Mixed...Media, Races, Messages, Part I

I've always had a thing for media. By that, I don't mean network television, per se. I'm primarily interested in other sources ...advertising, music, movies, popular literature, magazines, newspapers...and the effect they have on our culture. I did my English term paper in college on Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage, an amazing read from an author with a unique perspective. I highly recommend it and think I'll have to soon read it again for myself. I read my "local" newspaper, a very good one, on a semi-regular basis. I'm having anxiety attacks about what is going to happen to my precious Inquirer now that their parent corporation, Knight Ridder, has been bought by McClatchy, which plans to lop off both the Inquirer and its sister paper, the Philadelphia Daily News, along with ten other US newspapers.

It's all intertwined, you know...government, business, advertising, news media, war, economics, art. This is not some psycho, conspiracy theory. They are inexorably connected and, of necessity, both shape, and are shaped by, our culture.

I worry about monolithic media conglomerates sucking up news outlets like giant vacuums. I fret over the possible (likely? inevitable?) homogenization of the news we are fed. I worry about the chilling effect these buyouts and mergers might have on real freedom of speech and expression in the US. I fear Big Brother has moved in. I'm especially paranoid after watching V for Vendetta last evening. Kind of makes me want to go out and buy again all that George Orwell I read as a teenager. I worry about the direction our nation has been heading in, but that's for another post. I thank God for the free internet!

I subscribe to Alternet via daily e-mail and through an RSS feed (I think that's the term for it...I'm really a virgin with this stuff.). Any news outlet that carries Molly Ivins is fine by me! I don't read every article they send along but some things capture my attention, such as Merchants of Crap, a very interesting Frontline page which outlines the largest media conglomerates and their holdings. That's what started me on this media and culture thought thread and harkened me back to my McLuhan-loving days.

Also through Alternet, I found a page for this Frontline documentary. I remember hearing about this teacher's sociological experiment years ago, with little understanding. I found the PBS/Frontline documentary, A Class Divided, in the 80's or early 90's. If you'd like to watch it for yourself, here's that link. Here is the blurb from Frontline:

"One day in 1968, Jane Elliot, a teacher in a small, all-white Iowa town divided her third-grade class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups and gave them a daring lesson in discrimination. This is the story of that lesson, its lasting impact on the children, and its enduring power thirty years later." (Editorial note: Since I couldn't cut and paste this, any resultant typos are mine.)

I still find the concept and the program fascinating, having just watched it again myself.

Some of my thoughts on watching A Class Divided:

It amazes me that this experiment was allowed at all. Imagine, in this age, a teacher having such leeway to create and implement a lesson on social acceptance, cultural indoctrination and discrimination (pick you flavor there). I'm not a teacher, but I don't see how that would be possible in today's educational climate.

I am flabbergasted and appalled by how rapidly the children, little 9 year-old sponges that they were, were inculcated into acceptance of the fact that one person was better than another solely based on the color of their eyes, how readily they bought into the myth. In a span of half a day, the interaction between the children degenerated to the point of name-calling based on eye color. By the afternoon, the children were commenting that, "they always call us that...brown eyes," as if this had been their lot since birth. Intellectually, I understand this indoctrination but my heart cries out against it.

I recall, with a certain sense of shame that I; as a grade-schooler, junior high-schooler and full-fledged teenager; found such displays of contempt and discrimination abhorent but lacked the fortitude, at the time, to speak out against it.

I recall how much I loved my HS best friend because she did find the courage to openly oppose belittling or denegrating speech and behavior. She was my heroine.

I wonder if Mrs. Elliot received a PhD based on her experiment. If not, she should have...or a sainthood!

I am sorry we don't have every teacher, business leader, politician, health care professional, lawyer and judge in workshops like this on an annual basis. I am sorry there hasn't been, to my knowledge, a Jane Elliot revolution in educating children about discrimination of all sorts.

I hope I'm not sorry about expressing my feelings along this train of thought. This is only the start and there's much more I'd like to think about and express here. Please be gentle? ; )

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