Greening Media Education

Antonio López @mediacology

“This is more than an environmental crisis: it's an existential threat, and it should be treated like one, without fear of sounding alarmist, rather than covered as just another special interest, something only environmentalists care about.”

A Convenient Excuse,Wen Stephenson

http://thephoenix.com/boston/news/146647-convenient-excuse/#ixzz2C7hgtXbx

All media are environmental education...

Teaching how we should value the environment and coordinating behavior.

“Our climate crisis is an education crisis”

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/ProdDetails.asp?ID=RTSVOL25N3

Media gadgets in the US (2010):

• consumers spent $233 billion• 3/4 own computers• 1/2 own MP3 players• 85% use cell phones• four gadgets per person under age 40

(Maxwell and Miller, 2012)

• Conflict minerals

• Toxins used to make gadgets and their impact on the health of workers and their communities 

Media’s Ecological Footprint:

• E-waste generated from built-in obsolescence/overconsumption

• CO2 emissions of fossil fuels needed to run our electronic networks and the “cloud” (which is now equal to the global aviation industry and will double in ten years) 

(Alakeson, 2003; Greenpeace International, 2010; Leonard, 2007; Lewis & Boyce, 2009; Tomlinson, 2010)

Media’s Ecological “Mindprint”:

• Corporate media propagates ideology of unlimited growth, view of nature as separate from humans, marginalizes alternative ecological perspectives, discourse surrounding climate change gamed by fossil fuel industry.

• In 2001 63% of people got their information about the environment from television. (Coyle, 2005)

• In 2005 $971 in ad dollars were spent per capita in the United States/from 1900-2000 direct correlation between advertising dollars and increased consumption. (Brulle, Robert J. and Young, Lindsay E., 2007)

• Marketing and pop culture promote unsustainable cultural beliefs with pseudo-satisfier, dissatisfaction-manufacturing and convenience-constructing discourses. (Stibbe, 2009)

Regenerativemindprint:

EmpathyConnectionCoordinationStorytellingEducation

Why green media literacy?

Major Orientations

Critical Media LiteracyCritical literacy (about media/cultural citizenship,

fusion of critical pedagogy, cultural studies)

Digital Literacy Functionalist literacy (with media/

skills-based ed for knowledge work and 21st century skills, information literacy)

(Gutiérrez-Martín & Tyner, 2012)

“The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.”

Lakoff and Johnson, 1980

Three primary metaphors that guide media literacy research:

• Environment (medium literacy)

• Conveyor belt/conduit (text/content literacy)

• Grammar (language literacy, i.e. film edits, camera angles, sound cues, etc.)

(Meyrowitz, 1998)

Media ecosystems:

“Blogging and the media ecosystem” John Naughton

http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/documents/discussion/blogging.pdf

“Facebook ecosystem” “iPhone ecosystem”

vs.

“The media ecosystem is the ecologically embedded sum of all our technologically mediated interactions on planet Earth.”

The Media Ecosystem, Antonio Lopez

Ecomedia Literacy:Green Cultural Citizenship

Green cultural citizenship:

Embodying sustainable behaviors and cultural practices that shape and promote ecological values.

Ecomedia Literacy:

An understanding of how everyday media practice impacts our ability to live sustainably within Earth’s ecological parameters for the present and future.

• to develop an awareness of how media are physiologically interconnection with living systems

• to recognize media’s phenomenological influence on the perception of time, space, place and cognition

• to understand media’s interdependence with the global economy, and how the current model of globalization impacts livings systems and social justice • to be conscious of how media impacts our ability to engage in sustainable cultural practices and to encourage new uses of media that promote sustainability

Ecomedia Literacy goals:

Ecomedia Literacyfour lenses:

• Environment (Earth system): the material conditions of media, including extraction, production, e-waste, energy and emissions

• Culture (hermeneutics, cultural studies): Text and discourse analysis of media texts; mapping cultural behaviors and attitudes

• Political Economy (world system, critical theory): ideological structure of the global economics system, paying attention to the reasons why designers design what they do

• Worldview (phenomenology): media’s impact on our perception of time, space and place

Ecomedia Literacy Themes:

• Challenge growth and consumerism

• Critically engage technological sublime

• Promote cultural commons, connectivity

• Highlight alternative media

• Explore topics like food systems, gadget marketing, anthropocentric vs. ecocentric ideologies

• Explore discourses around nature, animals, climate change, ecopsychology

•Climate change discourses

Ecomedia Literacy skills:

• Research gadget production (information literacy)

• Deconstruct gadget marketing (media content analysis)

• Mindfully engage a media ecotone by demonstrating attentiveness to what experiences media environments afford (media mindfulness)

• Holistically inventory a media ecotone (systems literacy)

Ecomedia Literacy performance indicators:

• Create narratives of connection with digital storytelling tools

• Translate concepts between media and ecology disciplines using ecological metaphors to describe media phenomena

• Perform crossovers with ways of knowing through participant observation and social learning

• Develop an ethical framework in order act upon these understandings and to make wise choices

(based on MC Bateson’s (2007) model for global responsibility)

References

Alakeson, V. (2003). Making the net work: Sustainable development in a digital society. Middlesex, England: Xeris Pub.

Bateson, G. (2000). Steps to an ecology of mind (University of Chicago Press ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Brulle, Robert J. and Young, Lindsay E. (2007). Advertising and individual consumption levels 1900 - 2000. Sociological Inquiry,

77(4), 522–542.

Coyle, K. (2005). Environmental literacy in america. Washington, DC: National Environmental Education & Training Foundation.

Greenpeace International. (2010). Make IT green - cloud computing and its contribution to climate changeGreenpeace. Retrieved

from http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/press-center/reports4/make-it-green-cloud-computing

Guattari, F. (2008). Three ecologies (continuum impacts) Continuum International Publishing Group.

Gutiérrez-Martín, A., & Tyner, K. (2012). Educación para los medios, alfabetización mediática y competencia digital. Revista

Comunicar, XIX(38), 31-39.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [c1980].

Leonard, A. (2007). Story of stuff, referenced and annotated script. http://www.storyofstuff.com/resources.html: Retrieved from

http://www.storyofstuff.com/resources.html

Lewis, J., & Boyce, T. (2009). Climate change and the media: The scale of the challenge. In J. Lewis, & T. Boyce (Eds.),

Climate change and the Lmedia (global crises and the media) (pp. 3-16). New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Maxwell, R., & Miller, T. (2012). Greening the media. New York: Oxford University Press.

Meyrowitz, J. (1998). Multiple media literacies. Journal of Communication, (Winter), 96-108.

Stibbe, A. (2009). The handbook of sustainability literacy: Skills for a changing world. Totnes, UK: Green Books.

Tomlinson, B. (2010). Greening through IT: Information technology for environmental sustainability. Cambridge, Mass.:

MIT Press.

For more info:

http://EcomediaLit.com