic media, manipulating texts is easier than ever before. The points of view or values of a writer or producer can be easily found in the web of meanings in a text. In this sense, bias results automatically from the very process of selection as well as from the placement of the story, the headline, the photos and captions included, the use of names and titles, reporting of statistics, and tone. Bias in a story or advertisement is produced by what is left out as much as what is put in.
This article points to the pervasiveness of bias and how easy it has become to manipulate media texts and worldview to privilege one viewpoint over another. For this reason, a systematic study of bias is more expedient today than before. For example, both overt and covert bias is manifest in the popular media targeting certain individuals in our society (e.g., Arabs following the events of September 11, 2001) and describing certain countries as “evil.” Such bias extends from news items to pictures to news commentaries and in talk shows featuring hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, David Letterman, and Bill Maher. These discourses seem to paint the world around us in dichotomous terms as black or white, Christian or Moslem, either with us or against us. Such binary slogans leave little room for anything else, when in fact reality is more complex and perhaps dialectical rather than an either-or situation. I believe, however, that these topics deserve more elaborate discussion at another time. Suffice it to say that educators cannot ignore the intrusion of bias in the variety of texts that have been ushered in by new media.
What might teaching bias detection mean to teachers? First, at the very least, it implies that teachers need to understand more about what students already know before they start to teach what they think students ought to know. The assumption is made that teachers and parents must first employ critical skills themselves before helping students use these skills to analyze what they read, view, and surf. It also means that parents and teachers of girls must be vigilant in seeking out literacy software with positive and strong female characters. They must continue to encourage students to question what they see on computer screens in response to what they see around them.
Second, teachers today must understand that with the revolutionary changes in communication that have occurred in the past few years, media literacy has become an essential skill. They must be aware that media literacy education can relieve the pressure to censor that has, over the last decade, distorted the political process, threatened free expression, and distracted policymakers.
Finally, in order to provide today’s children and youth with adequate tools to critique bias, both in school curricula and in cyberculture, teachers must reflect and examine their own values and biases to make sure they do not replicate or perpetuate distorted views perpetuated by popular media. Rather, they must provide critical as well as multiple perspectives to any topic taught or discussed in the classroom.
References
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For a printer-ready version of this article, click here.
Citation: Semali, L. (2002, December/January). Crossing the information highway: The web of meanings and bias in global media. Reading Online, 6(5). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/lit_index.asp?HREF=semali3/index.html
Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted December 2002
© 2002 International Reading Association, Inc. ISSN 1096-1232