My hours on and off media and why it matters

Numbers too large for me to calculate. 

Like so many American children of the 1960’s and 70’s, I practically lived sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the television set.  There must be serious chunks of my brain so steeped in the fiction of the stories and ideas I consumed that they are as much a part of me as my DNA.  

TV was a window to the world. Like so many kids, at my home there weren’t many other affordable past-times such as sports leagues, music or art lessons. There were few parks or public pools, and no museums to hang out in my small town. My older brothers and sister, however, did not grow up with a TV in the house. My family was a bridge between the eras before and after TV's explosive growth.

I grew up and began my life-long study of communication. After college, I worked in commercial and public radio and television.  Ultimately, I obtained advanced degrees so I could teach communication at the college level.  I spent thousands of hours with hundreds of college students over the past 35 plus years, fifteen before the Internet, and the remainder after its arrival. We explored the evolution and business of mass media industries, their impact on society. We studied the emerging Internet-based communication platforms that now form the fabric of so much of our current social, educational and work lives. 

Before and After Smart Phones

Like my generation of test pilot TV viewers, my college students were also test pilots, who lived in the world pre and post the arrival of the Internet and social media platforms. When I compared students engagement in my classes before and after the introduction of the smart phone and social media I noticed a marked decline. 

The distraction of their cell phones on the desk was like an itch they couldn’t help but scratch. The immediate attraction of a new text message from home or from a friend, or a notification from Facebook or Twitter was too compelling to set aside during note-taking for lectures or lesson activities. 

Their focus was lost for a few minutes each time their phone distracted them with alerts or to be glanced at for updates of any kind. After the smart phone interruption was attended to, the student then mentally returned to the course material. There were now gaps in their learning. Time was lost in the ramping up required to catch up. Multiply this by several times each class period by the majority of students.  The loss in learning was the same as if  a student arrived a few minutes late or left early each class period.  A few minutes may not have mattered, but in the aggregate would come to matter quite a lot. I saw the distractions of a smart phone were a disadvantage that out-weighed its advantages.

 

What Tech Hath Wrought

As exciting as technology has been for me professionally (I am retired from teaching and now I write, shoot and edit videos), there are downsides to what tech has brought us. Like that of my students, I notice my ability to focus is a constant struggle. 

Where was I? Yes. That bad. On the surface, I look steady, reliable and attentive. That’s the front yard. Come see the burning dumpster in the back yard, where half dressed projects prance around teasingly, wagging hands and fingers from their ears, wearing socks that don’t match.

I tried hard to focus and stay on task. I wrote daily to-do lists, practiced mindfulness and meditation, and I read and re-read hundreds of self-help books. Yet, the seductive siren call of the screen beckoned. I stopped to read texts, checked to see if there was a new text or email. I stopped and started my work several times every few minutes. I scanned social media, podcasts, and news sites. Just as for my students, time slipped stealthily away for in-real-life pursuits like face-to-face dinners, face-to-face walks with friends, getting to know more people and learn new things. 

As my hours on social media increased so did my dissatisfaction.  At the end of the day, I felt tired of constantly stopping and starting, setting and resetting my focus. I saw the hours slip away from the day and many of my goals recede further in the distance.

Screens accompany us everywhere we go. They help us get where we drive to, and act as our adjunct brains for learning, work and entertainment. Smartphones have become so familiar we often consider them a natural part of our life and home. But our phones and the platforms they contain are not natural. They are an industry. They offer us entertainment and access to information. They then sell our personal information and preferences to others for their advertising and profit.  It is convenient to the industry that we keep thinking of smartphones as tools we employ, rather than see ourselves as employed (and exploited) by these tools. 

Turning An Ocean Liner

The essays and activities in this book are a result of my efforts to do something constructive about my backyard dumpster fire. I want to transform my dissatisfaction with social media and its impact on the quality of our communication. This e-book is a contribution from a teacher in the frontlines of college teaching, whose boots are worn and muddy. 

My goal is to have us rethink our contract with social media. From my classroom experience, I offer ideas and options to parents of children and teens to help them harness the tools in our purses and pockets.  We can set up guardrails of our own design into place and practice, long before regulatory bodies can climb across lobbyists whose job it is to keep us blissfully unaware of smart phones' adverse effects. 

The time has come for my college classroom to spread its message of empowerment and potential into homes and school campuses everywhere.

