From: dave@ratmandu.esd.sgi.com (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Subject: media literacy:  antidote to commercials invading the classroom
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: University of Missouri
Date: Mon, 6 Apr 1992 15:52:06 GMT


Subject:  media literacy:  antidote to commercials invading the classroom
Keywords:  The Cultural Environmental Movement wants YOU to PARTICIPATE

===============================================================================

Subject: Commercials in the Classroom

       COMMERCIALS IN THE CLASSROOM POLLUTE OUR CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT;
                     MEDIA LITERACY IS THE ANTIDOTE

    --- (c) 1992 by Rick Crawford, Howard Frederick, and George Gerbner
    
         Should an advertiser be required to submit an Environmental
    Impact Statement before being allowed to televise a commercial in
    a school classroom?  Should a public institution that disseminates
    media disinformation be required to document its hazardous releases,
    provide an antidote, and clean up the record?
    
         These scenarios don't sound so farfetched to citizens joining
    a movement to protect the Cultural Environment.  Just as Earth's
    physical environment has its moving plates and colliding continents,
    Earth's cultural environment is dynamically active, with ideas moving
    about, crashing into one another and causing social earthquakes and
    revolutionary eruptions.  Just as the physical environment is being
    degraded by rampant development and pollution, so too the cultural
    environment is threatened by market-driven commercialism and
    centralized control.
    
         One such threat to the cultural environment is a domestic
    intervention by a U.S. firm, the Whittle corporation, into the
    classrooms and minds of our most vulnerable population, our
    school-age children.  Whittle bribes schools by giving them "free"
    video equipment and a satellite dish.  In return Whittle *requires*
    students to sit as a captive audience and watch daily 12-minute
    broadcasts of advertisements, news, and entertainment of its own
    selection.  In California, the PTA and the State Superintendent of
    Public Schools have become so outraged that they filed a lawsuit
    against Whittle, declaring, "Our students' minds are *not* for
    sale"!  Yet Whittle has already infiltrated more than 10,000
    American high schools, quietly capturing over a third of our
    high school student population --- 6.6 million kids!
    
         This creeping commercialism should come as no surprise, since
    the United States is the most ad-driven society in the world.  Only
    seventeen countries had a Gross National Product larger than total
    U.S. advertising expenditures.  The typical American is exposed to
    about 200,000 ads each year.  Each morning John and Jane Citizen
    encounter fifty to one hundred ads before work!  While most ads have
    little effect individually, the total ad-exposure to which our
    population is subjected numbers almost fifty *trillion* doses of
    advertisements released into the common American cultural environment
    every year.
    
         So far our schools have been a relatively protected environment,
    a responsibility of teachers, administrators, school boards, and the
    parents and voters of a community.  The Constitution forbids even
    religion from entering the public schools.  But the integrity of our
    children's education, formerly entrusted to parents and teachers who
    cared, is being undermined by allowing a commercial organization
    to program any part of the school day with its own self-serving
    selection of entertainment and advertising.  That means a further
    degradation of our cultural environment.
    
         The Cultural Environment is a system of symbols, images, words,
    concepts, stories, and values.  Within it, we live out virtually our
    entire lives.  It is a *shared resource* that is (more or less) held
    in common by the people of a particular society or nation.  It shapes
    our tools, our languages and buildings, and they in turn continually
    shape our perceptions of the world, our relations with others, and
    even our images of ourselves.
    
         Authors such as Henry David Thoreau, Lewis Mumford, and Rene
    Dubos have shown us how, in creating and perpetuating these tools
    and artifacts --- our machines, buildings, and cities, our languages,
    images, roles, and myths --- we are in fact creating the very
    cultural environments that then become the measure of all things,
    the set of standards by means of which we classify and evaluate every
    aspect of our world, and of our selves.  These "cultural filters"
    shape, color, and even distort our perceptions, thoughts, and
    emotions --- frequently at deep sub-cognitive or pre-conscious
    levels.  Should we not therefore be wary of those who would implant
    their commercial biases in our children under the guise of
    "education"?
    
         Let's compare the cultural environment with another
    indispensable environment, the atmosphere.  Most Americans take our
    pervasive *cultural* environment for granted in the same way that
    they used to treat the *physical* environment.  We now know that
    chloro-fluorocarbons from spray cans and automobile air conditioners
    are extremely damaging to our shared physical environment, although
    when these innovations were first introduced, all we could see was
    their short-term benefit to each of us as individual consumers.  No
    one could imagine that our atmosphere --- so immense, yet at the same
    time so incredibly intangible and abstract --- could possibly be so
    vulnerable to the industrial profit motive, and to our unquestioning
    embrace of technological convenience despite the possibility of
    harmful side-effects.
    
