Cultural Media Literacy

(from "Cultural Bias in Prime Time Television and Teenage Viewers: Cultural Media Literacy for High School and Higher Education", pg.196)

Cultural Media Literacy, a development borne of this study, was an important and necessary advancement in the growth of general media literacy education, research and organization. While most media literacy focused adequately on the dynamics of medium production and distribution, how it worked visually, graphically and/or sonically and possible effects in society (Strasburger & Wilson, 2002), these efforts did not show a marked trend toward deeper discussion of particular social issues as a whole. All of the aforementioned organizations and efforts were spectacular undertakings and deserve to be supported and grown. The discourse must have at some point advanced more deeply into the core of the social dynamic, the people themselves. That core was the source or container of the conflict and/or challenge in values and dominant life practice around which the discussion about media and television revolved. That human core was the locus of hope for the ultimate growth in positive human development.

Cultural Media Literacy sought to advance the discussion of television in
particular and mass communications media in general as a serious motive social force, but also to raise issue with the society’s grasp of its own negative and positive tendencies, to help redefine and broaden its understanding of itself and its pattern of cultural consumption and production. The media, the empty television stations, dark movie theaters or unlit fiber-optic internet cables were not the criminals, but the ways in which they had been manipulated by some people and consumed and used by so many more could have been considered as such. The hammer was not responsible for whether it was used as a tool for construction of home or a weapon of destruction of life, so the media in general and television in particular were also powerful, desirable tools of constructive change and transformation, almost innocent by themselves until imbued with the higher intentions of the creator and consumer alike.

Cultural Media Literacy defined conventional media literacy issues and elements as important, but only a part of the larger discussion that must happen with regard to mass communications in any society. Aside from the deleterious, anti-social forces and consequences of corporate media conglomeration, within Cultural Media Literacy, the media were simply the carriers of the message and these messages are important to society’s ability to observe itself, analyze its tendencies, whether realistic or fantastic, fictional or non-fictional, and make functional, practical decisions, actions and changes in its forward motion through time. Without a substantive discussion about the actual elements that television could only raise issue about or narrow discourse on, any society would only have been spinning its wheels with regard to mentioning mass communications media, cultural issues and social responsibility and positive social development.

Cultural Media Literacy defined culture and society as an organic and embodied human force that was simply and gloriously a macrocosm of the dynamism of the individual human being. Just as the individual must have been able to have insight into its own reality, tendencies, strengths and weaknesses, so must have society as a whole been able to look at itself and through informed observation and contemplative insight been able to lessen its pathologies and increase the effects of the best elements that it had to offer itself.

Cultural Media Literacy assumed that people cared enough about other people that we should have been actively and constantly engaged in each other’s development for the good of the society and each individual within it. This concept was essential for any conscious and active society to move forward, progressively and intelligently. The history of countless cultures pointed to the necessity of this one to, like them, make informed and conscious choices about its future, in the interest of those who would carry it forward. Teenagers were the beneficiaries of our greatest failures and achievements. They found information, crystal clear and deeply flawed on the millions of small screens lit by the culturally biased images given robust life in prime time television.