Implications Inside and Outside of the Classroom
A few months ago I was in Africa living without electricity or running water or contact with rest of the world. I was teaching in a small home for physically disabled children and although I loved them and the experience, the boredom each night had quickly lost its novelty. For six weeks I saw no other westerners and only had access to Kenyan news. Because I wanted to pack light for the trip, I only brought three books and by the second week I was studying Out of Africa the same way most people study the Bible. My one link to the outside world, a copy of Time Ethiopian Airlines handed out, was creased and bent from many cover to cover readings. The last page, dedicated to celebrity gossip, was disturbingly nostalgic. I was homesick through the shock of learning about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ relationship. By the time I returned home, they were engaged, Deep Throat was found, a dozen movies had come and gone through the theaters. In just six weeks I fell out of the pop culture loop and felt completely off balance. I quickly realized what an enormous part the media plays in our reality.
As an educator, my newfound realization prompted many questions. I began to evaluate the role of media and pop culture in the context of education. Many studies have examined the negative role media plays inn social and moral development, but far fewer have examined these effects objectively. My concern lay with visual media’s cognitive effects on children; media has evolved and it is quite clear that children have evolved right alongside. As an example, a current popular show on MTV is Laguna Beach – a “reality” show popular with most 13-year-old girls. Below are a collection of still frames recorded each time the camera cut away over a period of 30 seconds – 19 in all.
When evaluated next to the comparatively laid back pace of Lassie, the evolution is obvious. Not obvious are the various effects such an evolution is having on developing cognition. How are these changes affecting young learners – not only what they learn, but how they learn? This paper aims to raise these questions by first examining the history of visual media (beginning with television), evaluating its implications, and finally comparing the role of the learner in new media and in the classroom.
Television
At infancy, researchers generally agree that babies interpret television as simply a random selection of shapes, colors, and sounds. However, as they begin to understand the function of language, “television may be perceived as a kind of ‘magic window,’” states Buckingham (2000), “…by the time they are about two, children seem to have understood that television is a medium that represents events which have taken place.” Buckingham also contends that from the age of two, children are learning how to take the information presented to them and build understanding for themselves. Just as books teach us how to read, television teaches us how to watch. For example, while many adults not born in the era of the “steady cam” (or the “shaky cam” as I like to call it) are unable to process the frantic pace of a show like Laguna Beach, teenagers have been cognitively “wired” to comprehend its quick takes and character-heavy plotlines. As cognitivism replaced behaviorism in the late 60s, interest in television’s effects began to take off in the psychology community. Gavriel Solomon was a researcher particularly interested in examining children’s grasp of media symbol systems (semiotics) in the late 1970’s. Solomon attempted to study children’s incidental mastery of specific mental skills by testing American children’s literate viewing (LV) of Sesame Street as compared to the LV of Israeli children, a population previously without exposure to television. His findings determined that while LV raised most dramatically amongst the lower class populations of the Israeli children after a month of viewing, Israeli children scored higher overall compared to the American children. This finding was surprising to Solomon because he hypothesized a stronger grasp of television due to exposure by the Americans. What he found was that American children watch with their mothers, and mothers are channel flippers. Their de-emphasis of sustained attentiveness to the screen in turn deemphasized content learning. Simply, children learned to not pay much attention. Additionally, the importance of the program had been removed; the Israeli children were instructed by their parents with great enthusiasm to “watch and learn” and therefore viewed with a more critical eye.
Educational Television
When Sesame Street first appeared on November 10, 1969, it was unique in several ways (Hendershot, 2000). The show had roughly an $8 million dollar budget granted by the US Department of Education. In turn, the department asked that the show stress cognitive development. LBJ had declared a “War on Poverty” and believed that broadcasting a show which included children of all colors in urban settings would give disadvantaged children the same cognitive advantages that white, middle-class kids enjoyed. While the show was lauded for its concept, critics were less convinced by its execution.
Joan Cooney was put in charge of the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) creative development. With a background in commercial production, Cooney aimed to take advantage of children’s love of Saturday morning cartoons, stating, “Children are conditioned to expect pow! Wham! Fast-action thrillers from television (Cooney 1969, as cited by Hendershot, 2000). Sesame Street had crossed over into the realism created by advertising, much to the chagrin of parents. Presently the parallel between Sesame Street and advertising isn’t made anymore because ad language has progressed to the point where it is no longer immediately recognizable in Sesame Street.
