Chapter 5: My Thoughts...
Those who control the past control the future.
(Please note: The text below was written in 2001, a chilling reminder that the issues facing society today have their roots decades in the past)
This research paper deals with a very complex, insidious problem. Media and information technology have the capability to mold our culture in a manner never before realized in all of history. The ties to the past that we, as individuals, pass on to our children are at risk of being diluted into oblivion and our thoughts are being molded into a homogeneous lifestyle devoid of diversity and history. All of the cultural traditions that were once passed on generation to generation are being lost through media's incessant barrage of commercialism convincing people to change their lifestyles to that which benefits the corporate bottom line. Without the vast diversity of traditional life styles we, as a society loose the understanding of the past. Without an emotional, human based understanding of what the past was like we cannot truly understand why things occurred that have caused events of the present. Without firm, in-depth understandings of the present, we, as a society, have lost the ability to control our future.
Those who control the past control the future…. how could someone control the past? Could someone really control our future? The findings to my research have provided some answers to these two questions. The potential, according to my analysis, is there for the manipulation of information and, in doing so, the manipulation of how society reacts to that information. We communicate with information. Data obtained from seeing someone's facial expression, hearing a sound, the sight of an image, all are forms of communication. This paper touched on how information that we obtain in such communication can be altered and appears to be different than what it first started out as being.
We must think about how each of us knows about history, about the past. We read books about events in the past; we re-tell stories that we have heard from others about past events; old copies of newspapers, magazines, letters, manuscripts hold information about the past; and films, photographs, and audio tapes also provide information of the past. Paintings, drawings, even the simplest sketches can offer important glimpses of that which occurred in the past. Now, stop and think about how many of these 'portals of time' are going through a metamorphosis within our society. Within this paper I gave many examples and instances where common avenues of communication are experiencing profound changes. The letter, for example, a common form of communication used for centuries as a means to convey feelings, thoughts and share experiences. Written down and usually sent to someone else to be read and many times saved. The vast knowledge that we have of the past has been greatly enhanced and added to by information obtained from the ordinary, common communication format of letter writing done on paper. Think of the Civil War soldiers' letters home, saved in tied bundles to be read and re-read throughout the years following, providing those of us, in their future, pieces of knowledge and understanding that would have been impossible to have without those gloriously detailed accounts of everyday life. What if, instead of paper, those letters home had been sent via email? Forget, for the moment, the absurdity of this thought and consider it from a purely academic angle. Knowing what we do about the typical length of an email message…short and to the point, and knowing how seldom the email message is ever saved to disk or actually printed out onto paper, one wonders how much less of an understanding we would all have now, about those who fought and lived during the Civil War? Most of the correspondences would have been quick little notes, deleted after a few days time, lost forever to those in their future. I believe that there is a critical change occurring in the quality of historically significant pieces of data and in how it is being saved. In the past 20 years I can attest to my own involvement with this lessening of quality in my communication. I used to write long, detailed letters to my few close friends who lived far away. Now I send an email. Usually there is no more than a brief, "Hi", and a "How are you?" and a quick recount of what's new. I know that an email is about as secure and private as a postcard (Anonymous, 1997). Sure, my past letter writing was probably never going to be of much value to the future historian, but I know for sure that my email letters definitely will not since they will not even exist, they will have been deleted and forgotten within a few short hours. Of those surveyed and interviewed, the findings show that more and more, communication is being done in a digital manner. Email and Internet chat rooms are becoming the favored format of communication along with the cell phone, another digitized media. All are quick, impersonal forms of communication that can be tied into digital databases.
Another example is the photograph. A photograph could always have contained a staged, doctored up image, yet now, with the commonly used digital camera and scanner, you hear everyone comment about the validity of what is being seen within a photograph. Yet we continue to place a high degree of importance and value on a photo. This, in itself, deserves to be studied in depth. People are becoming more aware of data manipulation yet are still allowing themselves to believe what they are seeing, or in the very least, allowing the image to become part of their subconscious. A little bit of knowledge of technology is not going to be enough for society; we need to force ourselves to learn as much as we possibly can. The key word, here, is "learn", for education is of paramount importance.
