Why Media Literacy?
Would you throw your students into a pool without swimming
lessons? Then, why would educators allow our students to drown in advertising
when we can throw them the lifesaver of media literacy? Let's pass down the knowledge that our kids can use to construct the vehicles to ride out the storm…
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| Find at: http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=134 |
There are 52 million kids under 12 in the United States –
the equivalent to the height of the baby boomers – and these children spend a
total of 40 billion dollars a year on everything from music to electronics to
clothes; and more importantly, these toddlers to tweens directly influence (are
you sitting down?) over 700 billion dollars a year in spending (Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood, 2004).
So, it comes as no surprise the amount of time and energy
that is spent by advertisers attempting to successfully market to these overly
influential –yet extremely susceptible- cohort of buyers.
I think what was more surprising is that the government deregulated
advertising under the Reagan administration. Ronald Reagan deregulated advertising? The same man who testified in the McCarthy hearings, which resulted in extreme censorship in Hollywood during the 1950s, deregulated advertising in the 1980s? Interesting.
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| http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/ |
The deregulation of advertising opened the door for juvenile
marketers to create campaigns that saturated children’s lives. Campaigns that
began with the creation of a children’s television show whose sole purpose of
existence was to infiltrate every pore of a kid’s imagination with a litany of
products from bed sheets to food to shoes branded with their favorite
characters (Consuming Kids: The
Commercialization of Childhood, 2004).
Raising Kids in the Ruckus
My kids grew up with Power Rangers, all the Disney characters,
Power Puff Girls, Sponge Bob, all the anime characters, and whatever else was
the flavor of the month. And admittedly, I was influenced to buy everything
from branded toothbrushes to macaroni and cheese (that tasted better, I swear).
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| http://www.psmag.com/ |
During this same time, I was a waitress trying to make our
lives better by getting my university degree; and I had a natural inclination
for decoding popular culture, social movements, and gender issues.
I was teaching my children to read media literacy while I
learned to be outraged by consumerism, patriarchy, and classism. Yet, I
kept buying the branded kids' wares; it was just easier. It absolved my guilt of not being able to keep with the
Jones as a single Mom – even Walmart carried Disney.
So, my point is that the
American hypocrisy runs shift and hard even for the advocates.
The art classroom: Media Literacy Lessons
Chung and Kirby (2009) define culture jamming as an act of detournement, a counter-revolution
against the mainstream media constructs to reveal the hidden agendas of advertisers.
Examples of detournement include performance art, subverisements, and flash
mobs. Chung and Kirby (2009) turned their art classrooms into a space of
detournement by asking their students to rebrand corporations’ logos and
slogans to reveal the real agenda
behind advertising campaigns, as an act of resistance power of symbols used for
consumerism. Students produced such subverisements as matching the Toyota logo
with the slogan, “Global Warming”; and another student wrote “obesity” in the
famous font associated with Coke-a-cola. For more go to the journal, Art Education, January 2009.
In Killing Us Softly 4(2010), Jean Kilbourne continues her campaign to educate people on the impact of advertising on women, ultimately on all gender roles. Kilbourne reveals the
“stunning pattern of damaging gender stereotypes – images and messages that too
often reinforce unrealistic, and unhealthy, perceptions of beauty, perfection,
and sexuality” (reference the study guide found at the Media Education Foundation).
So, one question that art educators -invested in teaching
media literacy- can ask is: how can we teach students “to take advertising
seriously, and to think critically about popular culture and its relations to
sexism, eating disorders, and gender violence” (Killing Us Softly 4 Study Guide, Media Education Foundation)?
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| http://iamguiltless.blogspot.kr/ |
What would the visual landscape look like if all of the
gender-biased advertisements were removed from magazines, the mall, television,
and movies? How would advertising campaigns based on empowering women’s self
image of themselves look like? How would advertise campaigns based on positive
gender roles for both men and women manifest?
After a series of media literacy lessons on power
relationships, gender roles, reductionism, and decoding of advertising, ask
your students to take ads and/or fashion layouts from a high-end magazine (like
Vogue) and reimagine what that layout would look like with healthy, powerful
gender images. Students should incorporate the original image in the final
composition as an act of subverisements and resistance of its intention to
disempower.
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| http://www.almostallthetruth.com/ |
Also, students should be given the option to take the campaign off
the page into such actions as flash mob or performance art. This will provide
students with a sense of agency and resistance against the flat,
dimensional-less images that are designed to assault their concepts of what
body really is in everyday action; they are provided the opportunity to take body image off the
page and into their lives.