Sesame Street was innovative in the way it crossed boundaries by taking the language of commercial advertising and rewriting its meaning. What we have here is a fantastic example of modern reification: the meaning and the sign do not coincide and are confused until they become one and the same. Although this may not be the first instance of blurring the lines between entertainment and persuasion, it certainly appeared to many to be the most insidious because of the target market. Sesame Street was taking advantage of already established children’s mental models and altering them. “From the age of two, children are also developing an understanding of the ‘language’ of television. They learn that it follows rules or conventions which are different from those of real life” (Messaris 1994, as cited by Buckingham, 2000). By this age they have learned to perceive the differences between programs and advertisements (Buckingham, 2000). Sesame Street’s target audience is children between the ages of two to five. From the get go Sesame Street confused the boundaries between learning and advertising and entertainment.
MTV: Sesame Street Inspired
Ten years later MTV was launched by 29-year-old Robert Pittman who wrote in a 1985 edition of Adweek “Conversely–drastically conversely–the TV generation processes information in nonlinear manner” (1983). Pittman calls nonlinear viewers “TV Babies” and claims the job of the music video producer is to get their attention (Sherman & Etling 1999). The creative fantasy world that MTV provides in short bursts of ADHD-inducing frenzy has become iconic entertainment for youth culture. The launch of Channel One television in 1989 prompted advertisers to take advantage of the blurring lines between entertainment, education, and advertising. Advertisers knew exactly whom their market was (middle schoolers) and exactly what they were watching (Channel One) to create commercials that played with already established rules of programming semiotics. Roy Fox, who studied the Channel One infiltration extensively, examined this phenomena through Pepsi commercials that mimicked documentary-style Public Service Announcements (PSAs). “In imitating PSAs, Pepsi capitalized on a positive, respected, ready-made framework through which students could interpret the new ads. For example, one student said, ‘The hidden message in the Pepsi commercial is “Stop the Hate.”’ And the exact phrase used in a popular PSA is ‘Stop the Hate’” (Fox 1999). Fox notes that many students believed that the Pepsi advertisement wasn’t an advertisement at all.
“Digital Babies”
Modern media teaches young minds at a very young age to extract meaning from non-linear ideas. Pittman created MTV to appeal to “TV Babies” where there is no beginning or no end, just a steady stream of information. The Web is no different.
Visual acuity becomes necessary in order to survive the barrage of cluttered messages children are taught to wade through. This is the non-narrative that children have shaped their mental models into understanding. The handling of information overload is a skill that, while not all children are born to cognitively decode and comprehend, most children are far better at doing so than children of even ten years ago. Although the loss of linearity in entertainment without a doubt has had deleterious effects on sustained reading, and is most likely a major player in the ADHD “epidemic,” it’s a perfect catalyst into the modern realm of communications.
New Media
The continued push for broader media will eventually remove the boundaries between print, television, and computer-accessible media. Digital media differs from old media in that it forces the user to be autonomous and self-directed. Information is no longer delivered to your living room awaiting the eyes of the collective masses. I believe University of Washington film professor, Steven Shaviro explains it best: “The Internet is even cooler than television. That is to say, it is even lower definition than TV and, consequently, even more involving. The World Wide Web offers possibilities so vast, and yet so tantalizingly incomplete, that I must get involved with it in depth. I am drawn in, I can’t help myself. This is why the Net is an interactive, many-to-many medium, whereas TV is only one-to-many. Television addresses my ears and eyes, but the Net solicits my entire body. Web surfing is a tactile, physical experience. In the first place, I must sit upright, directly in front of the screen, without slouching, and with my arms horizontal and my hands engaged” (2003; pg. 6) Rather than being pulled into a world (film), or subliminally shaped by one (TV), the Internet demands that you seek out its mysteries and do so without a beginning or an end; it asks you to “figure it out.”
now
What these changes entail for educators and parents is a call to redefine literacy. While the world we interact and communicate in has drastically evolved and changed, school curriculum has lagged behind. Traditional reading/writing/arithmetic education is no longer sufficient to prepare young students for the demands of the technological adult world and modern media challenges students in ways school are just not prepared to address. This is not a call to remove these subjects from K-12 school curriculum, or to replace teachers with computers. Instead, let’s first stop dismissing these technologies and begin to address and validate their impact, good or bad.
For example, the internet age has changed us from passive receivers of visual information into active, seeking, creators of visual information. Why should these skills be relegated or ignored at the classroom door? Why can’t we, as educators, build off of these media-cultivated abilities? Young students are familiar with their digitally intense, visually rich and wired world. They have grown up in this world. They have been taught to read billboards, follow story lines, process large amounts of information, recognize brands, and create online personas via MySpace or Blogger in this world. What if we could exploit and cultivate these skills to engage and enhance traditional learning, rather than continue to fight its influence? Students could begin to see their world reflected in the classroom and confident in their role as a participant and contributor of their learning, rather than remaining a passive receiver of traditional K-12 education.
And while the above technologies right now seem deeply rooted in ‘tween culture, it’s good to keep in mind – ‘tweens will grow up, will most likely become contributing members of society, and take their MySpace accounts with them.
Bibliography
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