Eprimer - Protecting Children in A Multimedia Age - Media Literacy

Protecting Children in a Multimedia Age Media Literacy
Preparing the next generation for a lifetime of learning
Protecting Children in a Multimedia Age Media Literacy
You have probably noticed that the subject of media literacy is rarely if ever taught in the USA, even though in a recent poll of teachers conducted by one of the most respected teacher organizations, the Association for Syllabus and Curriculum Development, almost 79% of all teachers thought that more emphasis should be placed on media literacy.
Question: How in this time of the narrowing of the curriculum, the stifling of innovation, the homogenization of talent, and the tyranny of low expectations can we reverse the trend in education practices and create team-oriented learning, critical and innovative thinking, problem solving, and the leveraging of diversity?
Answer: The multiplier effect of best practices!
Copyright 2006 Alex Terego www.AlexTerego.com
Chief Editor: Leslie Rowe of www.GreatWords.net
Table of Contents:
1: Introduction: The Media are the New Books ..........................................1 2: Looking, Making, and Reading All Texts .................................................9 3: In the Beginning .....................................................................................15 4: Freedom or Confinement? .....................................................................18 5: The Purpose of Advertisers ...................................................................22 6: Positioning, Image, and Product Personality ........................................25 7: Seeing Beyond the Messageand the Messenger ...............................28 8: Do I Really Believe What I am Seeing? .................................................32 9: Spin the Publics Opinion and All Will Be Well ......................................36 10: Billboards: a Malign Influence .............................................................39 11: Teaching Media Literacy .....................................................................41 12: Breaking the Media Down....................................................................44 13: Media Illusions and Reality .................................................................49 14: Knowledge is Bliss ..............................................................................52 15: The Real Deal .......................................................................................56 16: Questioning the Media .........................................................................59 17: Turning Children into Salespersons ....................................................63 18: The Realities of Sex and Violence in the Media .................................66
ePrimer Protecting Children in a Multimedia AgeMedia Literacy
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1: Introduction: The Media are the New Books

Its a wired world.
y now all of us know that its a wired world. London Universitys Professor David Buckingham and other authorities on the subject tell us that in a quick rupture with tradition, which took less than two decades, children now get most of their information from sources other than teachers, parents, and books. Their information now comes mainly from the media, and sadlyjust as this is happeningschools are making almost no effort to make our children media literate. This is the equivalent of giving children books and getting them to memorize words, but not teaching them about context, sources, syntax, grammar and most importantly meaning. In this ePrimer, my intention is to expand on this issue, and to explain what you can do about this deficit by making youand your studentsmedia literate. North America is the birthplace of media literacy. However, it is in the UK, Australia, France, and Canada that its importance in the lives of children has been recognized and acknowledged to the point of legislation being enacted. This legislation aims to ensure that children become critical consumers of the media, not just targets or even victims, as the media owners and content-marketers would wish. The concern of such people as Marshall McLuhanthe father of media literacywas always that the media has the power to manipulate its audience. He rightly concluded that the audienceespecially childrenmust go on the offensive first and become literate about the media.
Starting young: the case for media literacy
We live in a society where by the time a person reaches 18 they will have seen 10,000 murders on TV and film, and by the time they begin collecting Social Security they will have seen over 50,000,000 advertisements. Therefore it makes sense to begin teaching our children right at the beginning of a life filled with TV, the internet, film, and electronic games how to filter, interpret, critique, and deconstruct the mass media; just like we have always taught children how to filter, interpret, critique, and deconstruct books and other forms of print media.
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In the USA there is no national school curriculum for media literacy and only a small movementwww.amla.orgto create one. So again, teachers and parents must take up the challenge. It is also vital that teachers and parents must realize that children are moving rapidly from being consumers of media to becoming producers of media. They already know how to type, manipulate images, cut and paste, and modify and create websites. However, they are doing all this with little or no literacy or understanding of the media they use.
Results of passivity
The results of our willingness to passively submit our children uncritically to this media onslaught are all around us in our consumer society: obesity (even morbid obesity), diabetes, heart disease, anti-social behavior, drug abuse, violence, lack of respect for oneselfparticularly amongst girlsand a general withering attrition of what Confucius called right conduct: what I would call good manners and honorable, even noble behavior. In my opinion, and I am definitely not alone, these results can all be traced largely to the influence of the media in our lives; an influence that can sometimes be malignant, is large, pervasive and is growing. Furthermore, it is axiomatic that the media cannot be counted on to self-censor, which is the best argument of all for media literacy. Sex and violence sells, and the media know it better than most. Absent the school systems, the only antidote to all this is family and teachers. If parents especially are not media literate, and if they do not discuss the media with their children from an early age, they are abdicating the teaching of values to their children to MTV and the rest of the media conglomerates.
The importance of media literacy
In the ePrimer, Managing Information: Staying Safe and SmartInfoliteracy, I have written about how important it is to understand information, its role in society, and its importance to children in todays world. In this ePrimer, I am going to discussat some length, I give you fair warningthe issue of media literacy and its growing importance in todays digital world. Media literacy is actually a way of asking the following question: how can we teach children to critically consume media, in the same way that we have always taught them to critically consume books, and spoken words? When we read or listen to words, we are usually on the lookout for meaning. We are taught to look for subtexts, hidden meanings, inferences, points of view, biases, an ideology or sales pitches; tradition, experience, as well as education makes sure we do. We look at the person speaking, or the book that we are reading, and sub-consciously ask ourselves about the agenda of the speaker or the writer. In other words, unless we regard the source as unimpeachablefor example an approved mathematics textbookwe have hopefully been taught to remain skeptical of the printed message.
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Studies, however, have repeatedly demonstrated that children remain largely uncritical of electronic media messages, unless taught to view the representations through an educated, skeptical, and critical eye. Those of us who believe that media literacy is a vital skill, feel that children especially need to be taught to recognize basic media techniques such as product placements in movies and videos for what they are: disguised (some would say sneaky) advertisements that have been paid for by a brand manufacturer. Children need to know at least the difference between an advertisement on TV and the show that it interrupts, in the same way that they hopefully know the difference between a print advertisement and the editorial or journalistic content of newspapers or magazines.
Constructionsrepresentations with an agenda
They also need to recognize the messages they are being fed through the media for what they really are: constructionsrepresentations made up of images and sounds that have an intention or agenda. The makers of these constructed images should be thought of, in the words of Dr. Faith Rogow of the American Media Literacy Association, as nothing more than storytellers. Children are taught from an early age that books have authors who tell stories, and as children get older they begin to realize that many of the stories they are critically reading are actually metaphors that teach lessons of good and evil. It is one way our society hands down its values and traditions from generation to generation. (For more on this see the ePrimers, CRISS for Parent EducatorsEffective Learning through Reading, Writing, Talking, and Listening and Authentic Writing / Reading with a PurposeThe Literacy of Words.) Just like print storytellers, electronic constructions or representations are messages, which have authors who have their own language and rules and, most importantly, always have an agenda. Their agenda is often different from the storytellers in the print media; and children should know this. It should be repeatedly pointed out by teachers and parents to children from an early age that the authors or makers of these constructions are persuading their audience, and not always informing them. And even when they appear to be simply informing their viewers, their motives stay the same: selling a product, making a profit, or gaining ideological converts. Why else would they pay to get the time on TV, a website, in the movies, or space on a printed page? Studies and the anecdotal evidence of parents have shown that children can understand all this even at an early age, and it is a message that must be constantly reinforced by both teachers and parents. The forces of advertising in the media, and the media itself, are vast, persistent, aim to get their message across to us from an early age, and do not always have the best of intentions. Parents especially are the first and last line of defense against media constructions. The people who make these constructions are highly skilled in the art of persuasion. They are much more skilled in persuasion than children, or entire families, are in critical
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consumption. They know how to use subtle camera angles, mood-enhancing lighting, modelswhose only value to the constructors is that they photograph wellmusic, words, make-up and psychology to further the interests of their clients. You probably dont know how this is done. You should know; so read on.
Negative affects of subtle messaging
An extreme example of what can happen when children view print and electronic images uncriticallybeing largely ignorant about the source of the construction and their methodsis the current wave of girls looking to plastic surgery to make up for perceived flaws in their appearance. According to psychologists, as well as plain common sense, young peoples self-imagined flaws can be traced many times to the constant, reinforcing images of the perfect icons of beauty that the media persistently send to all children. Their message is simple and subtle: improve your looks by using our products and you will be happy; dont and you wont. Children see this all the time, and again are not equipped to consume these advertising constructions critically, which reinforces and leverages the makers messages immeasurably, because there is no antidote to counter the deleterious effects of this kind of advertising. Usually none of their friends is able to view constructions critically either, so a self-perpetuating circle is set up; and that is the dream of all marketers. If girls especially were taught by parents from a young age that the models and actresses they see in magazines, on TV, and the internet are a) carefully selected according to the creative directors dictates, with strict adherence to his criteria for tallness, thinness, hair, good bone structure, eye color, and shape etc. b) have had hours of preparation, many times involving surgery, prior to the camera rolling, c) have an expensive wardrobe allowance, d) have had multiple attempts, or takes, made to get the look and feel of the construction right and e) the final images have then had many hours of airbrushing and electronic manipulation, then the young girl will get the right view. Tell her early and often that if anyone had that amount of attention and money lavished on photographing them, they too would look gorgeous or handsome; especially if they have tinted contact lenses like the models. That is media literacy in a nutshell. Understanding it is like judo or karate, it is selfdefense training for the psyche.
Knowledge is power
Knowledge of how the media work gives us consumers more power and levels the playing field. The makers of these constructions know this. They spend enormous sums to make sure that the values and points of view that they wish to communicate take advantage of our lack of critical skills. According to the Center for Media Literacy, www.medialit.org, one of the best sources of media literacy information, all media messages and their constructors are organized
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and delivered to gain profit and power, or both. A brand image such as Nintendo, Coke, iPod or Nike, or even the latest pop stars, wields enormous power over young minds. The brand managers messages are all about reinforcing that power; they know that profits will inexorably come along with the childrens identification with the image. In effect, they recruit children to peddle their products to their parents. If children are taught to understand this, the family will gain a little power, and the brands will lose a little. The manufacturers of these constructions also know the value of repetition as a reinforcing strategy: pointing out a constructors use of repetition and other tricks of the tradediscussed in the next few chapterswhilst watching TV adds to your childrens or students literacy of the media immeasurably. A friend who teaches media literacy at Ithaca College has trained her own children well. They yell out product placement each time they see a scene on TV where an actor especially a celebritywalks into a Gap store, drinks a Pepsi, climbs into a Hummer, or drinks a Starbucks coffee. She once even had to hush them at a movie theater Are her children more or less likely to fall for sales pitches later in life?
An international movement
The Ontario, Canada Ministry of Education defines media literacy as:

Concerned with helping students develop an informed and critical understanding of the nature of mass media, the techniques used by them and the impact of these techniques. More specifically, it is education that aims to increase students understanding of how the media work, how they produce meaning, how they are organized, and how they construct reality. Media literacy also aims to provide students with the ability to create media products.
Several countries including the UK, several European countries, Australia and Canada passed laws a decade ago, which mandate that children must know about the media and how it works. All schools in those countries are directed to teach media literacy as part of the normal curriculum. The goal of the British legislation for example is critical autonomy. This is defined as the ability of the individual to apply critical judgments to all media: text or electronic. The French passed legislation in order to avoid passive viewing and manipulation, by teaching students how images from the media are produced, how they are organized, and how students can enrich the images in association with other forms of learning such as the written word and direct experience. In Finland, which has one of the very best educational systems in the word, students are taught how to develop independent opinions about messages transmitted by mass media. If you heed the advice of all these governments and take it upon yourself to teach your students and children to consume mass media critically, you will have done them and society a great service.
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The losers in countries that teach critical autonomy are of course the advertisers, and the manufacturers they represent. In the UK, France, and Finland amongst others, manufacturers of advertising constructions now have to work a lot harder to sell their products because the populacechildren especiallyis getting a lot smarter about analyzing and evaluating their messages.
The advantage of American advertisers
American advertisers on the other hand have it easy because their consumers have not been inoculated, and so have no defense except common sensea quality not often seen in childrenagainst companies manipulative tactics. In fact, the corporations have it even easier since new methods of advertising are presenting themselves all the time, and the consumers are not updating their defenses. The mantra of the advertisers seems to be no blank spaces shall be overlooked. Supermarket eggs are now being branded with the CBS logo; school buses are now playing radio programs with commercials; toll booths are peddling car insurance; video screens are appearing in taxicabs; office buildings are being turned into giant screens as advertisements are projected onto their sides. In their efforts to rise above the clutter these companies are creating clutter. Your students have to learn their motives and techniques so as not to fall for the latest attempts to separate them from their money and you from your influence. According to research quoted by the New York Times, city dwellers are now exposed to 5000 outdoor advertisements each day; and that is up from 2000 in 1977. And of course, there is the internet and its plethora of advertising opportunities from spam to the silly animated ads on every home page. Advertisers depend on us passively viewing their work, and so being easily manipulated by it. The metaphor of a virus and inoculation comes to mind. You have probably noticed that the subject of media literacy is rarely if ever taught in the USA, even though in a recent poll of teachers conducted by one of the most respected teacher organizations, the Association for Syllabus and Curriculum Development, almost 79% of all teachers thought that more emphasis should be placed on media literacy. Sadly, this means that 21%a sizeable and unevolved minority in this most important professiondont get it yet. According to the Center for Media Literacy, The USA sadly lags other countries. There is no national program or curriculum here at the primary, secondary or college level. They add, Unless a student decides to major in communications studies in college, it is likely that she will go through her entire school career without so much as a mention of critical viewing skills or media analysis. This is happening just at a time when more and more children are getting more and more of their information from the electronic media, which in turn tries its best to make sure that the line separating content from advertising is always blurred.
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It should also be pointed out that we are failing to teach media literacy in a country where, according to Elana Yonah Rosen, founder of www.justhink.org, by the time a person is 60 they will have consumedprobably passivelyover 50,000,000 advertisements. As consumers, we have given up the game before it even started. Talk about an unfair advantage. No wonder we are all fat and in debt; we are living at the lower end of a tilted playing field, and so uninformed that we are actually enjoying it there; blithely doing the bidding of large corporations and their proxiesthe advertising agencies. It is time to fight back and the only route to power is knowledge. And what does all this lack of media literacy say about our ability to evaluate and criticize political advertising, compared to the rest of the developed world? Well, no wonder we keep on hiring the same representatives to go to state houses and congress to keep it all going. Its our fault of course; in a democracy, it always is. If a baseball team comes to the ballpark to play but is ignorant of the rules, the other side has no obligation to give them a quick tutorial. So do not count on the advertising community to fund a media literacy campaign; that would be like cutting their own throats.
Critical autonomyand the responsibility to teach our children
Lets say a panel of eminent scientists releases a report with unimpeachable evidence that concludes that the foods advertised to children under 12 are predominantly high in calories and preservatives and low in nutritionjust the sort of diet that puts children at risk for long term health risksand the report also states that the number of new food products in this category released and heavily promoted each year has gone from 50 in 1994 to 500 in 2005. Does anything change? Do the industries concerned feel an obligation to the children? Apparently not, except when legislation such as the recent ban on trans fats in restaurants in New York City against which marketers fought tooth and lawyeris enacted! Its up to the parents and schools to create a situation where informed, knowledgeable decisions are being made by children. Its called critical autonomy, and it takes work. The schools are not formally doing this, so once again you the teachers and parents must. This report by a panel of eminent scientist is not a figment of my imagination. It actually came out recently, and the CEO of the American Advertising Federation, Wally Snyder responded to the Institute for Medicines report with the following comment, Theres a long way to go but the industry is responding, and it doesnt seem like theres any recognition of that in this report. The authors of the report had actually looked for any evidence of an industry response, and found it negligible. Among children and young adults ages 6 through 19, obesity rates have tripled in the past 40 years and incidents of the appropriately named morbid obesity have increased at a frightening pace also. The marketers will never take responsibility for that. YOU must. Media literacy, on top of exercise and dietnone of which are taught at schools
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anymoreare your responsibility. Do not expect advertisers to do the right thing. See the ePrimer, Stronger Bodies, Healthier MindsThe Literacy of Nutrition and Exercise. The various media no longer just influence our culture. They are our culture. As Marshall McLuhan, the father of media literacy, succinctly put it in the 1960s, The medium is the message. Those who study the medium and the message win, and in the USA, the only ones who study them are the ones who sell stuff to you. I hope you agree that a case can be made that children need to be inoculated against commercial onslaughts just as surely as they need to be given a vaccine to prevent the measles or mumps. If you agree then read on, and find out how you as parents and educators can and should teach your children to defend themselves against the media.
Summary
Your children are getting most of their information from electronic media constructions. Your children need to know how to go on the offense by learning how to consume the media critically. The media encourages poor, even destructive habits. Parents and educators must teach children to look for the real meaning in electronic media constructions. The electronic media are the storytellers of this generation. The constructions built and distributed by the electronic media have agendas. The media are our culture, and parents and educators are the first and last lines of defense.
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2: Looking, Making, and Reading All Texts

