How you can use and not be used by the media will be the broad goal of this column. Welcome to our maiden outing. Toth’s expertise in media literacy and Ball’s grasp of the ways in which macroeconomic and geopolitical trends profoundly affect our lives and careers will unite the micro and the macro. By doing so we’ll make this Big Data world small enough for you to find your way. We’ll provide a map drawn from specific examples of how the media impacts your life and work and how you can change both for the better by using media to your advantage.
To do this, we’ll wear business suits when exploring the practical and smocks as we paint and occasionally mock the cultural. We’ll take a light approach to illuminate what can’t be taken lightly, much less in the dark. In a world of endless broadcasts, you can be a spectator or a player. We’re here to tell you how to broadcast yourself. How to use and not be used by the media.
Our message to you: Don’t just sit there looking at your computer (or tablet, or phone). Engage! Say something into the plastic gardenia arrangement perched innocuously enough on your desk. Start questioning your motives and desires.
Let’s define media literacy. It’s a simple concept that promises and delivers to you the limits of your power. However limited your power, you have some power, and media literacy shows you how to use it. Here’s how the Media Literacy Project defines media literacy:
Today, we get most of our information through an interwoven system of media technologies. The ability to read many types of media has become an essential skill in the 21st Century. Media literacy is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media. Media literate youth and adults are better able to understand the complex messages we receive from television, radio, Internet, newspapers, magazines, books, billboards, video games, music, and all other forms of media.
Here’s how this column approaches you, media literacy and what you can do with media.
First, you can diffuse media myths like, “Believe in your dreams, follow your passion, and if you can conceive and believe it, you can achieve it. And we will tell you so ‘through an interwoven system of media technologies’ that never let you go until you finally cut the media’s umbilical cord of fairy tales.”
Here’s a scalpel for a simple operation that will remove some of your blues:
The media promotes the myth that there’s such a thing as “the news” upon which you can depend to know and understand the supposed events of the day. Knowingly or not, Brian Williams proved that myth untrue. He seemingly set fire to his reputation by inventing “news” that didn’t happen, violating the most basic journalistic ethics. How dare he!
But “the news” doesn’t even report the news regarding itself, for Williams’ NBC contact defines him not as a journalist, reporter or newscaster but as an artist. Williams’ job function is to be a news artist. He and all major newscasters (don’t report the news so much as they) (far less report the news than) redraw it. They may wear business suits while reading “the news”, but behind the scenes, they dress in smocks from which the day’s true news drips to the floor into a pool of paint, soon mopped away by a janitor.
“The news” serves many masters. We’re here you to tell you the real news. Unlike news artists, we’ll show and tell you the who, what, why, and when of those whom this veneer of news serves. For the moment, however, consider this point: Williams will likely lose the job by the very act of performing his job function.
Back to you. Remember that little issue of conventional employment and the fast-receding prospect of a gold watch for 30-year’s of loyalty, which you expected to be given at your retirement party? Instead, you’ve been given short shift. A full-time and reliable job has become a unicorn in the American imagination. Despite the widely-reported ‘”falling” unemployment number, one in ten Americans or, “as many as 30 million Americans are out of work or underemployed.” (“The Big Lie: 5.6% Unemployment” by Jim Clifton, Gallup, 3 February 2015)
If you’re not one of the unemployed, you’re likely concerned you may soon become one, and well you should be. Perhaps you’ve already faced unemployment and – at the end of 10,000 job apps that rejected you like ice too cold to bother melting as fast as your hope – you finally said, “Then I must sell myself.”
Congratulations. “You are correct, sir,” says Ed McMahon. The modern work world gives no answers, but it may force some from those with the guts to choose. One aspect of media literacy is information literacy. Your job apps amount to information, of course, and the responses and even non-responses become still more information. Information requires its own special literacy. By learning to better understand information, you learn to better use it. Then you might land a job. At least you’ll stand a chance.
But maybe not. Learning to read between the lines doesn’t guarantee you’ll change your life sentence; you might become yet another jailhouse armature attorney. To write your story – take control of your life – you must learn to use the media to your advantage. You’re what we call a “sub-optimized” professional. You’ve put in the hard work to establish your education, professionalism and expertise, yet you’ve seemingly failed to leverage your value; in fact, you’ve been denied the opportunity. Or, you’re a high-performance small business owner with barely enough time in the day to put out company fires. Broadcasting your message is a far-off luxury. You’re schedule has silenced you. You’re invisible.
Your media myth? You’re living the “death of a salesman”. That’s because you’ve been selling everything but yourself. Listening to “the news” rather than acting on the news of another day gone down the drain.
MediAction, (the name of this column) means acting with, on and by using the media. The media is nothing but a concept, an “interwoven system of technologies” that seems to leave you in stitches. It wants to leave you on the outside looking in, a constant spectator of a life that someone else lives and a world that is fabricated.
You have two options:
Option 1: Eventually, you find yourself thinking. “I can’t get no satisfaction… and wouldn’t get any if it were given to me.” Your appetite becomes insatiable because nothing satiates it. The more media you consume, the more bottomless your sense of alienation deepens by the very act of trying to it.
Option 2: You weave your way back into the world. We’ll show you how to use and act on the media. Instead of buying dreams, you’ll begin to recall a reality full of all the possibilities every media fantasy claims to offer, but denies. Neither spectator nor machine, you will come to know what Kafka means: “How out of one mystery there always comes a greater one! In the first moment the breath leaves the human calculator.”