         With chloro-fluorocarbons, profit-driven corporations
    unknowingly sold what were essentially environmental timebombs to
    individuals.  In pursuit of the short-term convenience offered by
    those technologies, we periodically detonated those timebombs ---
    thereby endangering our common future.  The situation with Whittle's
    commercial pollution in the classrooms is similar.  Clearly no single
    ad will ruin a child's life;  yet we should be mindful of the risks
    of cumulative effects from daily exposure to ads in an environment
    previously devoted to education --- especially since an analysis
    of "Channel One" has shown that its typical "news story" lasts only
    18 seconds, fully 40% shorter than its average commercial!
    
        Consider one probable impact --- the further trivialization of
    substantive issues in our democracy.  Politicians already blame the
    media for demanding that every issue be reduced to a sound bite;  the
    media, in turn, claim that sound bites are what the public demands,
    because the public's attention span has dwindled so.  Won't Whittle's
    "re-education" program further diminish it?  Although Whittle's
    advertisers have surgically targeted their commercial "smart bombs"
    for short-term sales strikes at U.S. students, in the longer term
    they risk wreaking immense collateral damage on our cultural
    infrastructure.
    
         The parallels between the physical and cultural environments are
    indeed striking.  In the fast-paced bustle of daily life, we tend
    to dismiss both as merely flat, unchanging backdrops set behind the
    stage of modern life;  yet both are very much in the foreground ---
    we act out our lives inside them.  They *pervade* everything we do,
    and everything we are.  With both, we are slow to notice when gradual
    changes degrade them, reducing our quality of life and eventually
    making these environments unfit for human habitation.
    
         Just as an atmospheric chemist was the first to detect the
    deterioration in our atmospheric life support system, so too groups
    of mass communications scholars have scientifically monitored the
    effects of mass media on our shared cultural environment.  Their
    studies have produced such disturbing results that they --- along
    with groups of concerned parents, professionals, and other citizens
     --- have been moved to action.
    
         These results show that, just as the ozone layer is being
    destroyed by billions of actions that taken individually had *almost*
    no effect, so the fabric of our cultures is being shredded by the
    *cumulative* environmental impact of advertising-driven mass-produced
    images and messages.  Too often the mass media portray our lives as
    stereotypes, marginalizing, dehumanizing and stigmatizing minority
    and majority alike.  They inundate us with a cult of media violence
    that desensitizes, intimidates and terrorizes us.
    
         Paying lip service to journalistic ethics but caving in to
    marketing pressures, mass media select and frame the "top" news
    stories of the day in a manner that habitually excludes the rich
    textures of our continually unfolding cultural processes, and denies
    the forces at work in the socio-economic strata in which those "top"
    stories originated.  Instead, their portrayals reduce the complex
    dynamics that underlie our cultural landscape's "news peaks" to
    simplistic, spin-controlled sound bites and photo-ops, thereby
    impoverishing and distorting our views of the world.  Thus they
    reduce us, in turn, to easy prey for disinformation campaigns that
    call us up to willingly devastate and incinerate other peoples.
    
         Offensive militarism is itself a form of cultural pollution ---
    a toxic bio-cide packaged by an extensive PR campaign, targeted
    at "the enemy", and sold to the public by misleading Nintendo-like
    videogame commercials.  But this bio-cide has toxic side-effects:
    it is absorbed on contact by every culture that attempts to apply it,
    causing unhealthy personal and structural deformities like those
    observed in our own society these past few years.
    
         We wage war on everything but injustice in our midst, and
    unfolding economic conditions that can only be described as the
    emergence of an American Third World.  Commercial hucksterism lulls
    and seduces us, blinding us to the role of our own hyper-consumption
    in the destruction of our planet's environment.  Our criminal justice
    system, arts, and electoral systems are crumbling, while make-believe
    media politics masquerades as participatory democracy.  And now our
    public schools, perhaps the last remnant of our authentic cultural
    institutions, are also being invaded by a profit-seeking system of
    mass-produced images and messages designed to the specifications of
    marketing, and targeted at our students, our children, our future.
    