Literacy in the new media
ccording to Professor Gunter Kress of London University, the word literacy does not have an equivalent in languages other than English. In English, the definition of the word literacy is expanding and changing. Fortunately English is a flexible language, and this is apparent in the fact that the literacy of words is now not the only literacy. Media literacy is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media in a variety of forms. It is a skill that is every bit as important to todays children as basic literacy was for all generations until recently. According to Kress and other scholars, complete literacy now means the ability to look at, make, and read all texts, not just print. The meaning of the word text has also expanded since the advent of our multimedia age; now, paintings, landscapes, cityscapeseither real or representationalfilms, videos, web pages, and even facial expressions and body language are now thought of as texts, which can be read. We, children especially in this new media-rich world, are necessarily becoming adept at interpreting these texts more skillfully simply because experience has trained us to do so. Formal training, however, in reading texts that include paintings and web pages as well as words is sadly lacking for most of us. Nevertheless, becoming literate about texts all textsis the new goal of literacy; hence this discussion of the topic.
Nonlinear, interactive textand making sense of the world
The ways in which the maker and the consumer of texts interact has of course also changed. For most of our civilized history, in a purely written textsuch as the one you are reading nowthe author designs the way you should read the text: it is a linear experience, with a beginning, middle, and end; all designed to either inform you, entertain you or convince you. Most critically in a linear experience, time must go by before understanding emerges on the part of the reader. Once sound and pictures, as well as text, are interwoven into a whole, multimedia construction, then the reader instinctively designs their own way to read the text. They have to, because its the builders intention that you design the reading experience. It becomes a nonlinear, interactive experience. Once pictures and sounds are introduced then time does not necessarily have to go by for meaning to emerge. The impact, and the meaning of the text are much more immediate; reading the text can be done at a
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glance. This is rapidly becoming the way that your students and children read all texts. One reason that this is the case is that an interactive presentation of information more closely correlates with the way children learn: they peruse, see something that sparks their interest, leave the main body of the text momentarily, and then return to the main page as it were. We are born with the ability to take in sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings and to make sense of them. Writing has only been part of our sensory environment for five thousand yearsor for English speakers, a mere 1200 years. The literacy of words was added to our other intelligences or capabilities, not the other way around. In a sense in the multimedia age, we are getting back to our abilities to use all the information that buzzes aground usnot just wordsto make sense of the world. If I read an online text, and see highlighted hot links, I am always tempted to leave the text I am reading, in the historic-literate sense of the word, and follow the links at the risk of losing myor rather the authorstrain of thought. I have developed some instinctive guidelines to make the experience more productive, however. I always ask myself if I am following the hot link as a way of enhancing my understanding of the article I am reading, or am I following the link out of pure curiosity. Then of course, I follow the link anyway, which takes me to another article with its own set of hot links that I equally find too tempting, and before I know it even the back button is of little help. If this sounds familiar, you should enter into a discussion with your student or child about identifying a purpose to any reading of a text, and sticking to it, and writing down the hot links on paper for later reference. The purpose of reading textseven if they contain more than just wordsdoes not change; just the method. Gunter Kress tells us that all kinds of data-formats and information are important to understanding, not just words. All kinds of data formats such as visual, aural, and other sensory inputs are gathered by individuals, and they then transform it all into useful knowledge to solve a problem in their lives. So the better one is able to read multiple texts, the better one will be able to solve problems, which brings me back to my major theme, which is that knowledge is power, which means that teachers and parents can and should help their students and children to master the skills of multi-text reading in its broadest sense.
Information and problem solving in the language of multimedia
All humanity is joined. I have argued that we are all part of a single, large, and complex organism, and the common language in which we communicate is looking, making, and reading. We all look at texts of all kinds, we all make texts of all kinds, and we all read texts of all kinds. We do this so that we might gather information and share information to solve the common problems of humanity. We do this by combining texts we already have stored in our memory banksin all possible formatswith new texts that we read, accessed and evaluatedagain in all formatsand we somehow are able to compute all this and come up with ideas with which to solve problems. It is nothing short of miraculous and should be encouraged and practiced.
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Elizabeth Daley is the Executive Director of the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California. She writes that language enables us to conceptualize ideas, to abstract information, and to receive and share knowledge. She points out that the usual, unstated, underlying assumption is that by language we mean only words. The work of the Annenberg Center is to expand on the idea that these days the vernacular in which we communicate is the language of multimedia. The language that we all see on a multimedia screen, Daley points out, is more than capable of constructing complex meanings, with or without words. Furthermore, this screen language enables modes of thought, ways of communicating meaning that is essentially different from traditional print. The Annenberg Center believes that those who are truly literate in the 21st century will be those who have learned to look, make, and read in the language of multimedia. Almost without knowing it, this has already happened to our children; but society has not caught up yet. It is still not accepted by adults that the definition of what it takes to be literate is no longer just a facility with words and other symbolic languages such as mathematics and chemistry, but a more aesthetic, emotional, artistic, metaphorical form of learning and communicating. Our children have already, through their interaction with video games and web-based music, begun to transform society from one that was based in science, linear writing and reading, and rational thought to one that also embraces metaphors, colors, graphics andvery importantlyillusions.
The new media and storytelling
One of the purposes of intellectual life, as well as pure inquiry, is to assemble knowledge so that it can be formatted for clearer understanding, improved upon, added to, and then passed on. For millennia, this was done by storytelling. When we developed reading and writing, we continued the oral tradition of storytelling but we added writing and reading; but storytelling in all its forms became entertainment, and over time became devalued by society. In fact, its value as a transmitter of culture has actually never diminished. With the advent of the new language of multimedia, storytelling is actually gaining in importance over the art and practice of just reading and writing words, because in a very real sense it has incorporated them; making words only as important as sounds and images. The act of making messages or stories is no longer confined to writing. An author now creates or constructs media messages rather than writes them, and consumers of media messages explore or navigate them rather than reading them; and they do this interactivelynot in a linear manner. Parents and teachers are naturally biased in favor of reading, writing, and learning through spoken and written words. It is natural since that is what they grew up with. They view film and TV as inferior forms of communication, and worse as forms of manipulation and purveyors of inferior values. They may be right; the messages
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contained in the language of King Lear or War and Peace do not have equivalents in the modern forms of media; at least not yet. But Shakespeare intended Lear to be heard and seen; performed as it was, live on stage in a multimedia presentation. And movies have been made of Tolstoys classics allowing the viewer to read all its landscapes. It is not important for a teacher or parent to understand Hyper Text Mark-Up Language (HTML) or other web page creation tools in order to begin talking to their children about reading and writing in multimedia. Instead, to begin gaining an understanding of what it means to read and write in the language of multimedia, a teacher or parent needs to enter into an ongoing discussion with their students and children about how a picture is framed in a movie or on a web page. Was it framed correctly in order to convey meaning with the full impact? Could the creator have chosen a different angle? What about the choice of colors? How well does the voiceover work? Is the dialogwritten and spokenappropriate to the message? What about the icons and symbols used? Is the kind of print typeface annoying, or does it fit with the overall message? Does the use of morphing objects from one shape to another help or hinder the message? Same thing goes for the use of dissolving techniques and their opposites. We have all seen a cow appear and disappear as if by magic, we have also seen a ballerina dissolve into a raindrop. Does your student or child think that these techniques aid the message or not? It helps to criticize the graphic user interface (the GUI) that the designers have built as doorways to their creations, and it helps to analyze the navigation too. Are they easy, confusing, or just right? The GUI and the navigation are not a given, beyond reproach, they are part of the message and construction and should be evaluated critically.
The role of teachers and parents in navigating the new media
Just like novels or radio plays where the writers rely on the reader or listeners imagination, the imagination of the creator of the new media message is their only limitation. The makers of tools that allow for the creation of graphics and animation can make it appear that anything is possible; and of course, they do. Your role as teachers and parents in this regard is to help your students and children interpret the messages, and a good start is to enter into a dialog with them as they and you learn about looking, making, and reading multimedia. As you will soon discover, anyone can build a website; and with that kind of skill comes a responsibility. Once a child learns to use a pencil to write words on a piece of paper, what is to stop them from spreading lies? Answer: parents and schools! The chances are that a child will never publish a book that spreads lies or hate. However, once they can build a website or write a blog or an emailespecially anonymously they are in effect publishing their work. What is to stop a child from using this skill for illegitimate or scurrilous purposes? Answer: parents and schools again! As we all know, bad things happen on the internet. We are rightly concerned with childrens safetya topic I have addressed in the ePrimer, Managing Information:
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Staying Safe and SmartInfoliteracybut sadly much of the content on the web is salacious, hateful, wrong, malicious, devious, and downright criminal. And mostly its legal. Breaking news: its somebodys child who is putting the stuff out there. Whats to stop children from hate-mongering or gossiping for example in the multimedia world, even if they are doing it just for fun, or just to see what they can get away with? Not the US constitution; this kind of activity is mostly protected by the doctrine of free speech. Would you want your students and children involved in that kind of activity, however? And who can take preventative measures other than the teacher and mom and dad? And who, except for schools and parents is going to teach them to respect confidentiality or the privacy of other peoples thoughts and work, or the ownership of copyrights when they create media? These activities are against the law, but what are the chances of them getting caught? It is not fear of the law or punishment; it is personal responsibility that mostly stops adults from doing wrong and doing harm. That personal responsibility may be influenced by the law and society, but it is what we learn as a child that acts as the best preventative measures against future bad behavior; and the only source I know for that is parental influence. And it cant be the church or synagogue either, unless parents send their sons and daughters, and I doubt whether churches and synagogues have updated biblical stricture to apply to the internet age anyway. Mine has not. I checked. With the dawn of the age of the internet, the potential for harm perpetrated by its members has grown exponentially; the diligent policing of childrens participation in internet activities clearly has not. It is vital to protect your child from the harmful effects of others on the web, but it is just as important to make sure that your child is a responsible citizen of the web, as well as the USA. Here are some rules you might want to write in big letters above the computer that your child uses in the family roomNEVER IN THEIR BEDROOM, AND NEVER EVER WITH A WEBCAM. 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) Thou shalt not hack. Thou shalt give credit for work quoted. Thou shalt not spread lies or hate. Thou shalt not plagiarize. Thou shall treat thy internet brothers and sisters as one would wish to be treated.
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Summary
Literacy now means the ability to read all kinds of texts, not just print. The traditional print author used to design the readers experience. Now readers design their own experience. We use all our sensesnot just sightto make sense of our world. We now use all of our senses to make sense of multimedia. Looking at texts, making texts, and reading texts of all kinds equals making meaning. We have always used language to generate and manipulate ideas. Now language is more than just wordsit is multimedia. By becoming literate about multimedia, parent educators can do much to avoid the pitfalls of the World Wide Web.
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3: In the Beginning
The electronic revolution
bviously, a great deal of time is spent blaming the media for its perceived corrosive influence on our children. We even attempt to periodically boycott the media; always with limited success, and attempts have even been made at censorship. None of this works and so the media will assume it is fine to carry on with its antics. The only alternative is education. As Epictetus said in Roman times, Only the educated are free. How true! If you wish to counteract the affects of the media on your student or child, then you must act. In our schools regular curriculum there is no place or time to teach the skills on how to be a critical consumer of the media; parents and educators must find ways to interweave these skills into their day. In later sections of this ePrimer, I will explain the skills necessary to anyone who wishes to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and express media messages. However, I think that some historical context is in order first. In 1911 in Canada Marshall McLuhan was born. He would change how we view the media forever. He died a respected scholar and writer in 1980, just as the electronic revolution he wrote so presciently about was getting under way. The revolution hinged on the invention of the PC and a new network protocol built by the US government, called the ARPANET, which in time became the internet. This network evolved into the World Wide Web, thanks mainly to Tim Berners-Lee a British scientist. McLuhan became known as the oracle of technology. He observed trends in the electronic media and, using his skills as a historian, drew lessons from our past experiences to draw conclusions about the impact of electronicsradio and TV, the media of his timeon society. He believed that we must look at the road ahead to avoid its pitfalls and exploit its potential. He once said about society and its emphasis only on history, We drive into the future using only our rear view mirror. His philosophy was to look at what had happened, to examine new inventions, and to draw conclusions about the future. He was an original thinker and a rigorous scholar.
Engaging the five senses
McLuhan thought a great deal about our prehistoric ancestors and concluded that they were informed equally about their environment by all five senses: touch, smell, sight, hearing, and taste. He astutely observed that the invention of the alphabet about 3500 years ago must have jolted that balance in favor of sight. He further concluded that the re-invention of movable type in the 15th century must have further accelerated the preeminence of our sense of sight.
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Looking at the beginnings of the electronic revolution, which he dated to 1844 with the invention of the telegraph, he predicted in papers published in the 1960s that the electronic revolution would take us back to a balance of being informed by all our senses. He was right. Scientists have already made rudimentary steps to replicate touch and smell electronically, and of course, electrical sound has been with us since the end of the 19th century. Can electronically replicated taste be far behind? McLuhan felt that an ineluctable lesson of history was the extensions we keep inventing. By this, I believe he meant leverage. So, for example, speech does for intelligence what wheels do for feet; they extend our capacity by allowing us to move from one thing to another with increasing speed and ease. Speech, and writing which is its recorded equivalent, extends our mind and consciousness just like clothes extend our skin and roads extend our ability to move. Its the same with money, fire, housing, clocks, and computers. They extend our ability to create comfort, a sense of time and an ability to record and communicate. He maintained that technologyespecially as applied to the mediacan extend our civilization. The questions he had were in what direction, for what purpose, and for good or evil. He concluded that of course, it is up to our culture and us.
Foreshadowing the global village
McLuhan saw in the 1960s that technology could extend our civilization into what he called a global village. He foresaw electronic connections extending our senses, our intelligence, and our goodness. I am not sure what he would make of our stewardship of this resource since the 1960s. He spoke of the change from magic to science, from savage instincts to rational thought and he hoped for an extension of mans essential goodness. He said, First man makes the hammer, then the hammer made man. In other words, he explained later, Technologies are not simply inventions which people employ, but are the means by which people are re-invented. Fire, tools, farming, literacy, and technology are lasting monuments to mans ingenuity. They also changed us forever by broadening our horizons. We invented TV and then TV reshaped us inexorably by offering us new possibilities. We invented multimedia and now it has shaped our children. TV also inevitably took away some things, such as a tabletop family dinners and conversation. McLuhan saw that too. He called them amputations; we might call them downsides. The example he used was the car. The invention and subsequent proliferation of the automobile gave us more freedom. It also had an amputation or downside, however. It reduced the need for exercise and created whole new classes of injury and death from crashes and pollution.
The downsides of invention
McLuhan had a warning. If we are not careful, each extension (invention) that society creates will create amputations (downsides) whose final stage is the reversal of all benefits of the invention.
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For example, the discovery of a way to make fossil fuels power and lubricate our societys manufacturing and transportation needs saved the whales from extinction in the latter half of the 19th century. A century and a half later, poor stewardship of this invention plus an emphasis on short-term gains means that we are in a worldwide pollution crisis, the proportions of which will only be experienced by the next generations, not us. That is what McLuhan meant by amputations leading to a final reversal. Todd Kappelman, who writes about McLuhan, talks of a more subtle kind of amputation. He points out that we as a society have trained our children not to be afraid of progress. Small children stand unperturbed on the sidewalk or train platform as vehicles hurtle by at speeds unimaginable to our ancestors just three or four generations ago. Toddlers surf the web and watch TV, unaware and unafraid of the medias implicit dangers. Parents teach their little ones to be afraid of strangers at the mall, not noticing that they are in just as much jeopardy in front of a screen. Its good to be afraid. It is part of our immunological system. Its a defense mechanism. Letting it go has led to a myopic, almost nave, view of warning signs. McLuhan had a defense strategy. He advised us all to ask four questions of any discovery or perceived advancement that we as a race may contemplate adopting. 1) 2) 3) 4) What does the technology or new medium extend? What does it make obsolete? What is retrieved, preserved, or rediscovered as a result of this advancement? What does the discovery reverse into if it is over extended?
Summary
We have always been informed by all five senses. Sight was predominant for centuries after the invention of writing. The electronic/digital revolution of the past fifty years has brought the other senses back into play. The digital revolution extended the human reach while it also limited us. Either way, it has shaped us.
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4: Freedom or Confinement?
Shifting power to the people
ince the topic is media literacy, I will attempt to ask and answer the four questions posed by McLuhan as they apply to the new, digital media. (See these questions in the previous chapter.) You may have different answers. The answer seems to be our sense of time and place, as well as our sense of entitlement.
What does the new proliferation of technology and content extend?
The nexus of better electronic devices, more competition, and more information has reduced the need for us to be tethered to an appliance or device just because of its inherent, cumbersome nature or communication limitations. Improvements in the storage and access of information now mean that we, not the content providers and programmers, decide when and where we want to get information or communicate with others. Once anyone has experienced freedom from the constraints of time and place then the third and most problematic extension comes in to play: entitlement. Once anyone has experienced the liberating experience of deciding when, how, and where to listen to or watch what you want, or when and how to communicate with others, or when and how to access information that will make life easier, an inevitable sense of entitlement must creep into the lives of even the most well-balanced of children. If these capabilities, which soon become an expected part of daily life, are somehow restricted or taken away, the child will feel their sense of entitlement being eroded leading to frustration. Old media and the older-established forms of national, tribal, and family ties are my answers, as well as the traditional view and practice of education.
What does the proliferation of technology and content make obsolete?
Newspapers sadly are an endangered species, kept alive only by the habits of older generations. My morning paper is the only way to start my day, books and writing occupy most of the rest of my day, and the TV news is the only way to end it. But I am a paleo-consumer. The new confluences do not appeal to me; my children and my grandchildren, however, who are neo-consumers, are a different story, and thats bad news for newspapers, magazines, TV networks, and even websites that fail to move with the times. The rewards as always will go to the nimble, and the other will be dead.
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In the 1950s a pioneering psychologist by the name of Doctor Rollo May, wrote of what he saw as mans alienation from his fellow citizens and family members. He blamed this sense of isolation as the pre-eminent cause of most psychological problems he saw. He called it the hollow people syndrome. He characterized it as a sense of being empty. As a result, he believed, people feel powerless, swayed this way and that by external events, knowing only that there are things that they should want, and decisions they should make, but were unable to do so because they are frozen by indecision. He described this as a feeling of being nothing more than a collection of mirrors reflecting what others want of me. If people were frozen by indecision and overwhelmed by choice at a time when families were stable and nuclear, and the only information came from radio and print, clergy, family, and teachers, imagine how hollow all this new proliferation of choices now might make us feel. There are now literally dozens of ways of conceiving a child and raising it. There are a billion sources of information. The new order keeps on changing as society strives to cope with change. Some of us will become isolated and alienated. So the new proliferation of technology and content has made traditional values, as well as newspapers, if not obsolete at least rarely used. What do you think? It is a measure of how transformative our age is that this question almost commands a book- length answer.
What is retrieved, preserved, or rediscovered as a result of this advancement?
What is not retrievable, preservable, and rediscoverable by appropriate and judicious use of the new media? So, to my mind the question really becomes this: will we use the new media to productively retrieve, rediscover, preserve, and even improve our heritage, or will we use it to gossip about inanities, entertain and amuse ourselves, as my anecdotal evidence suggests we already do? When writing was first invented, we retrieved our oral traditions and wrote the bible, preserving it for posterity so subsequent generations could rediscover its message. We have done the same down through the ages, in languages such as Chinese, Sanskrit, Egyptian, Sumerian, Greek, Latin, and their linguistic descendents. What we achieve in this new literacy of multimedia will say a lot about our civilization. Are you hopeful or not that cultural historians in the 25th century will look back on us and how we used our gifts and discoveries and heap praise on our memory? The discoveries of this new media age ultimately come down to one thing: freedom: the freedom of place and time; the freedom to choose when, where, and how to be in touch with content or people. So, how much freedom is too much freedom?
What does the discovery reverse if it is over extended?
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Freedom is a powerful commodity. It has sparked revolution after uprising after rebellion throughout history. People yearn to be free; the problem is that it takes a very informed public to know what to do with freedom, let alone to know what freedom is. There is a Chinese epigram quoted in a book of sayings collected by Tse-hyi Hsieh, If the world knew how to use freedom without abusing it, tyranny would not exist. The tyranny he refers to probably means a dictator who has no regard for his peoples will; sadly there are still plenty of examples to choose from. They are all men, by the way, and on all continentsespecially Asia and Africaexcept North America and Antarctica. However, there is also another kind of tyranny. It is an individual tyranny imposing its will on an individual. It is the tyranny of indiscipline. Freedom is not procured by full enjoyment of what is desired, but by the controlling of that desire, said Epictetus in the second century AD. 1500 years later Goethe asked, What is the freedom of the most free? He answered his own question, To do what is right. Being careless with freedom is dangerous; it can quickly be reversed. We are the freest people ever in history thanks to political and technological evolution. If we use our liberty wisely, it will extend our very being. If we use it unwisely, it will result in the amputation of that gift. I hope you can see that McLuhan was right. Asking these four questions provokes thought and should evince action.
Losing our freedom
One way to lose our freedom to choose is to do what McLuhan feared most about the coming electronic age that he prophesizedand in which we now find ourselvesand he said it best. Once we have surrendered our senses and our nervous system to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we dont have any rights left. Leasing our eyes, ears, and nerves to commercial interests is like handing common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the Earths atmosphere to a company as a monopoly. Hmmmm! He was talking about the media and its messages, and he famously believed that the medium is the message. Of course, we all have the freedom to choose to do what we will with our eyes, ears, and nervous system; if you believe in free will, and true freedom of choice that is. But do we have the will and the knowledge to make informed and literate judgments in the presence of the media? Perhaps you agree that this is all a little disorienting. Can you see where an overwhelming sense of entitlement can become the downfall of not only an individual, but even the most powerful of nations? The answer is to educate ourselves and our children about the lures, the limitations, and the pitfalls of the media.
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Summary
Technology has changed our sense of time and place and our sense of entitlement. The old-line media has been impacted heavily by technology and it will get worse for the print media especially. Society has experienced a seismic change because of the digital media revolution. (Not for the better in my view.) Humanitys knowledge base and the ease of access of that knowledge base has increased dramatically. The exercise of freedom and democracy has increased. The democratization of knowledge has begun. If knowledge is power, then power is shifting towards the people. They are learning to use that power more than ever before.
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5: The Purpose of Advertisers