As an educator I see, with my own eyes, changes occurring within our society, in our schools, with our children. The students of today are not like those 20 years ago. Teacher after teacher say the same things, how kids of today can't seem to sit still, how we, as teachers, need to be entertainers in the classroom to keep their attention, how children are rude, disrespectful, violent. In today's society we tend to ignore our personal intuition and call upon 'experts' and their opinions. So we continue our work, all along having a feeling of disquiet within our souls… we know something is not right, but we doubt ourselves and delude ourselves and allow others to make the decisions. We are forced to test the children on the mundane. Our standards have been lowered; thinking is not revered any longer. Individual teaching styles and learning styles mean nothing…. to repeat verbatim, to parrot the words of others, to belong to the group, to all be the same that is our goal. Ray Bradbury, in the classic, Fahrenheit 451, warned us of becoming too docile, too caught up in our need for diversion from reality, complacent concerning questioning, about asking "why"…
"School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally, almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?" (Bradbury, 1958, pg. 51)
Entertainment has become society's focus. I find it to be disturbing to know that many people believe that thinking can not be part of relaxing. Those whom I interviewed all had the same belief that it was good to stop thinking, that it was good to allow TV's images to flow unchecked into their unconsciousness. There are many 'truths', such as this that we, as a society, have accepted as part of our inner core of believes…. The need to escape from reality is another. Why don't we just change our own reality? Why must we blindly accept someone else's? Another 'truth' that I have found to be odd, and manipulative, is when I hear people compare the world of education and learning to the business world, referring to the business world as the "real world". Why does everyone accept this definition so readily? Why is the validity of learning and of education being questioned and berated? Why do we not value learning for learning's sake? What is "unreal" about education? What is "unreal" about the school environment? Why do we assign a lesser value of worth to the task of teaching and learning compared to manufacturing and business? Why don't we question the motive behind such a world-view? Who would benefit from this belief? Why is pure education such a threat? Why is the 'act of thinking' a threat?
I based the main focus of my research on the warnings presented in three remarkable books, one written in 1953, Fahrenheit 451, which I mentioned earlier. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, written in 1932, and 1984, written by George Orwell in 1949. Most of us are familiar with these classics. Why are we not taking their implied implications that a preoccupied populace, more concerned with entertainment than reality, is at a grave risk of becoming a totalitarian state, seriously enough? This is an important question that we need to ask of ourselves. Television, as an addictive medium that can communicate directly to millions in a split seconds time and which is controlled by a handful of global corporations, is problem enough. Now we are faced with the digitization of a combined computer, television and Internet interface. It is no longer a one directional form of communication. Our identities, our preferences, our medical data, our financial records, our personal likes and dislikes, where we live, what we eat, what our fears are, what we want, what we need…. all being compiled into major databases…. available to those who can make a tremendous financial profit out of that knowledge (Alwang, Mendelson, Rubenking, 2001).
Would it help if we each stopped and questioned each new use of a technology prior to its use? Is it all right to embrace innovation without question? The following is an example of what at first glance seemed to be no big deal… a simple change, yet, upon closer scrutiny; a lot more was involved …. Two summers ago I attended a concert at Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I have been attending the outdoor concerts there for 30+ years and have always found them to provide a unique experience for the concertgoer, for nothing can come close to the 'drift-away' feeling one has while sitting under the stars listening to the symphonic melodies of the masters. Two years ago, though, proved to be a turning point for Tanglewood, for they decided to try out an experiment. Two large television screens were attached onto the edge of the Shed's outside perimeter so that those who had lawn tickets could then view what they could not see occurring within the Shed, where the musicians and the conductor were. The idea could be considered simple and thoughtful. Something, though, seemed very different during that evening's concert. At first I couldn't quite figure it out, but then, after sitting there upon my blanket, listening to the music, I started picking up on the differences that marked that performance from all that I had attended previously. Having a television to watch had an effect on how people were sitting and or laying on the lawn. Where once everyone would be turned in a variety of directions since one can hear the music no matter which direction your head was turned, now the vast majority of people had their bodies and faces turned towards the screen. People used to lay there, eyes closed, daydreaming as they listened…. their own creative thoughts providing the backdrop to the music. Now they were sitting with heads upturned, staring at images, the light dancing across their faces. With the TV screen providing the visual stimulation, the imagination no longer seemed good enough… and, unlike the times one would stand up for a few minutes, binoculars in hand in an attempt to catch a glimpse of the conductor or a certain section in the orchestra, the audience seemed content to allow the camera man/woman make the decisions on whom or what to focus on for us. Individual decisions were taken from us without anyone even noticing it was happening. Sure, I could still close my eyes and daydream…. I could still stand up and try my luck with the binoculars, but the continuously flashing images on the screen were always present, competing with the stillness of the stars, the slow, soft movements of the clouds, the sway of leaves from the wind…. Our society takes changes such as this without much, if any, question. It occurs so frequently and is accompanied with such a positive message of things being "new and improved" that we really never understand what we might be loosing instead of gaining. This research's findings show that the visual image has a very strong attraction to the viewer. Research shows that no matter what is going on and how much noise, the image still has the power to grab the attention of the individual.
