“There is no such thing as unmanipulated writing, filming, or broadcasting. The question is therefore not whether the media are manipulated, but who manipulates them. A revolutionary plan should not require the manipulators to disappear: on the contrary, it must make everyone a manipulator." -Hans Enzensberger (Rust Belt Visions: The 2011 Allied Media Conference)
It is a commonly held notion that the world around us isn't good enough. Maybe with the exception of people who belong to the elite class of luxury and excess, most of us look around us and see things that need to be improved. Most of us are willing to work towards improvement, if only for a good night of sleep following a hard day's work. We don't want our effort to line the pockets of the elite or further the damage already surrounding us.
For change to happen, we need resources. Knowing that one of the problems we face is a shortage of resources, some of us choose to directly address this need. I respect that effort, especially because to do it honestly it requires skillful navigation between the corporate creation of scarcity and actual need.
Apparent in my penchant for literature, rooted, perhaps, in the immigrant tradition, I want to address our need for resources by helping both people seeking to provide resources and the people in need of them think about what they really need and to best provide and/or obtain it, and I want to do it by addressing our escapist tendencies.
Next, though you might not immediately see how this comes next, a good story caters to the escapism of entertainment and a really good story teaches you something important at the same time. Though I have spent years of my life with my nose, nay my entire head, in some book, I know that most people escape into music, television shows, movies, video games, or, the biggest one of all: the internet. And though I was an English major, I know that most if not all media contains a message. The message is usually simple: consume more media from this source/follow this message.
BUT the original conception of the internet was not one prompting us to consume but to create. It was not to create another platform for corporate manipulation but to give us access to creating information. Dave Winer from Wired.com equates internet access with having access to your own personal printing press. And the more digitized media becomes, the future we can take that. Why not your own radio or TV station? Video game? Record company? Art gallery? Why not? It seems like the ultimate escapism until you realize the internet is a place where change can happen. In fact, it is happening but the change is being enacted by corporations and that needs to change.
The next question is that of creating media with messages in good faith. In other words, creating media in the context of creating a better world, not just one into which we can escape, as has been its historical corporate function. This is probably the hardest part. While I was English major, dissecting the worlds created in literature-- even though literary fiction is often a prompt to dissect the intentions of the world around us, facing the intentionality in the world around us is an incredibly difficult task. Before using literary analysis, which tries to pinpoint the techniques used by the author to create the message of the book, I never really thought of books as being authored, forget the process by which they are. The way I learned to read as an English major and the way I read before were entirely different and the difference nearly ruined the pleasure of reading for me.
But there are people who face intentionality at its worst everyday. People who face racism or sexism, for example, and know they should be judged as an individual rather than through prejudice. Especially when prejudice is encountered everywhere, it becomes apparent as being constructed with the intention to justify the mistreatment of others. People who struggle against it can tell you how important it is to know the historical context of both the force they reckon with and of their struggle as it proceeds.
For example, when part of a struggle against prejudice, such as the revolutionary movement of hip-hop, is commercialized and made into "pop," it's context (the Civil Rights Movement) disappears. So how do you create media in good faith? You make sure it is connected with the context of it's intention. Don't trust anything without context.
But simply providing context is not enough. Judith Butler, on addressing the lack of centrality/representation/leadership in feminism states that gender, to remain relevant and to avoid coercion, must function as platform for the interpretation of gender. For feminists, gender is a conversation starter, not a lecture. Gender is a context but without the opportunity to continually edit the contained content, it morphs into the polar opposite of what feminists (and humans in general) need it to be. Given, the next step is to empower people to contribute to the creation of information and media.
So, my goal is to help people become aware of information manipulation (giving them context) while giving them the skills to dismantle the sway of the current methods of manipulation as content contributors. This will not only help people become more aware of commercially created "need" but hopefully also help us find our actual context within which we can assess our actual needs. Believe it or not, you can learn all the necessary skills to do what I want to do at a good Library and Information Science program. So that's where I'm headed next.
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