The advertiser is the over rewarded court jester of business. J. W. Krutch, 1959
ew forms of advertising come along right after the invention of any new medium; that much we all know.
McLuhan did not think much of what he called advertising men. The objective of advertising men, wrote McLuhan is the manipulation, exploitation, and control of the individual. He added that, advertising is the cave art of contemporary times. I wondered what he meant by that. It sounded like a good one-liner: facile, catchy and pithy; just like advertising copy. But like much of what McLuhan said, it turned out to be to the point and thoughtful. After all, when cave dwellers discovered the art of painting, they invented a new medium. Cave art as it turns out was, just like advertising, also meant to manipulate, exploit, and control its viewers. This is not my opinion. It is the opinion of E.H. Gombrich, author of the Story of Art, considered by many as the bible of art history. He writes that the cave art from 30,000 years ago in Lescaux in France and Altamira in Spain was painted by our Ice Age ancestors, not as something nice to look at, but as something powerful to use. It is known that the paintings were painted byor at least on behalf ofleaders who wished to impose their will on others. Their location must have been selected to evoke awe and fear, painted as they are on cave walls deep underground. This must have made them seem mysterious, otherworldly, and fraught with symbolism to the viewers; just what the tribal leaders wanted.
The manipulation of others
If the painter, or most likely the man who controlled the painter, did not have as his purpose the manipulation of others, then what, asks Gombrich, was its purpose? Elsewhere Gombrich tells us that there is no such thing as art, just artists. It follows then that there is no such thing as advertising, just advertisers. The ancient cave artists had a purposeto manipulate the viewer, exploit them, and control them. They knew that they could use their skill at paintingand probably primitive lighting tooas a powerful tool. In the advertising world, copywriters, artists, photographers, and creative directors use their skill in a similar endeavor, but with many more tools at their fingertips than the pigments and candles of those early men.
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The job of the advertiser
Here endeth the first lesson of media consumption: advertisers are nothing more than people whose job it is to try to get a lease on your students and childrens eyes, ears, and nervous system on behalf of their clients; and they are very, very good at it. You and your children are very poorly equipped consumers if you are not media literate. So, guess who wins?
Truth in advertising
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) publishes an enlightening guide for businesses who want to know what they can and cannot do in advertising. It can be found at www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs.buspubs/ad-faqs.htm. Tellingly, the FTC does not publish a similar guide for perplexed consumers; Caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) seems to be the FTC motto. This guide for businesses states plainly in the opening section that Advertising must be truthful and non-deceptive. Advertisers must have evidence to back up claims, and advertisements cannot be unfair. It must be pointed out that truth in advertising is a moving target, however; in the face of competition, the vendor wants to exaggerate, but the buyer needs the truth. In this FTC document, explanations follow with the following caveat. The FTC looks at the advertisement from the point of view of a reasonable consumer. The lawmakers and lobbyists for advertisers must have wrangled for at least ten seconds over this phrase. They know that an educated consumer is the last thing that any manufacturers want. This would shift the balance, and the watchword might become caveat vendor. There follow a number of hair-splitting definitions. An advertisement that states emphatically that its product does something beneficial is making an express claim, and there must be evidence that proves the claim. For example our mouthwash prevents colds, must be backed up by clinical data. If such data are not available to the manufacturer then it can still legally say our mouthwash kills the germs that cause colds. Can you or your child see the difference? Probably not, because lawyers are at work! Again, one can see the cold hand of the lobbyists at work on their black art over a steak dinner with lawmakersat a world-class golf resort, or worse. The FTC will scold any advertiser who leaves information out. Woe betides any advertiser who neglects to say that the books you ordered are abridged versions; the penalty for this sin is the equivalent of being savaged by a dead sheep. It is patently infeasible for the FTC to police all advertising all the time in all US time zones. And anyway, much of the advertising your child sees on the internet originates overseas. Like much of the other legislation on the books, it relies mainly as a deterrent against only blatantly fraudulent or misleading advertising. The FTC focuses on products that promote health and safety, as it should; if a sunscreen does not work, the effects can be devastating. If a car seat belt or airbag do not perform as advertised, then death or maiming can result.
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Most of us cannot prove that a certain gasoline performs better or that a certain refrigerator will reduce energy costs and so the FTC watches them more carefully than they do products that make claims such as tastes better. However, the lesson here is not that government oversight is a function of who shouts loudest in their ears; it is that you, the consumer, need to know what the tricks of the advertising trade are so you can level the playing field. That is the purpose of media literacy.
Summary
The purpose of advertisers is to manipulate and control those with money to spend. They have as their mission the leasing of your senses. The advertisers are wealthy and can afford to lobby elected officials; you probably cant. So caveat emptor.buyer beware!
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6: Positioning, Image, and Product Personality

