Technology, in addition to being a learning tool, is and always has been a portal into the world of consumerism. Unfortunately, much of modern consumer culture is fueled by a corporate/media oligopoly designed to create insecurities within the general population so that money can be made assuaging the false needs created by the same corporate/media machine. With that understanding, it should be expected that by using its ubiquity, the corporate/media partnership is making meticulous plans on how they can best exploit their corporate partnerships and the education technology movement in order to more effectively bully our nation's youth into consumerist submission.
The situation is already dire at best. With research claiming that the average person sees upwards of 5000 ads a day, and understanding that many of these ads continue to disseminate and reinforce ideas of female objectification and dismemberment, physical male dominance and aggression, unattainable male and female body images, sexualization of increasingly younger subjects, along with ethnic stereotypes and under-representation, it is imperative that teachers and students comprehend the uninvited influences entering the classroom so those teachers and students can effectively combat the media messages and all of their negative effects that increasingly plague our youth every year.
To potentially compound the problem, the Common Core State Standards explicitly include the creation of media as an assessment tool. In most classrooms, it would be a safe guess to say that neither the teacher nor the vast majority of students have a great deal of experience in media literacy, let alone media creation. After all, the students and most teachers have been raised as products of the misogynistic, corporate mainstream media that has only increased its stronghold over public discourse and ideology during the past twenty years of media deregulation.
Consequently, if as a nation of educators, we are going to expect our classroom stakeholders to consume and create media, then we need to do a much better job at training teachers, students, and administrators as to exactly what that means. Otherwise, much of what gets created stands the chance of mimicking the toxic values that already permeate society and youth culture in particular.
This situation is also an important reason that classroom stakeholders need to openly understand and embrace social media in the classroom. For instance, too many teachers and students still view Twitter as simply a gossip or texting site. In doing so, they are missing the fact that social networks are vital in today's world for activities including personal and professional networking, collaborating with like-minded individuals around the globe, fostering and spreading social activism, and combating the mainstream corporate/media machine by offering massive networks of smaller alternative news sources.
Understanding that allowing and embracing social media in the classroom also opens the door to the dreaded mainstream media machine, makes it all the more apparent that the media literacy piece of the equation be implemented and expanded as quickly as possible. So, if you are reading this blog, let's continue to use the voice that the internet and social networking has given us, so that we can spread ideas to continue making important educational reforms and combat the ignorance, apathy, fear, and negativity that is the bread and butter of the corporate/media machine.
And let's do it quickly because if you know anything about net neutrality, it's pretty obvious that they're on to us.
Thanks for reading. Follow me on Twitter @mrtessier33
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