It is important for us to study how our tech tools, like all tools, can hurt us and our kids, when they are used without preparation or carelessly. Years from now, we may think of our culture's rapid embrace of smartphones as unfortunate, just as we now think about to the dangerous era of dynamite's early days, or when physicians and surgeons were uninformed about germs and refused to clean their hands before operating on a person. So many avoidable deaths. 

Rethinking our relationship to something as familiar as our technology is easier said than done. For me it's been like turning an ocean liner. It takes focus, time and energy.

 The good news is we are not alone on our journey. More importantly, the prize for our efforts is regaining for ourselves and our loved ones the priceless time and experiences that might otherwise have gone unnoticed in moments of distraction.

This Changes Everything

Is America a diverse country? 

If so, do on-screen representations in films, televisions and other media reflect this diversity? 

This Changes Everything is a documentary streaming on Netflix about the effort to have more women and people from diverse backgrounds direct films and television programs. It is also about the power of data.

Why are diverse directors important? Voices from the many cultures of our nation translate directly to stories that reflect and include those of marginalized people. This can mean everything to multicultural audiences in our country and to those who watch what we Americans export to the rest of the world.

This Changes Everything is a thorough, detailed, persuasive and illustrative examination of power and how difficult it is to attain power especially when gaining power for one group equals losing power for another group. 

In any discussion of media, power is an important player. In my college communication classes I focused on the power of government, churches and the marketplace of ideas on mediums of mass communication. 

By definition, power is held with strength and is rarely relinquished voluntarily. It is usually held by muscle and by force. 

But this documentary shows that there is also another force that is also an important player: children. Children reside outside of the usual equations of power in media, such as free market v. government imposed regulations, free speech v. limitations and recognition of the importance of representation of women and minorities in media. 

Children can change the equation because they reside in both opposing camps of mainstream media and the those who want to enter and populate mainstream media, folks such as women and people from diverse backgrounds. 

The power of children in the equation is hard to measure because children and their importance transcends that of money or strength. They are the future of our human race and its survival. 

Children are the keepers of our knowledge, our treasure of wisdom. They are the product of humanity, a product more precious than the sum of the rest our other inventions and ideas. 

The documentary shows that the way to fix a problem begins by recognizing that a problem exists. I have seen the debate about on-screen representation of women and minorities waged loudly or quietly for the past 50 years. There are still many in positions of privilege who refuse to recognize that a problem exists. That could be changing with the arrival of research data. Research data now show in hard-to-argue-against numbers that our on screen worlds in fact do not match our in real life in-person worlds. 

Children are influenced by what they see. Children’s on-screen viewing can affect their ideas on how strong or weak, how powerful or powerless they believe themselves to be. 

In the 1960’s, Fred Rogers and the Children’s Television Workshop were both pioneers of an early recognition of the importance of protecting children’s viewing. Those were the days that television used the public airwaves to broadcast programs, so government had a clear and defined role. I was very influenced by my classes at the University of Texas especially my course on children and television taught by Aida Barrera, the producer of Carrascolendas. The PBS program for children which depicted life in small-town South Texas. 

With the advent of cable and the Internet, the public’s airwaves were no longer used in. TVwould become a private industry and with additional deregulation laws our government’s role became less defined. That role is at the heart of current efforts stop regulate internet monopolies. 

The documentary shows recent research data is irrefutable. What children see on-screen is unbalanced and distorted in its representation of gender and diversity. 

The documentary shows the efforts to quantify and bring data into the present day legal argument to balance representation of women and diverse populations and also to fold in the importance of children into the equation. 

That may prove to be the winning formula. 

It gives me hope for progress. 

I have witnessed the decades of struggle to bring change to the massively powerful and lucrative entertainment media industry. The tipping point may be the role of children and the importance of protecting their minds and hearts. 

People in the industry entrenched with profits-uber-alles mentality may think “hey it’s my paycheck! Get out of here with your gender and diversity equality ideas,“ but everyone—however much money they are making—has a stake in children. 

We all share dreams of a better future. If anything can change the course of media misrepresentation it may be the idea of including how misrepresentations detrimentally affects all children.

Equal employment opportunity commission efforts and other legal remedies are truly important drivers, but in the marketplace of ideas putting kids first may be the way to turn the wheel of change in on-screen representation of women and diverse groups forward, faster and further. 

Children’s well-being depends on changing how gender and diversity are shown on screen. 