The power of suggestion
large part of being media literate has to do with controlling the part advertising plays in our lives. Remember, the people who create ads have as their goal to manipulate, exploit, and control your students and family, with a view to getting you to change brands. Knowledge is power, and knowledge about how the advertising industry works makes for powerful consumers.
On the lookout for positioning campaigns
Most of us have bought in to a positioning campaign that an advertising agency has created for a brand. One of the great examples in the annals of advertising lore is the Volkswagen Beetle of the 1960s and 1970s, which according to David Ogilvyone of the masters of advertisinglooked like an ugly orthopedic boot. Its competitors were sleek, powerful, and roomy. So Ogilvy, one of the wizards on Madison Avenue, used his firms creative skills to position the Beetle as a protest against the vulgarity of Detroits offerings and the image of conspicuous consumption they promulgated. It did not hurt that a few years later the first oil shock took place, re-positioning and cementing Hitlers little invention into Americas consciousness forever. Now thats positioningand you and your children need to be on the lookout for campaigns such as that one so that you can hone your consumer skills. Be aware, and teach your students and children to be aware, that every product that you see advertised and buy has been subjected to a rigorous process of positioning by men and women in conference rooms armed with statistics, Power Point presentations, spreadsheets, and lots of imagination: the rewards in this segment of American business are huge. iPods were not simply invented and released one day once they worked reliably; they went though a lengthy positioning process first. In fact, the positioning process for iPods began before they were built. This goes for consumer products as well as the products that businesses buy from other businesses. My focus is on the consumer side of the business, but the same rules apply to business-to-business advertising.
Product imageits personality
Image is not to be confused with positioning. Tell your students and children that image is the personality of the product, and reflects what the advertisers perceive as the personality of the market segment they want to target. So, the name chosen for the product, the packaging, the price, and the type of advertising all add up to the
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personality of the product; its image. This is the kind of topic for discussion that makes for better and more informed TV watching: TV watching as a lesson plan. TV is full of teachable moments so go on the offense. If you are watching TV with your middle-school-age child, and a product that you know they want is advertised, why not begin a conversation with them about the positioning and image that the brand is attempting to portray. They will never look at advertising the same way again, once they realize that jeans are jeans and cell phones are just that. Get them to realize that they are buying into an image not a product, and their eyes will be opened forever.
The power of suggestion
If they feel, as many teens do, that they are a different kind of consumer and not subject to the laws of marketing, tell them how susceptible they are to image creation by relaying the story of a group of researchers at the University of California. They gave glasses of water to a group of students. The water had been certified as having been distilled in laboratory conditions, so that all that was left was completely unadulterated H2O; as pure as water gets. They told the students it was tap water. Most of the tasters told the researchers that water tasted horrible; the image of water from a faucet, and all that that it implied, overwhelmed their sense of taste and logic and trust in their own judgment. This is the power of suggestion, and it is what advertisers are using with positioning and image techniques. This cell phone is cool, that pair of sneakers is in. By inference other brands are not cool or in, and so are to be avoided, making it possible for the maker to charge more. They know how important it is for children to be in with the cool crowd. Imagine if the background music to a Coke commercial aimed at teens was Mozarts Requiem, or if a group of retirees was shown wearing Nike sneakers, and you get the image idea. Advertisers are well aware of these ruses and pitfalls, and now you are too. The next step is to help your children gain power through that knowledge. Advertising is nothing more than salesmanship in print, video, or sound. Its purpose is to solicit action from you the consumer. Whether it is done in magazines, newspapers, on the radio, on TV, on the Web, by phones, mail, or worst of all, roadside billboards, the aim is the same: a share of your mind and bank account. If advertising fails to get its intended audience to act, then it is considered a failure.
Sex sells
If you are the teacher or parent of a tween or teen, you need to know how advertisers use sex to sell products; you already know that they do. According to the Federal Trade Commission guidelines, there is only one rule about sex in advertising, and that is relevance. A public service advertisement promoting safe sex can hardly be done in the absence of a reference to sexual activity. Products that enhance the attractiveness of either sex canand douse sexual imagery and erotic references to show how their products can improve a customers attractiveness. That is probably acceptable to you, depending on your level of tolerance.
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However, the obverse of relevance is gratuitousness. And that is the lesson I think we should all learn from advertising. If you are in front of the TV and an advertisement uses sex in a gratuitous or unnecessary way, remark on the fact to your teens and preteens. Tell them that it is a question of taste and discuss what that means. Gratuitous use of sexual imagery in advertising is the last resort of the clueless, because it is unnecessary. Like its close cousin pornography, gratuitous sex in advertising is difficult to define, but every parent knows it when they see it. The legendary founder of the Y&R agency, Raymond Rubicam, repeatedly called for Advertising to behave responsibly. He did this because he knew its power. The majority of family-oriented products, such as Proctor and Gamble, do behave responsibly, but only because it is in their interests to do so; and who made sure it was in their interest? Pressure from parents of course! We all do thatbehave well when it is in our interest to do so. The measure of behavior in advertising is the same as in life, how well do the advertisers behave when they do not have to behave well?
Summary
Be on the lookout for positioning and image making campaigns. Start a dialog in front of the TV about these campaigns and their purpose. Notice the call-to-action in most campaigns for what it isbegging. Sex sellsbe forewarned that companies will use sexual imagery and allure to co-opt your childrens eyes and emotions.
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7: Seeing Beyond the Messageand the Messenger

Promise, large promise is the soul of an advertisement. Samuel Johnson 1758
bought a ticket to a fight, and a hockey game broke out. This old joke reminds me of what it is like to watch TV. I tried to watch some commercials but the evening news kept interrupting. Phrases such as, Back after this, and More when we return, get really tiresome, dont you think? Bring on the Tivo! The impact of all the advertising we are subjected to is difficult to measure. One thing is for sure: the advertisers assume a great deal of ignorance, if not downright stupidity, poor judgment and taste on our part. H L Mencken famously observed that No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people. Was he right? Or should we rephrase this by inserting intelligence instead of taste? Judging by many of the advertisements on TV, the advertisers assume that we are easy to sell to. Take for example two long-term trends in TV advertising. The first is moving foodmore on that in a moment. The second is what I call, as homage to David Letterman, stupid man tricks.
The mystery of moving food
Since David Ogilvy wrote his many commandments of advertising in the 1950s food has been moving on TV. Take a break from reading this ePrimer and switch on the TV. At the first commercial breakwhich statistically you have a one in five chance of catching as the TV picture comes onyou will see hamburgers, steak, orange juice, and every other kind of victuals moving, or at least seeming to move as a camera lovingly pans its way across a plate of eggs and bacon. Food and drink in commercials is never still; check it out for yourself and point it out to the children. Ogilvys theory was that the food most of us eat is immobile; imagine trying to spear a moving piece of tuna. So the assumption is that when we buy and serve the food, that movingly moved us to do so, and put it on a stationary plate, it is more appetizing. I can find no logic behind this, but ask any advertising executive and they will tell you that it works. Ogilvy in his biography confessed that he did not know why it worked either.
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Advertisings stupid men
So, turning to stupid menand for some reason its almost always menand the tricks they perform; let me ask, am I the only one to notice that these pitchmen selling us car insurance, fast food, cars, home equity loans, cleaning products and many other products are inane? When I watch men talking like infants about an ice cream sundae, I imagine these otherwise sensible men going to a commercial film shoot and behaving like idiots because someone told them that is what will persuade us to buy. I also imagine that Mencken sounds like a sage. Ask yourself what does all this tell us a) about us, b) about the actors, c) about the advertising agencies, and d) about the manufacturers who hire them? Sometimes we get two for the price of one when both stupid men and moving food appear in the same commercial. This happened recently in a commercial I saw for one of the large hamburger chains. The men in the commercial might have been stupid and the food might have been moving, but neither the customers nor the servers portrayed in the commercial were obese. The hamburger purveyors are not that stupid, but they think we are.
The message of the model: a mirage
Women in commercials on the other hand have a more subversive role to play. They become works of art; masquerades selling hope in a bottle or a sachet or a needle. The cover girl on the front of a glamour magazine or the young lady cavorting for the camera and selling cosmetics is a tribute to legions of assistantsmake up and hair artistes with names like Alberto, never Fred, or Bob; young women assistants with pins, hair extensions and the like at the ready; lighting experts; and of course a photographer who could make even me look good. The message the model is sending is simple: you too can look like this if you buy the products being pushed. My message to young girls and women is this: you probably cant, and what s more, you probably shouldnt even try. These models have unique bone structure, uncanny height, perfect teeth, a rare shape, and have usually been subjected to plastic surgery before being injected in the face with a derivative of botulism, a bacterial toxin spore usually associated with a nasty disease of the gastrointestinal tract that can cause progressive paralysis. Of course, perfectly good lips should not be tolerated; they must be puffed out like little pillows, aided by shots of collagen. All this is done in the name of the perfect smile and the perfect image for little girls and big ones too. As I have said, mothers, start telling your daughtersat a very young age, pleasethat the women and girls in commercials and on the catwalks are as much a piece of art as the Mona Lisa, and took almost as long to prepare, and are just as divorced from reality, and have looks that are unattainable without a huge budget. Even then the results will not outlast a night on the town.
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There she stands in the eye of the camera, a gorgeous mirage, complexion flawless, hair gently blowing, a practiced seductive smile playing about her mouth, and her figure perfection itself. Now get your children to imagine themselves in the directors chair off-camera. To their right is a fan that blows at just the right speed, and to the left of the director technicians stand ready to dab away any hint of sweat caused by the megawatt klieg lights needed for the shot. In a chair, off-camera sits another model draped in a coverall with her hair in curlers nervously smoking a cigaretteit helps suppress the urge to eatas she waits her turn. It is hard work being beautiful; hard work for everybody involved and tedious too; but it gets results from a gullible public. Talk about this to your six-year-old daughter whilst she still listens to, and more importantly still believes you. Tell her to imagine these glamorous women first thing in the morning, fumbling for first a cigarette and then a toothbrush, dressed in their favorite bathrobe, and looking blearily into the mirror as they fantasize about food they dare not eat if they want to keep their job. The reality that your childrendaughters especiallyneed to know is that the only way young girlsand young boys for that mattercan make the most of their outward appearance is to run and jump and climb and throw and hit, from a very early age. Bodies look and work best when they eat plenty of fruit and vegetables and nuts and juice, get plenty of sleep, and avoid red meat, tobacco, alcohol, mood altering drugs, sugar and caffeine. Despite the old saying, clothes do not maketh a man, or woman. They cover your modesty, protect from the cold and heat, and only finally make a statement. If you are a healthy specimen, even old, out-of-style clothes will look good on you. If you are unhealthy, it will take an army of stylists to make you look good.
Whats next?
An industry that can spend $416 billion annually worldwide on salesmanship can afford plenty of sophistication. They have some very creative minds working on behalf of their clients, they have lots of data to mine, and increasingly they have new ways of reaching your children. Global positioning systems can help you if you are lost. The possible implementation of this technology as a marketing weapon has not been lost on advertisers. How long will it be before a person walking down the street with a GPS phone gets a call from the store they are walking past inviting them in to sample their wares? Warn the children. Its coming.
Summary
Promises are at the heart of advertising. That was true in the 18th century and is still true today for a very simple reason: it works.
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Advertising is frequently insulting and ridiculous; and we put up with it. Point this out to your children and you will take a little power back. Advertisers obviously assume their audience to be stupid. Their audience is not stupid; it is however uninformed about the tricks of the advertisers trade. Models, celebrities, and pitchmen are people. They have jobsif you can call them thatand problems like everybody else. Stop putting them on pedestals. Advertisers are usually the first adopters of new technology. Keep abreast of new technology as a way to thwart their efforts.
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8: Do I Really Believe What I am Seeing?