         How has the cultural pollution caused by certain forms of
    advertising already altered our perceptions of self and worldview?
    Consider that up until recent times, "consumption" was regarded
    as a disease, and was listed as the cause of mortality on death
    certificates for many individuals.  Yet within two generations excess
    commercial advertising has eaten away at the semantic links attaching
    this "consumption" word to its former meanings, and has attached
    in their stead a constellation of meanings that values unthinking
    hedonism, and that promotes the view that a *human being* --- far
    from being an ethical citizen --- is instead nothing but a *consumer*
     --- an amoral economic agent acting in a (supposedly) free market
    so as to maximize short-term, selfish, and unexamined individual
    preferences.  It is not entirely coincidental that since 1950, human
    consumption of goods and services exceeded that of *all* previous
    generations combined.  When not only our values, but even the
    meanings of words are eroded by the acid reign of excessive
    advertising, what will the word "education" come to mean after it ---
    and our children's attention spans --- have been Whittle'd down by
    a barrage of classroom ads?
    
         There can be no doubt that cultural pollution --- in the form of
    ubiquitous commercials selling consumption itself --- is occurring on
    a massive scale, and that its initial impacts have been shown to be
    highly detrimental not only to the external physical environment, but
    also to our sense of community, our family life, and our internal
    emotional and spiritual environments.  Like the huge agri-businesses
    that crowded out family farms, the existing centralized control
    of mass media endangers our natural cultural biodiversity by
    artificially fertilizing a "cash crop" monoculture --- consumption
     --- while inhibiting the natural flowering of species of ideas that
    speak of less harsh, more sustainable and satisfying values and ways
    of life.
    
         To begin addressing the degradation of our cultural environment
    caused by cumulative impacts from mass media, and to alert the public
    to this historic new challenge, the Cultural Environmental Movement
    (CEM) was launched.  (See "Adbusters" Vol. 2, No. 1)  The CEM
    recommends that citizens start participating in the decisions that
    profoundly affect our children's minds, both in the school and in
    the home.
    
         Nowhere is this so imperative as in the case of Whittle
    Communications.  Whittle captures children, and sells their open
    minds to its advertisers.  The advertisers' goal is straightforward:
    Once a captive student audience is delivered to them, they attempt
    to hook the children on consumption --- in the form of their own
    brand-name products.  The "news" cast is just the bait on the hook,
    and a means for injecting the ads in the most favorable vein.  Not
    only the ads, but even the content of the "entertainment" program
    itself is designed to attract young Consumers to the Product, never
    to inform them with a balanced view of its liabilities as well as
    its virtues.  This, despite the fact that in a 1990 study of 3,000
    children already required to watch Whittle's ads in their classrooms,
    students reported that they "believe products advertised in schools
    are good for them".  And the students who are thoroughly sold ---
    those who swallow the advertisers' bait hook, line, and sinker ---
    can quite literally *spend* the rest of their lives trying to *buy*
    their freedom and happiness.
    
         The Cultural Environmental Movement wants to make parents and
    taxpayers aware of Whittle's abuse of the public trust.  In monetary
    terms alone, Whittle's classroom intrusion amounts to taxation
    without representation, since the commercial sale of instructional
    time (considering only the time for Whittle's explicit advertisements)
    costs California taxpayers almost $50,000 annually for each school
    of 2,000 students.
    
         The Cultural Environmental Movement does not condone censorship
    of free speech, nor do we advocate a ban on all TV ads.  But
    neither do we approve of the indirect federal government subsidy
    to commercial speech, in the form of a blanket tax exemption for
    all types of advertising.
    
         But most of all, we insist that our children --- like those in
    Britain, Canada, and Australia --- receive *media literacy education*
    in public schools.  Such education is vital to prepare them for life
    in the modern world, so they can practice critical viewing, exercise
    independent judgement, and learn to draw their own conclusions.  We
    may not abolish cultural pollution overnight, but at least we can
    help our children develop a measure of immunity to it.
    
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------
    Those desiring more information about the CEM are invited to contact:
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------
         Rick Crawford                George Gerbner
         2804 Ganges Ave.             Annenberg School for Communication
         Davis, CA  95616             University of Pennsylvania
                                      3620 Walnut Street
                                      Philadelphia, PA  19104
Internet
Email:   crawford@cs.ucdavis.edu      fgg@asc.upenn.edu
    
    
    
         Howard Frederick
         Institute for Global Communications
         18 De Boom Street
         San Francisco, CA  94107
    
Email:   hfrederick@igc.org
    
    
--
                                             daveus rattus   

                                   yer friendly neighborhood ratman

                              KOYAANISQATSI

   ko.yan.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language)  n.  1. crazy life.  2. life
       in turmoil.  3. life out of balance.  4. life disintegrating.  
         5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.


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