MTV, with its music videos, has changed the way many people experience popular music. The research shows that music is 'viewed' as it is being listened to based on the high percentage of teens that identify themselves with MTV and its videos. Prior to MTV, if one heard a song on the radio or tape, any images that came to mind, formed by the lyrics of the song, were our own. Our own imagination easily captured the song and supplied an internally created visual backdrop for our thoughts. Pieces of personal memories in our past helped to fill in gaps and enabled a weaving of real and imagined images to float in our minds. These images held special meaning to us, for they were our own. Now, with music videos, someone else has control of what we 'see' in our thoughts when we listen to a song. Try as you might to erase it, but the image from a video remains in your head forever. The findings of my research show that everyone remembers the images that they have viewed. Years and years may go by and the images are still in their memory. The same is true for any movie or show. Read a book and you create how the character looks by yourself, using your own imagination along with the literal descriptions provided by the author, but, if you viewed the story first in a film, then read the book, it will be the actor's features you will envision when the words try to describe how he or she looks. Even if you read the book first, then saw the movie, try as you may, but it would be nearly impossible to recapture the image that you had first conjured up with your own imagination. The filmed image wins out. This may not seem like such a negative thing, that of thinking of a particular actor or actress instead of an image that we created. Think about it though…. If each of us creates our own image, then we have retained our individuality. My character may be taller than yours, or have shorter hair. Your character may have a longer chin and more piercing eyes than mine… what I am getting at is this, each of us have our own individual standards, our own individual likes and dislikes. If we allow someone else to determine what a character looks like then we all are 'seeing' the same image from that point on. It is in our thoughts and we have all begun a march to the exact same beat. Who is playing the drum? Who benefits from having us perceive certain personalities as one type of person and another personality as another? Ethnic stereotypes can easily be perpetuated in seemingly benign ways. Harmful generalizations can become embedded into millions of individuals within a second's time, without them ever being aware that it is occurring.
From the analysis of my research the findings show that teenagers are at particularly high risk for behavior modification by the media. They use both the television and computer in their leisure time far more frequently than any other segment of the population. MTV targets this age group with such fervor that it would be very difficult for a teen to avoid the marketing messages surrounding their every move. Knowing this has caused me to speak more freely with the students that I come in contact with during the day. There was one group that I spoke with, while I was working in a computer lab, that seemed particularly interested in some of the things I had to say concerning Internet privacy and security. The kids had some very pointed questions to ask of me and I thoroughly enjoyed their inquisitiveness and honesty. The following day their English teacher approached me, asking if I would be willing to come to speak to some of her classes. Evidently the students that I had talked to on the previous day were so interested in the subject material that I brought up that they had asked her if I could come back and speak to them again. She also asked me if I would be willing to be included in the curriculum plans being made for the following school year. Some of the teachers thought that I would be able to provide a very compelling introduction to the unit on science fiction literature, including my findings concerning this form of literature as being an important method for predicting trends in society.
In doing this research I have found that there is a need for the subject of media literacy to be included in the curriculum in addition to being taught at home. Decisions should be made based upon facts, weighed against other options and be a conscious act.
Many are concerned about the potential for society to loose its identity and its cultural diversity. Many songs are written that touch upon such warnings and many films and books are produced with this as a theme. The analysis of data within this research paper seems to show that our society is still in the beginning of the trans-formative stages that would allow us to loose control of individual destiny and decision-making. We are at the point in time where, with education and the re-awakening of self, we can regain the power of a questioning, philosophical intellect. The most important point that the research analysis has made is that communication among those is society is changing. Evolving formats that are replacing the personal, face-to-face, traditional forms of communication are becoming the norm, especially among the teenagers. The "we" that makes up our society will remain viable and active only if the "I', the individual, remains intact. Education concerning the evolving forms of communication is critical.