Informationor emotional trickery?
hen you go to the theater, the movies, or watch a performance on TV, there is an unspoken bargain between you and the people responsible for the production. In return for being entertained, you pay money and suspend your disbelief. In other words, you give your tacit approval to be deceived into thinking for an hour or two that reality goes away. Actors playing improbable fantasy roles routinely defy gravity on screen for your entertainment. Actors become cops, tramps, dukes and duchesses, presidents and villainsand even lawyersfor your diversion. You suspend any idea of skepticism; you might even know what comes next, but you are being entertained. Advertisers have a more difficult job. They want you to suspend your disbelief and natural skepticism without any obvious benefit to you. Because they face this difficult task, advertisers have more than a few tricks up their sleeves. You need to know themas part of becoming media literatethe better to inform your students and children about how to fight back against the constant barrage. For some reason advertisers show us a lot of stupid advertising; way too much. They would have you believe that it is normal for people to be portrayed talking to the Venetian blinds which talk back, or a car, or other inanimate objects. I even saw one advertisement where a woman was using the toilet plunger as a microphone to address a recalcitrant lavatory bowl. Do you and your children watch this charade passively, as the advertisers wantor do you get annoyed? I dont know about you, but I find the incessant drumbeat of banality, inanity, and particularly the condescension, annoying; particularly when the only thing I get in return is nominally free network TV, which in reality is anything but free; its not even cheap. I find it marginally more acceptable when actual facts are presented, particularly if accompanied by cute babies or animals: but no more cockney-accented, talking geckoes please or cavemen. Humor too is fine, as long as it works; but its shelf life is limited. Who do they think they are kidding when an ad for the state lottery only ever shows people winning, when we all know the odds are a zillion to one against? Customers are always happy in TV commercials; does that reflect your reality? These and other observations can be made whilst watching TV with your family in order to provoke skepticism, the best armor of all.
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What advertisers strive for is to show you the benefit to you of using their products. All too often, whilst attempting to do this, they have a breakdown of the imagination and have to stretch the truth and reach for the old staples: use, wear, drive, drink, smoke, or eat this product and you will have more sex. The man with the graying beard is rejected by the nubile younger women. He buys a product that conceals the gray and voila, this same young woman drags him into her apartment, and soon soft groans of ecstasy emanate to us the viewers. Oh, really? How about some credible testimonials from experts instead? A burglar telling me that he couldnt pick a particular brand of door lock I would think could be very persuasive. Please make these observations to your children and if they want to discuss them, turn the TV off and talk.
Informationor is it?
Information is the real key to advertising. The presentation varies. Print advertisements use the available space to impart information; they know that to do otherwise is a missed opportunity. Humor sells, as long as the joke does not fall flat. Two people discussing the merits of a product in a setting that approximates real life is also acceptable. Demonstrations, as we all know, can be boring, but if the product really can be demonstrated to have a benefit, showing it is a good way to sell. Talking heads seem to have fallen out of favor except in infomercials, as have characters invented for the express purpose of identifying a product. Advertisements that seem to be news announcements work well. If your child hears the following phrase often enough without some countervailing discussion, they will grow up believing it: Its worth $100, but for a limited time it is yours fornot $50not $25 but for the low price of$17.95. The economic reality is that this product is worth $17.95 for the simple reason that that is the price it is being offered for, and that is what the manufacturers have decided to charge. Even the rarest diamond is worth something only when a price is agreed and the gem is purchased. The diamond might be appraised at a different value; but that is not its worth. Please discuss with your children.
The emotional sell
David Ogilvy reminds us that, products are like human beings, they attract the most attention when they are first born. The manufactures know this, and they treat the products like babies by using the emotional sell. Appealing to our emotions sells very well. This is a given in the advertising world. Old World charm still features in advertisements, appealing as it does to a feeling of nostalgia for a bygone time. Sentimentality, fear, greed, love, lust, and jealousy all feature in commercials from one time or another. Watch with your children and try to identify which ads feature which emotion.
Branding
Branding is another type of commercial to watch out for. As I write, BP is trying to rebrand itself as a company that is doing its best to be a leader in providing clean renewable energy. BP does this by repeating their name in association with slogan
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meant to appeal to the conservationist in all of us. Of course they have a job on their hands; images of icebergs covered in soot, falling off the Antarctic ice shelf, playing on the evening news is not helping their cause any, particularly when juxtaposed with the sight of the CEOs of the largest oil companies being hauled before congress. And congress is busily building an image of its own by scolding these eight white men in public before being taken to dinner in private. A lot of what advertisers do on TV would look bizarre in a store. Suppose the appliance salesperson in response to your inquiry began by singing a jingle, or made you look at the product from a distance of six inches, or sang the praise of the packaging, or moved the food, or fried some sausages in a non-stick pan, all the while humming a jingle? All these things commercials regularly do, hoping against hope that you will willingly suspend your disbelief and suppress your instinct to mock and laugh.
What really works?
The truth is that advertisers are really only vaguely aware of if and how their campaigns work. A chain store magnate once was told by an advertising agency that only half the advertising dollars he spent would work. His question reveals the problem of all advertising campaigns, Which half? No one knows still; advertising remains more of an art than science. There is a wonderful storyprobably apocryphaltold about a new advertising agency that approached the manufacturer of Alka-Seltzer and promised to double its sales. The agency got the go-ahead and came up with the campaign that featured the line, Plop, plop, fizz, fizz. Before they came along the manufacturer had been selling its remedy one tablet at a time, which was enough to cure whatever ails the patient. The agency knew that the publicthats you and medid not know the difference and would go ahead and plop two tablets into the glass of water instead of one. The manufacturers sales numbers promptly doubled as promised. This may or may not be a true story, but we can probably all see our collective gullibility in light of this cautionary tale.
Summary
Advertising is fantasy; suspend your disbelief at you peril. Be skeptical at all times. Be informed. Advertisers count on the fact that you are not. Learn their techniques, watch out for them, and point them out to your childrenconstantly! Humor works, but its intent is the same: to separate you from your money.
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All you really want from advertising is information; discard the rest. Advertising is the sensory equivalent of sleight of handa trick.
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9: Spin the Publics Opinion and All Will Be Well

The art and reality of public relations
any different organizations such as non-profits, foreign governments, government agencies, political parties, businesses, business people, individual politicians, celebrities, and entertainers want to change your opinion of them, for many different reasons. However, they mainly want to go from negative views of them to positive ones. They want to spin their image in a new direction. The media, in all its forms, is the avenue of choice for this exercise because it is so wide and deep in its reach to the public. And the media consultantsor spin doctors as they are affectionately nicknamedare the facilitators. Parents and educators and your children and students should know that the reason they spin is very simple; it works. It works because the public by and large is unaware that it is going on and consequently is an easy target. The spin-doctors best friend is the publics gullibility. The organization or person who hires the public relations consultantsthe name by which the spin-doctors prefer to be knownmay already have a favorable view from the public and want to improve it. Or they may have suffered an embarrassment such as being caught drinking and driving, cheating on their wife, trying to bribe their way into the senate, or sadly soliciting underage children, and wish to make a speedy recovery into the good graces of their public. In any case, spin is called for and the spin-doctors go to work. Public relations firms are a facet of the advertising industry and use all the media to accomplish their goals. Your students and children should be as aware of spinning in the media as they are of advertising. The one area where spin-doctors can do little to help is when an egregious betrayal of public trust is involved; however, this does not stop them from trying. The past two presidents can attest to the fact that betrayal of public trust is a sin not easily forgiven in the publics mind. There is nothing minor about having an affair in the Oval Office, or starting a war under false pretenses. Spin-doctors may do their best to imitate whirling dervishes, but thankfully, public opinion is impervious to betrayal of trust. We seem to suspend that skepticism when it comes to ordinary commerce and celebrities, however. No less a personage than Abe Lincoln once said, With public opinion on its side, nothing can fail. With public opinion against it, nothing can succeed.
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Public relations consultant is the name given to the people who practice the black art of attempting to change perceptions. They try, and all too often succeed, in changing public perceptions.
Image building as an art
We all know that water with high concentrations of sugar and caffeine is not good for us, and even worse for our children. So, some bright spark many years ago gave the innocuous sounding moniker soft drinks to these potent, damaging, yet tasty cans of soda. Theres nothing soft about them. Thats public relations at its bestor worst, depending on whether you own shares in their clients or not. If an executive is indicted for fraud, look for a barrage of press releases about what he did when he was a young Peace Corps volunteer, or how she worked her way up from obscurity. Image building is an art form. There are people who pride themselves on their ability to portray gun dealers and manufacturers, pornographers, cigarette manufacturers, alcohol brewers, pharmaceutical and health care (notice the word care) companies as regular Joes, just making a living, creating jobs, obeying the law, and paying taxes. They can and they do it daily. For example, spin-doctors have succeeded in manipulating public perceptions to the extent that to object to gun violence perpetrated with weapons conceived for the battlefield is somehow unpatriotic and simplistic. Because of the legions of spinmeisters and the billions funneled to them over generations, to complain about the prohibitive cost of legal drugs or the state of education is somehow associated with whining. And so on and so on.
Reality vs. perceptionbe aware of the difference
Those who shape public opinion and those who shape legislative agendas to suit their causes are in charge of the country. You need to have this discussion with your students and children, who after all are the future leaders of our country. I say all this to make you aware that your perceptions of reality, and those of your students and children, are constantly being manipulated by people who have a vested interest in having you believe their version of the truth, and they rely on gullibility. You cannot escape it; you can only be aware of it and tell your students and children to have their antennae up also. Something repeated often enough somehow becomes the truth. Politicians running those dreadful negative ads rely on this fact. They canand domake a hero look like a villain. That technique has entered the lexicon; it is now called swift boating. Look for more of it in your local and national elections. The other side is the rosy scenario version of events; shaping public opinion by repeatedly emphasizing the positive and never, ever admitting the negative. US Secretaries of Defense appear particularly adept in this area. So much for public relations! Again, the only defense you and your children have is information, knowledge, and hence the power to see through what the Irish call
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blarney, defined as smooth or deceptive talkflattery in other words. That is the aim of the spin-doctor; to present to the world the most flattering image of her client. Even the most flagrant offences by a star can be made better in the minds of the public by a well-chosen interview, where softball questions are floated under flattering lights. These choreographed interviews always take place after the obligatory and very sincere apology and a hasty retreat into a rehabilitation center. Your child will be better able to deconstruct and analyze the behavior of media professionals if you have discussions about this kind of conduct. Almost every night on the TV news, and what passes for news about the entertainment industry, there are teachable moments that will allow your children to get their defenses up and keep them up.
Summary
The media is used, often brilliantly, by public relations professional to modify the publics taste and opinion. Dont let your children fall for it. Your opinions, and those of your children, should not be up for sale.
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10: Billboards: a Malign Influence

I think that I shall never see A billboard lovely as a tree. Indeed, unless the billboards fall Ill never see a tree at all. Ogden Nash
ne of the nastiest forms of advertising is the roadside billboard, and my hope is that as you drive with your children across America, you will open a dialog with them about billboard advertising. Pat Brown, a governor of California in the 1970s, hated billboards with a passion and tried to get them banned. Anyone who has driven through California knows that its scenery is entrancing. Why then, wondered Brown, would we want to clutter up, hide, and divert attention away from this precious asset? He concluded that the people who own the billboard business are a malign influence. In a speech he said, When a man throws an empty cigarette package from an automobile, he is liable to a fine of $50. When a man throws a billboard across my view, he is richly rewarded. President Lyndon Johnsons widow led a campaign to beautify Americas highways and failed. Before her Eisenhower was quoted as saying, I am against those billboards that mar our scenery, but I dont know what I can do about them. The reality is that the only thing that anyone can do is to try to ignore them; they are not going away. In fact, they are becoming smart. They are being converted to digital screens on the highways and byways, the better to get a lease on the eyes and minds of the consumers. Once this digital switch takes place, hidden hands will be able to change the messages on the billboards remotely to time the sales pitch to the time of day or events; the better to catch your eyes and divert them from the task of driving. I guess the lesson is to drive much more defensively in highways with smart billboards that can flash graphics as adroitly as any computer video game. The problem with the new billboards has become so bad in Houston that the president of the Chamber of Commerce has likened stretches of Houstons highway to Las Vegas.
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Billboards, accidents, and powerful lobbyists
Billboards are part of the media. They communicate messages and inform us every bit as much as TV or newspapers or the internet. The trouble is that most of the people they are intended to communicate with are driving. Highways with billboards have three times as many accidents as those without. Highways with billboards showing beautiful and partly clothed women or men would be a disaster. Common sense tells us that the only safe way to advertise to a driver is by radio. Why then is our landscape still polluted with these advertisements? One answer is that they work. The other answer is a little darker. Here is how advertizing legend David Ogilvy puts it, quoting a New York state senator. The billboard lobby shrewdly puts many legislators in its debt by giving them free space during election time. The lobby is savage against the legislator who dares oppose it by supporting or favoring anti-billboard laws. It subsidizes his opponents, foments political trouble in his home district, donates billboards to his political opponents, and sends agents to spread rumors among his constituents. This is quite a discussion topic you could have with your students and childrenand future voters and even legislatorsas you drive along your states highways. Tell them that, due to the lobbyists for the outdoor advertising industry, there is actually a law on the books called the Highway Beautification Act that says that the purpose of the Congress of the United States is to promote outdoor advertising, yes really! Billboards represent less than 2% of all advertising in the USA. Yet they are still a blight on every road in the USA. If we took a vote, who would want them kept? They are there because their owners long ago affirmed their right to deface the landscape in the pursuit of free speech. Is that spin, or is that a valid interpretation of the free speech amendment? Ask your children.
Summary
Advertising billboards are intrusive, ugly, dangerous, omnipresent, and sadly becoming as smart as any computer screen.
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11: Teaching Media Literacy