It is interesting that finally seeing data that measures misrepresentation may be what brings opposing camps finally together to work together.  I look forward to the day the stories we tell are of who we really are and who we can be, instead of who we aren’t. 

Finally! Mi Gente!

I am shining all my shoes. And my boots and sandals, too. St.Peter might call me and I want to look presentable.

Why, you might ask, am I preparing for looking my best for the next chapter?  I have spent the past week holed up in front of my TV avoiding the coronavirus like the rest of the planet.  And a miracle happened. In 65 years of watching more television than I care to calculate, I have finally seen Mi Gente!

My people! People of the Americas. Indigenous, mestizo, mighty and in all our multiplicities. On two --count 'em-- not one, Netflix series. This qualifies as a miracle of the media kind in this retired Communications and Journalism teacher’s eyes.

Gentefied is set in Los Angeles and Undone is set here in Texas. Both are so worthy of praise and being cited as a media miracle.

My shoes are shined Saint Peter you can take me now, but I hope you take your time.  I want to see more of this miracle of finally seeing Raza portrayed in complex storylines with fully rendered push and pull of young and old, traditional and modern, and chingos of diversity.

The miracle of 2020 is that I have lived long enough to finally see television that portrays people that look like me: Not white, not black,  not brown, not yellow, but everything all at once. Throw into this mix the beauty of our armful of languages, music, art, and spirituality and you have a glimpse of the true Raza Cosmica whatever that might be shaping into.

I know portraying raza was a lot for Madison Avenue and Hollywood to take in with their tendency to flatten and simplify. Then, bam! Like the Big Bang only with a great soundtrack. Now that it's here, I'm still picking myself off the couch in disbelief. And boy, have I been waiting.

Besides being ecstatic, maybe, as Anne Lamott might say, some of us might be a little pissed with TV for only showing us as anything but hookers and gangsters. But it seems that if you wait long enough miracles sometimes do happen.

Now when and if I ever do make it past St. Peter’s gate, I plan walk in muy dueña wearing my shiny shoes and I'm going to ask what the hell took so dang long for TV to finally show our cultura’s beautiful diversity and dignity!??

I hope St. Peter understands I’m not ungrateful, just a little moody about the long-ass wait.

Channels of My Imagination

We watched television last night that made me wish for more.

I was asked to be a judge for Cinefestival this year. The task of a festival judge is to view and make critical decisions scoring projects by the strength of the story editing direction etc.

It is a most imperfect process but one that is necessary when you need to assign values. Filmmakers’ long months of complex work researching and building their productions are reduced to points, quantifying by necessity the creative work that, thrillingly and by definition, escapes number assignments.

We saw stories of homegrown music and art that grow like cactus around here, with only a little rain and total disregard from mainstream, commercial mass media.

What is missing in the current rain storms of media flowing to us from the Internet, satellites and cable that are currently replacing the managed mainstream offerings that television has had for 50 years is a curator. Without a curator, we are blind in a storm and thus we may find we are going in circles instead of forward. Luckily, last night we had a curator, who selected the submissions for us to judge, festival director, Manuel Solis. He is busy organizing the 40th edition of the indie festival at The Guadalupe Theater July 5-8 this summer.

Watching the lineup of documentaries last night reminded me how much I miss local creative documentary productions. I imagined how amazing it would be if we had a steady supply of locally-sourced productions:  Imagine a Narciso Martinez channel beside a Neil deGrasse Tyson channel. A Sandra Cisneros channel beside a Chris Rock standup comedy channel. A mad mix of mainstream and mini-stream.  In this way, the media we consume would be a well-proportioned plate of delicious fresh food, a balanced diet that helps us grow stronger in ideas, actions and identity, looking inward as well as outward. 

There needs to be an app for that.

I need an algorithm to find more works about our city and region.

But first, before that, I need an algorithm that supports local artist to create more videos about our city and region.

And before that, I need an algorithm that, more importantly, sparks in the minds of artists notions about local and regional topics to be explored creatively with outcomes or endings unknown: A journey taken for whatever insight and learning may be revealed in the process.

At the very start, I need an app for video documentaries that ask more questions than provide answers. Documentaries whose arc evolves in the process of interviews and the editing timeline as much is in the minds of the producers.

I need an algorithm that sorts the entertainment available in the lineup that comes in from the current curtain of rain. One that promotes local and regional productions and collects some for us to pick and view some nights on the couch, so we can learn more about this place we live in, drive across and spend our lives drawing our breath from.

I had a taste of that future last night.