Why Study Media Messages?

We all use them. We all love them. Media messages are important parts of our lives. 

Fish don't ask about water. Birds don't ask about air. We humans have a more evolved and complex brain than any other living creature. Yet, we often react in the same way to our media saturated environment as our brothers with fish and bird brains. 

Media messages, from those in books, to the latest software, are such a welcome presence in our lives (think all the fun we have). While we spend our time being entertained, they may rob us, without our awareness, of our privacy, personal data and, most importantly, precious time.

This is About Money

Media, for all its attractions, is first and foremost an industry. Media takes our attention and time and uses them to make money. 

We are the product, not the images that captured us. Those are bait. Media companies sell our eyes and interests to advertisers, businesses and mailing lists in order to sell us stuff. 

We are entertained in the bargain. The transaction is ingrained and automatic. Each time we browse, stream or listen to music, a podcast or a book we signal our agreement that the transaction is acceptable to us. 

Until we stop, take a moment, and put a pin in it. 

Try This At Home: Five Questions

Asking questions about the media we are immersed in protects our time and how it's used. Over time we become more conscious consumers of media.  

Welcome to media literacy and its gifts. It is an important road to start on whatever our age. The benefits are enormous. With media literacy, we add to our enjoyment of media, we feel more sure about how we use our time and resources, and when we Don the writer/producer hat to create our own media messages, they are more effective because we are media literate.

Why should we improve our awareness of media? Don’t we have enough to do already?

Fostering a questioning attitude towards media products does not come naturally. An entire army of programmers  exists to keep our attention moving along, not stopping to ask pesky questions. We’re not supposed to stop and inspect media or ask questions about it.

If a media message is a piece of chocolate cake, think of the five questions of media literacy as knowing not only how the cake tastes, but also how the baker made the cake, what is inside it, how long it took to bake it and how and when to serve it. 

Some may be content to have their cake and eat it, without aspiring to know its journey from ingredients to our teeth. Some may be content to know we consumers are the product, not the messages we consume.  

The benefit of asking questions of our media breaks a belief that media messages are akin to magic. We learn that mistakes can happen and the people who create media messages have their own biases and agendas as well as put their pants legs on one at a time. 

Our curiosity about media helps, protects and serves us.  Since our time is limited, it is important to select with awareness and care how we spend whatever time we allot to media.

Questioning Media Messages Is Active

When we passively watch whatever is on the set or find ourselves down another rabbit hole on our phone, we often ask where did all that time go? The five media literacy questions break the spell that media so deftly casts. 

Media Literacy Questions Awaken Us From Slumber  

Dorothy landed in Oz to discover an old man behind a drawn curtain, pulling ropes and sounding otherworldly while putting on a show for his benefit alone. Dorothy and her journey to return home began when she awakened to what she had not known before she drew back the curtain. 

Asking questions around media messages is not something we need to always do, but,  because media messages shape our views and lives, it's something we always need to know how to do.  

Our engagement deepens when we explore the message to uncover assumptions and biases. The practice gets easier, even automatic. 

When we are passive, our minds are unguarded, receptive, and un-questioning. When we ask questions, we shake off our comfort. We lace up our sneakers. This is no longer a sit-down spectator sport. 

Studying a scene in a movie or an image looming over us on a bulletin board can be a way for parents to engage with their kids on values or assumptions. It models to kids that asking questions of media messages is not only allowed but helpful to someone growing up.

Drawing back the curtain to show the hidden sides and angles of any message or story, even one made with multiple millions of dollars, pays us back with even greater riches. Media literacy allows us to thrive, instead of aimlessly wonder as we wander, serving other's interests before our own, in the media rich world that surrounds us.

3/27/13 Edie Takes Her Case to the Top Court in the Land

This Saturday morning in August, 2011, we in Texas are expecting the highest temperatures of the year, 106 degrees. There’s a heat wave and drought that brings stress to wildlife, as well as anxiety to people about falling water levels in the aquifer and wildfire. Meanwhile, on the East Coast of our country, Mother Nature brings in waves of storms and winds in the form of Hurricane Irene, whose swath threatens the coastline from North Carolina, through New York’s densely populated boroughs, to New England. Those extremes -- drought and deadly storms-- are happening at once on the fearful body of our country.

It’s days like this that make it clear to me just how big the United States really are in scope and scale. Stumbling upon the stunning beauty of historic piazzas in Florence a few years ago, I was astounded by the scope and scale of those beautiful structures, built hundreds of years ago by our human ancestors. I thought of scope and scale again when I recently read about a successful entrepreneur who lost all business fear by hitch-hiking across the country with less than ten dollars in his pocket. His adventures taught him to shift his ideas of what was possible, to live his life with less care about the “what if” fears that keep many of us from being who we would like to be, our real selves.

When I was a girl, TV’s vision of our times was large and supposedly all encompassing -- but my life was missing. Where were the Mexicans who weren’t maids, gardeners or bandidos? Was I invisible to our culture? I held tight to the representations I accepted and adopted about what it meant to be American. My scope and scale was such in those early years that I couldn’t figure out where we borderlanders fit in.

TV seemed like it was telling the truth. I was sure that the people in the 1910‘s and 1920‘s I saw on newsreel footage walked faster and in a quirky odd gait. Why did people walk so differently back then, I wondered, not understanding filming technologies that were in their early stages. When my Arizona cousins would travel to Texas and Mexico to visit our grandmother, I asked my Tio for their stationwagon keys so I could listen to the Arizona radio stations that I was sure they had brought with them in their car radio.

It was with this same scope and scale of truth that I learned that every media depiction of being gay was terribly tragic, especially for lesbians. On the screen at least, I learned it would be deadly to be gay. I remember seeing movies like “Therese and Isabel” or “The Fox” (D.H. Lawrence), “The Killing of Sister George” (adapted from Frank Marcus’ play) or other plays stories like “The Little Foxes” (Lillian Hellman). There were others, I’m sure. In most media depictions for the better part of the last century being gay meant you were a loser: you either committed suicide because you were gay, or someone killed you because you were gay.

For some viewers of media, it is somehow a function of media to set in our mind’s eye the scope and scale of our perception of the world. Then an event like a massive hurricane comes to reset the view. We are still a large country, but we seem smaller in our vulnerabilities to drought and storm, regardless of our scale and scope.

Likewise, my perception of what it means to be gay in the media has been adjusted to a wider, more full screen recently. I saw the television documentaries, “For My Wife” and “Edie and Thea: A Very Long Engagement,” two ground-breaking projects that shifted my focus and view to a new level.

In “For My Wife” a Northwest’s woman’s struggle for equality in the eyes of the law finds support that breaks barriers for all of us, no matter where we live in this big, wide country. “Edie and Thea” tells the story of a couple of ‘classy dames’ who shared their love and lives for 42 years.

My vision was advanced to a new “setting” by these two honest and moving documentaries. I think of the many girls happening upon these Netflix offerings and seeing hope and possibility for themselves or their gay friends instead of the gray and sad films that were made in the last century.

That makes me happy,and relieved: The scope and scale of my perception are flexible and can still be affected by what I encounter on our media. That give me hope for this country and the world. I’m reminded that despite our differences, our American measure in miles doesn’t compare to our measure of creativity and persistence in defining ourselves by the compass of truth, compassion and diversity.