The modern Little Red Riding Hood, raised on singing commercials, has no problem being devoured by the big bad wolf. Marshall McLuhan 1951
hat is not what any parent wants. So what is the solution? Fortunately, there is general agreement amongst those who study and teach media literacy that there are many actions that can be taken to educate the young so that they can become better consumers of the media.
We are all teachers of media literacy
The main message about the media and children is that all of usparents, teachers, relatives, politicians, and scholarsare teachers of media literacy. If we do not teach the children about the media and its influence and methods, who will? What happens if a child grows up getting all of its information about life and the world around her from the media, without any countervailing advice? This question is of course rhetorical. We as a society anguish over the demise of conventional literacyreading, writing, math, science, and social studiesamongst our children; we should be equally concerned about their lack of coping skills when it comes to the barrage of data they get from the media. Society has always taken its responsibility to teach its children to interpret, analyze, and criticize text very seriously. Thats why we have schools, and we must continue to do this. But we must also recognize that our children are increasingly getting their information from sources about which we teach them nothing in terms of critical consumption. As I have said, it used to be that all of the information that children got was in either in print or text form, or was orally transmitted. Now things have changed and your children get only a portionand probably a minority proportionof their information from printed and spoken words. It is a new age and we must not fight the last war by teaching only print literacy.
Media literacy and infoliteracy: together in a wired world
It is vital to understand that computers and communication capabilities have radically changed the landscape forever. Sight and sound are now fused into a media experience that you almost certainly never had, yet your children take for granted.
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As I have said, the problem is that it has become difficult for them to discern reality and value amongst all this welter of images and sounds. They are living in a world of multiple formats, and the chances are that you are not. And no one is teaching them how to filter, so there is a good chance that they dont have the ability to question the authenticity of the information presented to them. A DVD is simple to operate. What it represents, and what it is capable of, however, is, extremely complex. A blend of hi-fidelity sound, video, computer platform, and most importantly graphics software allows the creator to fool the viewers senses. Should we let your students and children figure this out by themselves, or should they get this information from parents and educators?
Children consume and use new media to communicate
Media is both consumed and used. The need for our children to be able to consume or access the media critically and dispassionatelyby analyzing its content critically and evaluating the messages sensiblyis paramount. They will inevitably learn to use the media to communicate via these technologies because its easy and getting easier to do so, and its what all their friends are doing; and its cool; and its also what a vast number of companies are betting on. In the times when all we learned was in print, we made sure as teachers and parents that our children could read and comprehend what they read, which meant knowing the difference between fact and fiction. We also made sure that they could write and clearly communicate ideas. But we did not leave it at that. We taught them to not just recognize characters written on a page, we taught them higher order skills, which led them to be active readers, and hence critical and even skeptical of what they read. We taught them to question the text and its authors intent by questioning motives and skills. In other words we taught them to evaluate and filter, discarding some work and accepting other work. In short, we taught them to think, using words as tools for cognition.
Teaching them critical thinking
We need to approach the new media with the same intent, namely to show our students and children how to become active and critical users of information; to think about what they are doing. Since the schools largely are not doing this, then parents must; and this means parents and educators must learn how first. There must be a disclaimer. The younger your children are, the better your chances of success. Teens think they know best and are less likely to take direction, particularly about a topic they assume their parents know little about. If you ask a six year old if the man in the white coat on TV walking around a hospital ward with a stethoscope is a doctor, what will be their response? Whatever it is, it can start a discussion about the role of TV. Ask a teen that same question and you risk contempt. The sooner young people realize that there are huge differences between reality, advertising, and entertainment, the better your chances of raising a media literate child
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who can watch and listen to an ad that says This product will make you look healthy, and differentiate it from one that legitimately claims that you will be more healthy. That is the gift that keeps on giving all of their lives.
Steps parents can take
There are some simple steps teachers and parents can take. First, make your students and children very aware of how much media they consume. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, American children spend 6.5 hours per day watching TV, on the internet, or using other electronic devices. How do your children measure on this scale? If they are young enough to listen and take advice, ask them to keep a log, and to impose limits on themselves. Discuss with them how influential the media is in their lives by asking them to imagine life without the media. Ask them to consider the messages the media is sending them. Ask them if media consumption affects their family life in any way. Discuss with them the difference between the messages the media is sending them, and the messages that real life teaches. As parents and educators, ask yourselves if the media choices your children and students make makes you happy. In addition, think about those choices and how your action or inaction contributed to the choices your children make.
Summary
All of us must become teachers of media literacy. Your children need the same coping skills they use for conventional literacy printed wordswhen interacting with multimedia. Your children need to learn to use, interpret, analyze, and criticize all texts; not just print. They live in a multimedia, multi-format world and they need to become active consumers of all the media formats. Children spend on average more than six hours per day with electronic media. A discussion about how this affects them and their families is a good beginning towards media literacy.
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12: Breaking the Media Down

Recognizing the medias message in context
et me introduce you to Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher born in Algeria in 1930. The reason I bring up his name, or more correctly his work, is that he pioneered a type of inquiry called Deconstruction. Of course being a philosopher, and being a French one at that, he couched his descriptions of this activity in dense language, which seems designed to obscure rather than illuminate. I will try to remedy that because what he did is of great importance to the study of media literacy. In this age of media convergence, high-resolution graphics, video, animation, hi-fidelity sound, and powerful editing tools, seeing is not believing anymore. Instead, what we need to acknowledge to ourselves and more importantly to our students and children is that more and more what we see from the media is not reality. As I have said, they are carefully crafted constructions. This goes for something as obvious as a cartoon or an advertisement, or something as seemingly innocuous as a movie.
Promoting a message
The first and most important lesson is that we must get our students and children to assume is this: these constructions are the result of enormous effort by people with agendas and messages they wish to promote. If someone is constructing a message with a very serious purpose such as separating you from your money, then it is important to view that construction critically. This is where deconstruction comes in. It is obvious, given the amount of time youngsters spend in front of screens filled with constructions of one kind or another, that their realitytheir experience of lifeis informed to a very large extent by these media constructions. Six and half hours per day using, or being used by, electronic media adds up to an enormous number. 2372 hours per year in fact. This compares to an average of about 1030 hours spent each year in contact with a teacher, and probably less time than that with a parent. And the fact is that rarely, if ever, does anyone actually tell them to spend time with electronic media; unlike print homework, which is demanded of them. Unlike school, they choose the time, place, and content, so by definition it is more enjoyable time than school; they are doing what they want, not what a teacher or parent wants them to do. Hence, the influence of media constructions has to be commensurately larger. The makers of these constructions know this; so should you; and more importantly, so should your children.
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Why is all this important? Simply put, a childs viewyour childs viewof the world and how it works is created in large part by the media; and those media have attitudes, meanings, a purpose, and conclusions already built in to their constructions. And their goal is not just to share these attitudes, meanings, purposes and conclusions with your children, but to co-opt your students or children to their point of view. So, since media conglomerates are the ones with all the control, money, power, and influence and have a willing audience too, it makes sense that our children need a new skilla new literacyin order to make them better consumers of these media messages. This is where Derridas thinking about deconstruction comes in.
Picking the message apart: deconstruction
When faced with a new idea or concept, a good way to begin to understand them is always to look for analogies and synonyms. So, another way of saying deconstruction is to say pick apart or dismantle or break down or turn inside out or reverse engineer. In other words to deconstruct is to look for the constituent parts that make something up, or comprise something. The whole is the sum of its parts; the job of deconstruction is to figure out what those parts are in order to uncover reality and meaning, or the truth behind the construction. By doing this we can navigate our way to the true but hidden meaning of the medias constructions. By looking at the parts of the whole, we can bring personal factors to bear on the message we are being fed. Its like saying, wait a minute, time out, let me factor in my own feelings and the realities about me such as gender, race, income, political views, tastes, and so on before taking the message I am being fed at face value.
Commerce and finance behind the media message
Negotiating and decoding the true meaning of a construction necessitates understanding that the messages that the media deliver have commercial implications. For example, the financial backers of a movie would never allow the promotion of a religious or political belief or an interpretation of historical events they did not approve of, unless the money is too good to turn down of course. When deconstructing a message, its important to look at the ownership of the media message. Its vital to identify what is missing from the construction, and to look for hidden messages and even outright fabrications.
Ideas in context
However, before going into much more depth about deconstruction, I would like to explain to you a thinking process that I have written about extensively. It is a step that students can be taught before they begin the act of deconstruction. Its called contextual analysis, and is actually very simple. In the ePrimers in this series devoted Essay Writing and the one on Collaboration Skills I show how, before deconstructing an idea, it is important to think about the ideas in their context. In other words, before breaking a construction down into its
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constituent parts, it is always advisable to find out what the construction itself is a part of. One way of doing this is by creating a hierarchy. As an example, take the word essay. Before breaking the idea of an essay down into its constituent parts, examine first what is the context in which an essay exists? Well, if you think about it, essays are a part of the act of writing, which in turn is part of the larger skill of communication. Now you can figure out the relationships between essay writing and say writing novels, biography, or poetry. Having done this it makes sense to go ahead and break down the word essay into its constituent parts, which happen to be substance, style, and type. Using this method, the following diagram shows how my neighbors fifteen-year-old son deconstructed the word advertising. First, he thought of the word in its larger context, and then he broke it down into its constituent parts.
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Diagram A: Deconstruction
ePrimer Protecting Children in a Multimedia AgeMedia Literacy 2006
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Try deconstructing for yourself with other words such as television, computer, food, drugs, government, education, language, gardens, transportation, mythology, heroes, war, religion, or any other nouns. Remember to look at the big picture first before deconstructing the word into its constituent parts. See if it helps.
Summary
In our digital age seeing and believing are very different concepts. Advertisements, movies, TV shows, and electronic games are all carefully crafted constructions. Most, if not all, constructions have a message or agenda. Most children do not have to be told to spend time with electronic media. Most children do have to be told to spend time with books. The influence of the media is huge because it is cool. Help your child break down the constructions into their constituent parts. Next, help them build the construction back up and see it in context. Now your child is in a position to view the advertisement or movie critically and actively.
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13: Media Illusions and Reality

Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on me.
rompe loeil is a French phrase: it means to fool or trick the eye. Its actually the name for a style of painting in which the viewer is fooled into thinking something is there that is not; its an illusion. There are rooms in the Palace of Versailles near Paris that are in fact empty but the parquet tiles are so skillfully arranged on the walls and floors that it appears that the room is furnished, and has doors and windows that are actually flat surfaces. Its the same with the makers of media constructionsthey are illusions. Their primary goal when creating a construction to present to a viewer is to make the construction appear like a seamless extension of the viewers reality. That way the viewer will be coopted to the message without knowing it, and therefore will not question the message. This way they fool us all hundreds of thousands of times over a lifetime. Shame on us! The goal of the viewer should be to make the seams apparent. This can best be done by understanding how the construction was created in the first place. This is done by asking and answering two questions. What were the decisions that the message makers took in order to build the construction? And what technical means did they use?
Learning the difference between reality and a construction
Www.medialit.org uses the following example to begin to show how easy it is for us especially childrento be deceived. They ask a fundamental question of the young viewer by telling the story of a teacher who is holding up a picture of a horse, and asking a class full of eight year olds to tell her what it is. They responded of course that it is a horse. The teachers response was to vehemently deny this, and her denial caused confusion for a long time, until the students began to understand that the horse was a carefully crafted construction of a horse; not a horse at all. It was a representation of a horse, as seen through the eyes of the constructor, in this case a painter. Big difference! The children learned a huge lesson right there. Childrenespecially those up to and including eight year oldsthink of reality differently. The first step in making them media literate is to help them erect a barrier or filter by learning the crucial difference between reality and a construction.
Suspending disbelief: a media constructors dream
If you are sitting in a theater watching a play, you have to deliberately suspend your disbelief by ignoring the footlights, the artificiality of the stage and its set, the exaggerated behavior of the actors, and of course your fellow audience members. That
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is a lot to ask, but it is the bargain that all playgoers, playwrights, actors, and directors depend on. A great deal depends on the actors ability to convince the audience; and of course, the quality of the dialog and plot, stage decoration, and music make it easier or more difficult to go along and suspend our disbelief. The success of the performance also depends frankly on your level of gullibility; your willingness to let go of reality and accept the construction of the playwright, the actors, the director, and through the performance, the message of the author. And make no mistake, there is always a message. If you are in a movie theater, the border of the action is no longer framed by the wings of a theater or the footlights; it is the edges of the screen. It becomes easier to suspend disbelief, and so to accept the message the movie producers, director, and actors wish to send via their construction. If you are in front of a handheld game console, a 50-inch plasma TV screen, or a computer monitor, the borders of the experience are different again and the setting more familiar. It might be your den, bedroom, a city street, a park, or your family room. Again, the quality of the experience and a certain level of unquestioning participation on your part is what the media constructors are counting on. They want you to suspend your skepticism; if you also want to, then you will swallow their message whole. We often talk of deliberately losing ourselves in a movie or being distracted by a TV show. That is a media constructors dream.
The purpose and methods behind the advertisement
Again, what is a parent or teacher to do? Hermeneutics, thats the answer. A big word I know, but like a lot of big words, its really just shorthand. It is easier to say the word hermeneutics than to say, The process by which we can come to an understanding of the constructions purpose by looking at its underlying parts and its message. Put more simply: analyze the advertisement by looking at its purpose and methods. How is this done? Simply by asking who created this construction, what the intended relationship with the audience is, what the intent of the message is, why the construction was built in the first place, and where and when is the construction intended to take place. And this is something that children can understand how to do from an early age. We all have a sense of reality; we began building it when we came into this world, and probably wont stop building it until we depart. By learning at a young age to ask questionsespecially the who, what, why, where and when questionsabout the sources of information from which we construct our reality, children have a better chance of constructing a more accurate picture of reality and their place in it.
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Summary
Constructors try to make their illusion a seamless extension of your reality. The viewers goal is to make the seams visible and apparent. Find out whats behind the constructors intention. Find out the technical means they employ. Suspending disbelief is your decisionnot the constructors. Pick apart the construction. The who, what, what, why, where, and when questions are your scalpels.
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14: Knowledge is Bliss

