Module 3 Readings Reflection
The recent technological advances that have taken place over the past century have forever changed the way we receive and process information. Before the printing press, most people did not think of information as trash to filter through. However, the amount of information that we now have at our fingertips greatly overwhelms the amount of information we could ever consume and process in one lifetime. This has lead to a question worth considering: How do we make information useful? Goldhabar argues that if information is plentiful, it cannot be what we consider valuable. Therefore, we do not live in an age of information. Instead of the new economy being built on the basis of information, it will be built on the basis of attention (Lankshear & Knobel, 2001). To understand what this means, we must first understand what attention really is when it comes to processing information. Since we are constantly exposed to an infinite supply of information, what we pay attention to is what shapes our experience. Lanham understands attention in the action sense, meaning that we use attention to turn data into something that is useful (Lankshear & Knobel, 2001). Using this knowledge from Goldhabar and Lanham, Lankshear and Knobel form a hypothesis to understand why attention is problematic is schools. Schools somewhat contradict themselves as they associate attention seeking behavior as problematic, while also considering short attention spans and attention deficit to be learning disabilities. This creates a tug of war between trying to decrease and increase attention at the same time. I remember struggling with this in school when I was younger and being diagonosed with ADD. I never felt like there was anything wrong with me, but it just seemed like I was not cut out for public school learning. Our public school system in the US is based on operational learning, which focuses on the language aspect of literacy. Lankshear and Knobel suggest that shifting our public school system towards more cultural and critical dimensions of learning will spark the interest and keep the attention of students. This style of learning also instills useful knowledge and critical ways of thinking to help students navigate through life far after graduating from school. The teachers who have had the largest impact on my life are the ones who inspired me to think differently. I don’t remember how to write in cursive and I couldn’t tell you the names of all the different triangles to save my life, but powerful messages about culture and values have become engraved into my memory. I believe this is because these are the topics that make you feel something, not memorize something.
The second topic of this weeks readings had to do with paying attention and how poverty relates to media literacy. A study done by FAIR found disturbing results while investigating how poverty was represented on weeknight news networks (deMause & Rendall, 2007). Over the course of three years, there was only 58 stories covering the issue of poverty on three mainstream news networks. This is shocking considering the tens of millions of Americans who live below the poverty line. Of the 58 stories that represented poverty, many were only discussed by experts, excluding any actual poverty victims from appearing on screen. If they were on screen, you could almost guarantee it was an elderly person or someone of the armed forces. These stories were also most likely to be aired around Christmas, Thanksgiving, or when an unexpected catastrophic even occurs . This study strongly exhibits how the media is biased and selective with the content that they feed to viewers. This selective attention creates a dangerously inaccurate narrative about poverty, instead of representing the truth about an issue that impacts so many citizens of our nation every single day. dMause & Rendall explain, “both the scarcity and the content of network news coverage conveys the sense that poverty is a problem mostly to be worried about on holidays, when it affects those whose poverty is considered shameful, or during natural disasters” (p.8, 2007). By excluding the real stories and people of poverty, a huge demographic is kept in the dark. This means that even though 44% of children come from low income families in the US (Jiang, Ekono, & Skinner, 2015), there is virtually no media coverage that tells their stories. That is approximately 33.1 million children who are struggling everyday to get by in one of the “richest nations in the world” as the news networks turn a blind eye and decide the Kardashians’ latest divorce is more important for the public to know about.
After watching the video “Child Poverty: In their own Words”, the realities of life in poverty become all too real. Seeing the individual faces and hearing a few of the stories that make up the 33.1 million children statistic is a much more moving experience than any shocking statistic is capable of eliciting. If these stories could be heard more frequently and on a larger platform, I believe that far more people would be inspired to advocate for a permanent systematic solution. So why aren’t we exposed to these stories? To understand the media’s selective attention to seemingly pointless topics while discarding topics of monumental importance, one must consider who holds the power of what content gets aired and what motivations are behind those decisions. Since advertisers do not consider the poverty narrative to be compelling or good for business, news networks tend to stick to stories that get the most views. Journalist Simon Kuper, truthfully reflects on the reality that poverty has never been sexy and the media continues to ignore the poor even as poverty has become the most pressing problem in developed countries (Poverty’s poor show in the media, 2015). He goes on to explain how “poor people’s analyses rarely fit neatly into the formats through which the ruling class interprets the world” (p.2, 2015).
In the video “Poverty in America 2015”, Marian Wright Edelman calls for change as she states that child poverty in the US is “not necessary, very costly, and the greatest threat to our future national, military, and economic security.” To reverse this issue that seems to be spiraling out of control, we must collectively change the way we think about poverty. Shannon Ridgway explains that media literacy is about noticing, and being open and able to question what we see (4 Problems with the Way the Media Depicts Poor People, 2013). Since the media has such a heavy influence on the perspectives of our population, changing how the poor is depicted in the media is a good place to start (or at least recognizing the inaccurate assumptions). Ridgway identifies four main problematic ways poor people are portrayed in the media: (1) as invisible, (2) as numbers, (3) as poor due to their own life choices, and (4) as temporarily “down on their luck” (2013). When we only see the poor through these categories, we take away their human worth. When we see these people as people, we will no longer be able to turn a blind eye to this unnecessary epidemic. According to research done by the Children’s Defense Fund, the US could reduce child poverty by 60 percent by “making work pay more, supporting employment for those who can work, and expanding safety net supports to ensure children’s basic needs are met” (2015).