Seeing beyond masters of persuasion
bout twelve years ago I was in Mexico when Hurricane Hugo came ashore. We had absolutely no advance warning, and my wife and I sat helplessly watching TV as satellite images of the very building in which we were trapped were beamed into our apartment as the hurricane hit us full force. It was surreal; it was like watching oneself on the news, while at the same time watching the news. Reality and TV pictures were blended together, giving us a much-distorted perspective on reality. I remarked to my wife at the time that describing that sort of experience even fifty years ago would have been regarded as science fiction. In a sense, we are all living in that kind of world, where the edges of reality, fantasy, and manufactured reality are blurring. I am not a fan of movies where animation and other tricks are used to allow actors, swords, and other weapons to defy the laws of physics. People routinely leaping across spaces and distances that would defy an Olympic athlete just sets me to questioning my fellow audience members IQ, and my own. One Matrix film was enough for me. However, I will say this for those kinds of movies and cartoons: at least you knowor should knowfrom the outset that reality is going to come unhinged. But what about advertisements that use the same tricks to sell you something? Are they cheating? No, because they have every right to assume that we are smart enough to separate truth from fiction. Except of course if the intended targets are very small children; more on that later.
Medias subtle power to influence
The New Mexico Media Literacy Project has identified some basic concepts about how media uses its power to influence us. This is a summary of the main points they make. I strongly suggest you enter into discussions with your children about these observations as well as going to the New Mexico site website at www.nmmlp.org. It is not news to say that all cultures throughout history, but especially our own, have been largely shaped by the images they saw and the stories they heard. In the past, the storytellers were known to us. In ancient times, images and stories were conjured up and passed on by traveling bards; usually old men and women passing on the stories of past deeds. Since the invention of movable type in the 14th century, the storytellers have been writers and newspapers. The modern storytellers, however, are largely restricted to a few media monopolies. Who are they, do you know? You should. Start by Googlingis that really a verb
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now?the publisher of the books your children are reading, or the TV station they watch, or the website they use, and find out the spiders web of ownership. You will be surprised at how few real owners there are. Advertising, news, popular music, and other forms of entertainment are a powerful force in our culture and are concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. We cannot assume that they will act responsibly, so we must. So, a good beginning is to understand who owns what. The effects of the media are subtle; even though the actual construction might be a blunt instrument with raucous noise and over-the-top behavior. A single advertisement rarely prompts a rush to the store. The message about a brand or a product if repeated often enough, however, will prompt a buying decision once we are either in the store, or once we have decided to buy a category item, such as a fridge or car or house or insurance or diapers or cosmetics.
Masters of persuasion and hype
The media are masters of the art of persuasion. They have to be to succeed; its their business. Therefore, we need to be aware of the tools they use, since they are being deployed against us. For example, they are masters of symbols. Think of the power of a symbol: the cross, the Star of David, our nations flag. Now look at a basketball players shoes. What do you see? Talk to your children about the value of symbols in their lives, from the school football teams logo to car badges and discuss what these symbols are trying to tell us. Hyperbole is defined as exaggeration for the purpose of effect. It has a shortened version that we all understandhype. It is usually vague and always boastful. Donald Trump has taken it to a new level. Everything he speaks of is the best on the planet or even in the universe; count how many times people like these use the word incredible. When you next see examples of hype tell your children this: if someone is hyping a product or a cause, they probably have nothing substantial to say, so they call it incredible. Tell your children this also: the word incredible actually means not to be believed. Teach your children to recognize outrageous claims for what they are; all surface and gloss and unsubstantiated claims.
Humor sells
Humor can work as a tool for persuasion. You should understand that the advertising agency responsible for the humorous campaign has also suggested other types of advertising to their client, and the decision was made to tell a joke to sell a product. The problem is that many people remember the joke and not the product. See if that is true in your house.
Fame sells
Famous folks sell products that they have no connection to at all. Does it work? It depends on the acceptability of the spokesperson to the intended audience. An actor
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who plays film or TV roles that require a serious and dignified persona are hired as pitchmen for financial services companies all the time. At the other end of the continuum, it is not uncommon to see a clown selling used cars on a local TV channel. Point this out too as you watch with your children.
Negative portrayal
One of the least appealing forms of persuasion is the negative portrayal. If you take a video of the most beautiful person in the world speaking and you stop the tape abruptly as the person is shaping their mouth to pronounce a wordany wordthe result will be an unappealing, unflattering photo. Now, take that picture and use Photo Shop to reduce it to a grainy black and white image, and you have the political negative advertisement. Its a lie, but it works because we are so media illiterate that we cannot see the distortion, or we cannot be bothered to see it. The subliminal message sent by this kind of advertisement is powerful, but would you really want the person who approved this message to represent you in congress?
Flattery & bribery
Flattery will get you everywhere in advertising. Does this sound familiar? Only the very best use our credit card, are you good enough yet? Armed with this knowledge, your students and children will be on their guard against this kind of message and will be better able to deconstruct it, and therefore consume the message critically. Bribery works too. Buy one, get one free: children please notenothing is ever truly free. No payments until next year means that the furniture store has already built their cost into the price you pay next year. They would not be in business next year if they truly gave things away for no payment. Omission is a sin, just like commission. Does an advertisement for a movie ever include quotations from a bad review? My newspapers movie critics regularly pan a movie that is advertised on the same page with glowing accolades, usually from people I have never heard of. I go with my newspapers review.
Nostalgia sells
Watch out for advertisements that hark back to the good old days with warm and nostalgic images. Neither milk nor bread is delivered in horse-drawn carts anymore, and neither is beer. I worked in both a bakery and a brewery in the good old days and my memories are not warm and fuzzy, rather they are hot and smelly, with very long hours. Speaking of beer, next time you are watching TV, point out the fact that the beer commercial always shows the image of a trendy night club filled with handsome men with chiseled torsos and beautiful girls with sculpted figures, honed by long hours on the treadmill. They are all drinking a high calorie, intoxicating brew whilst dancing and politely talking. Now contrast that with another reality; a football stadium or a sports bar full of paunchy menno womenall drinking beer and behaving like kindergartners.
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Of course there are many types of persuasive advertisements, not all bad. To be media literate is to be able to recognize the techniques and become selective consumers of the media.
Knowledge is bliss
Sadly, most commercials assume we are stupid and perhaps that is a correct assumption on their part. I once sat in an advertising agency office in New York City. I was there to listen to their sales pitch to get my business. The president of the agency welcomed me with a glad hand and motioned me to sit. I looked at an engraved sign on his desk. It said simply, Ignorance is bliss. That said it all. I queried him about the slogan and he proudly admitted that he felt it was his duty was to bamboozle the audiencemake that my customerswith tricks and ploys. I believed then and still believe that in fact, knowledge is bliss. If an advertisement, which after all is a form of communication, does not have as its first purpose to communicate ethically, then it fails the manufacturer and us. I do not object to the use of persuasive methods when companies or people communicate. Rhetoricthe art of persuasionhas a long and honored tradition. For more on the art of persuasion see the ePrimer on Leadership. I do object when the vendors assume I am stupid, and will only relate to, and be persuaded to buy by men doing stupid tricks, moving food, the odd celebrity, anthropomorphized animals, and other fantasies. So should you. You are better than that, and so are your students and children. We deserve better.
Summary
Begin early to help your children get and keep their grip on reality. The media conglomerates are master storytellers. The public are not masters of critical consumption; the media know this. The media uses storytelling to advance their agendas. Their weapons of choice are repetition, symbolism, image making, and hype. Note how, when, and why they use particular spokespersons and discuss. Note how they use snob appeal, bribery, and nostalgia.
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15: The Real Deal

Schemes, offers, and subtextreality or fantasy?
have come to expect, and so should you, that subtextsor hidden, implied messageswill be used aplenty in advertising constructions. Pictures of families eating at restaurants with big smiles contain the broad hint that families that eat at this restaurant stay together. The same message can be seen in almost all advertisements. Do this, buy this, use this, and you too can be happy, rich, sexy, married, living the good life, even in retirement, and so on. The people seen in a TV commercial promoting business opportunities usually get rich schemes - all show their satisfied owners in front of large houses, on large yachts, and driving expensive cars. The message was none too subtle: get rich quick. Of course one lesson of media literacy is that if it looks too good to be true it probably is, so as always, caveat emptor. I made $6000 in one month working part time, happily declares an actual client. I saw this commercial in the company of some teens and I had two questions, which they found instructive: Was that gross revenue or net profit? I explained the differenceand, How much of the $6000 went back in franchise fees, and other costs, to the master franchiser? I took the opportunity to discuss multi-level marketing and Ponzi schemes recently in the news once again - with them. All commercials usually present teaching moments. Get your children to begin wondering about the same things and down the road, they may be spared some dumb decisions.
Peddling wish fulfillment: constructing a solution to our problems
The people behind this kind of advertisingself-help and personal improvement books, tapes, and seminars includeddepend on the fact that we all construct messages from the commercial that are peculiar to ourselves and our situation. In other words, the constructor is counting on the fact that we will receive the message we want to receive by interpreting the messages and constructing as a solution to our problems. Its a kind of a wish fulfillment scenario; just like the one fortunetellers depend on. We all hope, even in our darkest times. This is human nature. The peddlers of wish fulfillment have few scruples about suggesting a subtext that an investment in their product or scheme will bring you endless relief. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with subtexts. The greatest writers have all had subtexts. Dickens deplored the conditions of the men, women, and children toiling at the lowest rung on societys ladder. Many of his books are, on the surface, comedy of
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the highest order. Look a little deeper and you cannot miss his radical message that economic exploitation in Victorian England was making life unbearable for the majorityincluding Dickens in his own childhoodwhilst at the same time benefiting very few.
Non-commercial and political subtexts
Subtexts can be non-commercial. They can contain messages that have to do with an ideology or values. When Christian charities advertise, the subtext is clear. The gospel told you to help, so how about it? When a conservative candidate for office advertises, the subtext is always clear: a vote for my opponent is a vote against family values. When a liberal advertises these days the subtext it is likely to be against foreign adventures. Discuss these messages and their subtexts with your children; it will not only alleviate the interminable, mind-numbing repetition, it will also teach them something about citizenship and its rights and obligations.
The human brain, logic, and emotion
People in the media business are familiar with the human brain and how it works (much more on that in ePrimer, Understanding the Mind and the BrainEducational Psychology). They know that images and text are processed differently by different parts of the brain. They know that images can be used to invoke emotion, whereas text tends to involve logic. The founder of a famous perfume company was fond of saying that he was not in the business of selling scent, but the business of selling hope. It is logical that the only way to fight against all this is to learn the same principles, and share them with your children. Videos of babies or puppies in distress tug at the heartstrings. Videos of babies and puppies playing happily elicit a different emotion. Advertisers know how to use these images better than you know how to watch them; and they rely on that. Becoming media literate does not mean making your children cynical; it does mean helping them become realistic, skeptical, and critical consumers of advertising; including always watching for subtexts.
Buy now!
The other fact the constructors of all images know about the brain is that if it is given time to think, it will be more likely to make a logical decision. So, quick time editing is the key to emotional buying decisions. I used to think that the rapid pace of the car sales advertisement had to do with getting as much information into 30, 60, or 90 seconds. That is not true; the rapid-fire delivery is a ruse to get you emotionally involved and susceptible to the buying messageor call to action as the advertising people put it. Buy now, not later; dont wait; this deal will not be available next week! Well, of course it will.
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Technology enhances emotions
The emotional impact of a TV subtext in a commercial can be further enhanced by clever camera angles, special effects, lighting, and music. The same can be achieved on the web with animation, and in print advertisements with exquisite photography. Tell your students and children about these ploys and watch for others, and do it together as you watch TV. See that, mom; they just switched from wide angle to narrow to bring their car/model/hamburger/logo/candidate for office with his family into better focus. You reply Well done. And they changed the lighting too, to make the mood seem softer.
Summary
If an offer looks too good to be true, guess what? Advertisers play on our wish fulfillment fantasies by being suggestive, not blunt. Look for the hidden messagethe subtextthats their real message. Advertisers know how to prompt emotions with images: joy, sadness, pity, hope. Make a list and watch as they press the buttons. Watch for quick time editing; its used to get you involved in their reality. An active consumer of the media is always critiquing the ad.
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16: Questioning the Media

Teaching children to distinguish between advertising and reality
econstructing the mediain all its forms, not just advertisementscomes down to asking and answering some quite simple who, what, why, where and when questions about a construction. Here are some examples of questions you can ask and answer in the company of students or children. I am sure you can think of others. Who created the message? Who is the target audience? What is the obvious text, and what is the subtext of the message? What techniques of persuasion are they using to influence us? What is being left out? Why did they create the message? Why is it placed there, in that place at that time? Why does it air at that time? Where is the message placed? When does the commercial air?
Starting young
The key is to start young. Toddlers and children under the age of seven cannot really distinguish between advertisements and reality. They are particularly influenced by product placements. If they are watching a cartoon and one of their favorite characters is drinking a particular brand of soda, they will also want to drink that soda. Research at London University has found that children under seven might even find the commercials more engaging that the program they are watching. Only you can monitor and control this by explaining the situation. You can make them active, when the advertisers want them to be passive consumers. The media constructors start targeting the young; so should you. By the age of three or four, a child should know how advertising works; and they can only get this informationwhich is powerfrom you. They need to know that the
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main message of many constructions is life improvement. Buy this product and you will feel, look, and be better and happier than you are right now. In other words, advertisers play on our natural insecurities. Ask your children what products they could buy that would make them happier and why.
Drawing them in
As your children get a little older, explain how an advertisement is designed to draw them into a story, especially when cartoon characters are used. Show them how the copywriters cleverly use words to get around restrictions imposed by the law. For example, the phrase Tastes like real fruit is not a lie, but to a child it means this product is nutritional, even though it was designed by chemists from the by-products of an oil refinerys catalytic converter. Talk to your children about cross marketing and tie-ins. These are concepts even a seven year old will comprehend. The burger joint is giving away tiny replicas of a character in a hit childrens movie and the store is selling pajamas with the title character printed all over them. Why? Tell your children it is because the movie studio, the burger joint, and the department store have spent millions with lawyers hammering out an agreement, which can maximize the money they take from Moms purse. Cross marketing and product tie-ins are really good business.
Encouraging skepticism early
It pays to encourage a certain level of skepticism about business even in the youngest child. This is a variation on the old adage: give them a fish and they eat for a day: teach them to fish and you feed them for life. Isnt that what parents are supposed to do, prepare their offspring for life after the home when they will be watching commercials alone? If you start young enough, you will have armed them against the efforts of the clothing and games and cosmetics industries, who have some quite clever ways of making their products cool, playing on the needs that children have to fit in. But you must prepare them by the time your children get to the age of image-consciousness, which happens in the pre-teen, muddle school years with the dreaded onset of hormonal changes and the childs about face from center-of-the-universe to a spoke-in-a-wheel. If you forewarn your seven-year-old that they will fall victim to this need in a few years, then when the time comes, they will be a bit more enlightened about this urgeand other urges you have discussedthat they encounter. By the time your students and children are sixteen, it is probably too late to be deconstructing advertisements, except perhaps as an academic exercise as part of a school homework project. At this age, they already think you and all adults are nuts; asking them to discuss an advertisement that blatantly misleads by claiming that their sugary concoction is part of a nutritious breakfast will probably fall on deaf ears. Start young and show them how photographers, lighting specialists, and artists conspire to make a pair of jeans look must-have great or a hamburger appetizing.
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Talking to a teenager for the first time about the value of moneyhow tough it is to earn and how difficult it is to hang on tois like trying to teach an old dog new tricks. The reality of our culture is that it values consumerism over saving. Toys or savings certificates; which do most parents invest in? You can and should have conversations about this early on.
Creative warfare
There is a new book called Cathys Book on the store shelves. It is aimed at young girls and is an onslaught by marketers on the young. Throughout the book, products made by Cover Girl (a subsidiary of Proctor and Gamble) are promoted in lines spoken by the heroine such as she was wearing a killer coat of Lipslicks called Daring. Proctor and Gamble did not pay the publishers directlythat would have been too obvious. They promoted the book on their website aimed at teen girls instead. This is almost certainly the beginning of a new trend in product placement. The only defense against this kind of creative warfare on the part of large corporations is vigilance and knowledge on the part of parents and children. Look honey, you say, This book is a way to advertise; even though it is in the childrens book section, its not childrens literature, is it?
Self publishing and grassroots media creation
Heres a little bit of good news for those of us concerned about media literacy. A welcome change is permeating society. It used to be that people and institutions with power controlled the media. Whilst this is still largely the case, young people are recognizing that they too can create media in the form of websites, emails, blogs, and personal publishing such as books on demand, webcasts, podcasts, and so on. The large media conglomerates are taking notice. Sadly that means buying the places where this publishing and sharing happensMySpace and YouTube are two examples however enough people are left who will be listened to and who will influence the debate in the electronic public square to give us all some hope. Maybe we are not too far away from seeing TV shows that are produced and distributed by amateurs who might have different agendas, such as keeping the populace informed, smart, and skeptical. I doubt whether I will see the day when canned laughter at stale jokes from dysfunctional families portrayed yet again by the same bankable actors, interrupted by the same commercials will be replaced as the staple of prime time. Thank goodness for the History, Science, and Discovery Channels, PBS and their ilk. Note my deliberate omission of BBC America, which seems to have adopted as its new charter pandering to the lowest common denominators of sex, violence, and foul language along with all the others. I guess money talks even in the hallowed, Art Deco halls of Broadcasting House.
Summary
Start deconstructing the media with your children at an early age.
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Use the who, what, why, where, and when questionsand add how. Teach them how and why cross marketing works and what its purpose is. Teach them to be from Missourithe Show Me Stateshow me first why I should buy.
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17: Turning Children into Salespersons

Selling by the nag factor
oddlers in the USA are very big spenders. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, toddlers who cannot yet speak have been observed humming the McDonalds jingle; much to the delight of McDonalds shareholders, I am sure. The same organization also found that one third of all American children has a TV in their room. Put these two observations together, and you will realize why parents tend to buy what the toddlers ask for; and it is usually something they have seen advertised on their favorite TV shows. Many parents worry that their children are being turned into zombies as they watch TV passively. It depends on the TV show. Children sitting down in front of Blues Clues will soon erupt and begin talking back to the characters; and this is good news. The Kaiser Foundation has noted that children who watch quality childrens programming do better at problem solving than those who dont. Obviously the American Academy of Pediatrics watches all this and have advised parents that children younger than two should see no TV, and children over two should be restricted to two hours a day and then only if they are watching quality programming. This is because children take everything in, even messages not intended for them. One embarrassed father is reported to have watched in dismay as his son asked the doctor to prescribe Viagra for his fathers earache.
Gatekeepers against a relentless assault
Parents are being complicit at worst, or negligent at best, if they do not realize that allowing children to watch any TV they want is succumbing to a multi-billion dollar advertising campaign. Harvard psychologist Susan Linn rightly observed, It is sad that just about every media experience for children today is designed to sell something. She goes on to say, that most parents are doing their best in what often feels like an overwhelming and never-ending struggle in the face of a well-funded, brilliantly strategized, relentless assault on children. Parents are the gatekeepers, and I am sure feel ill equipped to cope let alone combat this assault on their children and their credit cards.
The power of a nagging childa marketers dream
What to do? Well, first realize that if you are a single mother, a parent of very small children or teenagers, you are probably susceptible to nagging. If you are not in any of
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the following categories you are less susceptiblebut decidedly not immuneto nagging. According to a study by Western Media International, businesses that sell to children know all about nagging and have attributed up to 46% of their sales to the nag factor. A newsletter called Selling to Kids worked with 150 mothers and found that mothers are nagged by their children on average almost five times per day to buy a product they have seen advertised. The nagging, as I am sure you know, gets worse as children grow. Its a marketers dream world; they have co-opted you as unpaid sales people. Come to think of it, you are not only not paid; you do the paying. To help companies refine their marketing pitch Western Media International helpfully sub-divided parents into four categories: indulgers who give in to their childrens whims all the time; kids pals who are parents who want to have fun with their children, and believe that buying what their children want indulges the parents desires also; conflicted parents, usually single or divorced parents who buy out of guilt, and bare necessities parents who are impervious to nagging and make purchasing decisions on their childrens behalf.
Obviously all of these market segments require slight adjustments to corporate marketing strategies. Perhaps you should look closely at the way the companies target a product, and decide what they are up to and act accordingly. Toddlers are credulous. It is in their nature to believe what they see, and of course, our culture is saturated with images, most of which are created with an agenda or a message. Again, parents are the gatekeepers. It is their responsibility to ensure that what goes into their childrens eyes and ears is wholesome from a developmental perspective. If parents do not do this, their children will not learn to construct messages and meaning for themselves; instead, their meaning and reality will be mainly influenced, if not actually constructed, by marketers; and the other part of the equation is that parents bank account will needlessly suffer also.
Adapting a strategy for media consumption
We all live in the very early stages of what has been called the connected epoch which is changing everything. I am convinced that parents of young children need more than anyone to adapt their parenting to this new paradigm. You have rules about most activities. Why not devise some rules about your childrens media consumption? I do not know you or your children, but I know that there are some things that you probably should do to make your childrens media experience
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more productiveor less deleteriousby not allowing them to simply become yet another a passive audience member for commercial enterprises to exploit. Fight back! In this era of digital manipulation, it makes sense to teach your children to distinguish fact from fiction. This is not as easy as it may seem, since on TV and on the internet there are different levels of realism. Is that woman on TV in a white coat with a stethoscope dangling around her shoulders really a doctor, or the woman handing out diplomas really a college president? Young children think they are. Sit with them as they watch TV until you are sure that they are able to see the constructionsfrom advertisements to puppet showsfor what they are; fabrications with an agenda. Learn how the special effects that make TV shows so appealing are accomplished and make sure your children are aware of them. Show them how product placement in a TV show or a movie is nothing more than advertising. Encourage young children to get a sense of how much time they spend in front of a screen and what they like, and do not like, and why. Get them to write down their thoughts and feelings about their media habits. This more than anything will make them aware of what they are doing with their media consumption. If a child finds that by writing a log of their watching habits they find themselves watching programs they do not like, for instance, this will have a major impact on their life-long media consumption habits.
Summary
TV + toddlers = cash outlays. Toddlers should watch very little TV: its good for them, and saves money too. It is a fact that most of your toddlers TV experiences are sales pitches. You are the gatekeeper. Learn very early on to cope with your childrens nagging. Actively watch TV with your toddlers and teach them how to watch TV.
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18: The Realities of Sex and Violence in the Media

The risks and the antidote
econstructing the mediaall the media, not just TVmeans inevitably addressing the role that sex and violence play in the messages that the media are attempting to feed, with increasing impunity, to your children. Children do not just buy products; they also buy the prevailing culture of the times in which they are growing. There can be no doubt that sex and violence sells. In fact, they can and do sell almost anything.
Negative, harmful trends
The recent trend towards the use of graphic sexual and violent imagery in pop music, which is a huge part of the media your children consume, cannot be ignored. Whether you like it or not, the music industry is pumping lurid lyrics into your childrens ears, and sending them images of violenceparticularly towards womenevery hour of every day. According to DuRant Research, over one quarter of MTV videos portray overt violence, with an attractive role model being the aggressor 80% of the time. The same research shows that 25% of all the music videos on MTV contain alcohol and cigarette use. These numbers are from 1997. I think it is a good guess that these ratios have not gone down in recent years. According to the Journal of Pediatrics in a study published in 2001, On MTV, 75% of videos involves sexual imagery, over half involve violence, and 80% combine the two, suggesting violence against women. Does this constant theme of portraying girls and women as objects of violence and predatory sexual targeting concern you? If it does, talk to your boysnot just the girlsand provide an antidote. As I have said before, self-policing is not a virtue amongst the media conglomerates who peddle this stuff to our children; and when challenged, they always invoke their first amendment rights to do just what they want. The American Academy of Pediatrics watches all this and has calculated that children see an estimated 10,000 acts of violence each year on TV alone, and tell us that by the time a boy or girl graduates from high school they will have witnessed 18,000 violent deaths on TV.
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The peddlers of this kind of imagery have plenty of vehicles to choose from, since there is no shortage of people willing to make a buck off our children by glorifying uncivil behavior, casual sex, drug and alcohol use, and random and gratuitous violence. Radio and TV stations owned by mainstream companies that depend on advertisers such as Proctor and Gamble and Coca Cola must surely object to their messages about their image being sandwiched between lyrics such as this from a performer known as Jay-Z, She wanted us to end cause I f----d her friend. And if they do, no problem, music promoters can simply switch to an unregulated channel. A vivid testament to the coarsening of our culture foisted on us by so-called shock jocks and their amoral paymasters is the reward recently lavished on the scrofulous Howard Sternover $500m by one estimateto take his ghastly, corrosive performances to satellite radio.
The only antidote to the message of sex and violence
The only antidote to all this is the same one promoted by the American Psychiatric Associationcorrectly in my viewwhich is the only way to inoculate children against drugs and other aspects of our culture: you, the parents and teachers. Children learn, especially in their younger years, by copying. If they hear foul language, see drug use and violenceguess what? They will assume that it is a valid use of their communication skills. If they constantly see and hear the other side of the equation from Mom and Dad, that there are choices they can make about language and behavior, the chances are that they will listen to Mom and Dad, since parents carry more weight in the earlier years. By the time they are entering the teen years, and if they have not been inoculated by lessons in responsibility, they will be inured to the blandishments of society about manners and ethics. Left unchecked, we will have lost a generation to the coarsening and corrosive influence of the media at its worst. And like a virus, this affects all of us indiscriminately.
The risks of learning life from music videos
Dont take my word for it. Listen to Doctor Michael Rich, director of the center on Media and Child Health at Childrens hospital in Boston. When we look at the research, it indicates that children who listen to a lot of music videos actually are at risk for violent behavior, substance abuse, and other risky sexual behavior. We draw an artificial distinction between entertainment and education in our culture. We think they go to school and learn all the important lessons they need, and then come home and turn their minds off and watch TV. They are learning all the time. And they learn as much from Marilyn Manson as they do from Abraham Lincoln. That is a sobering assessment that any parent or teacher needs to take to heart. Media literacy is as vital a part of any childs growing up as learning to cross the road safely or not speaking to strangers.
www.AlexTerego.com
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Doctor Rich has done the peer-reviewed, scientific research and published his findings in journals of science. But really, how could anyone, who is even a casual observer of contemporary society come to any other conclusions just with the anecdotal evidence that accumulates by living, reading, and watching? The lesson is obvious. An antidote is needed to the purveyors of all the media that our children consume, and that can only be first their parents and second the teachers. Would you expect the businesses who peddle this stuff to your offspring to forgo their profits and become responsible or even highbrow? Do you expect the schools to spend what little time they have left after teaching children to pass examinations in math and readingand little elseto teach responsible behavior and media literacy? Do you expect politicians to suddenly get a conscience? No, it is your responsibility and yours alone, and the first step is to become literate about all that concerns the welfare of your child, not just the media, and that demands rigorous inquiry.
Summary
The media use sex and violence in their messages with impunity and increasing regularity. The evidence for this is overwhelming. You, the parents, are the only antidote. You make every effort to protect your children from predatorsboth online and in the real worldand you should make just as much of an effort with the media predators who use sex and violence to co-opt your children to their agenda.
Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you. Tell a friend. Alex
www.AlexTerego.com
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Eprimer - Protecting Children in A Multimedia Age - Media Literacy

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Protecting Children in a Multimedia Age Media Literacy

Preparing the next generation for a lifetime of learning

Protecting Children in a Multimedia Age Media Literacy

Answer: The multiplier effect of best practices!

Copyright 2006 Alex Terego www.AlexTerego.com

Chief Editor: Leslie Rowe of www.GreatWords.net

ePrimer Protecting Children in a Multimedia AgeMedia Literacy

1: Introduction: The Media are the New Books

ePrimer Protecting Children in a Multimedia AgeMedia Literacy

ePrimer Protecting Children in a Multimedia AgeMedia Literacy

ePrimer Protecting Children in a Multimedia AgeMedia Literacy

ePrimer Protecting Children in a Multimedia AgeMedia Literacy

The Ontario, Canada Ministry of Education defines media literacy as:

ePrimer Protecting Children in a Multimedia AgeMedia Literacy

ePrimer Protecting Children in a Multimedia AgeMedia Literacy

ePrimer Protecting Children in a Multimedia AgeMedia Literacy

ePrimer Protecting Children in a Multimedia AgeMedia Literacy

2: Looking, Making, and Reading All Texts

ePrimer Protecting Children in a Multimedia AgeMedia Literacy

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ePrimer Protecting Children in a Multimedia AgeMedia Literacy

ePrimer Protecting Children in a Multimedia AgeMedia Literacy

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5: The Purpose of Advertisers

ePrimer Protecting Children in a Multimedia AgeMedia Literacy

The job of the advertiser

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ePrimer Protecting Children in a Multimedia AgeMedia Literacy

6: Positioning, Image, and Product Personality

ePrimer Protecting Children in a Multimedia AgeMedia Literacy

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7: Seeing Beyond the Messageand the Messenger

ePrimer Protecting Children in a Multimedia AgeMedia Literacy

Advertisings stupid men

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8: Do I Really Believe What I am Seeing?

ePrimer Protecting Children in a Multimedia AgeMedia Literacy

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9: Spin the Publics Opinion and All Will Be Well

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ePrimer Protecting Children in a Multimedia AgeMedia Literacy

10: Billboards: a Malign Influence

ePrimer Protecting Children in a Multimedia AgeMedia Literacy

Billboards, accidents, and powerful lobbyists

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11: Teaching Media Literacy

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ePrimer Protecting Children in a Multimedia AgeMedia Literacy