GeoJournal (2009) 74:175–182 DOI 10.1007/s10708-008-9216-y
Geographic media literacy: an introduction Chris Lukinbeal Æ Jim Craine
Published online: 23 October 2008 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008
Abstract In a media saturated world of globalization, information flow and knowledge economies, an interesting paradox exists: geographic literacy appears to be on the decline while geographic information is on the rise. In this introduction to a collection of essays on geographies of the media, we explore this paradox and use Baudrillard’s (1994) work on Simulacra and Simulation to argue that increased mediated information does not produce more meaning, but rather leads to a catastrophe of meaning and the medium. Drawing from McLuhan’s axiom, ‘‘the medium is the message,’’ we posit that with more mediated information there is less meaningful information and as such we need to address geographic media literacy as a primary mode through which to address geographic literacy. Keywords Information literacy Information technology literacy Simulacra Crisis of representation Geographic education
C. Lukinbeal (&) School of Geographical Sciences, Arizona State University, P.O. Box 870104, Tempe, AZ 85287-0104, USA e-mail:
[email protected] J. Craine Department of Geography, California State University Northridge, 18111 Nordhoff Street, Northridge, CA 91330-8249, USA e-mail:
[email protected]
What is essential today is to evaluate this double challenge — the challenge of the masses to meaning and their silence (which is not at all a passive resistance) — the challenge to meaning that comes from the media and its fascination. (Baudrillard 1994, pp. 83–84) Geographers are not unfamiliar with the headline: ‘‘More know where the TV show CSI is set than can find Iraq on a map’’ (National Geographic Society 2006). In an era of increased globalization, of interconnected flows of capital, ideas and technology, it seems odd that young adults in the US are becoming less rather than more geographically literate. In a representative survey of young US adults age 18–24, 63% could not find Iraq or Saudi Arabia on a map of the Middle East. Another, three-quarters could not find Israel or Iran and 88% had no idea where Afghanistan belonged on a map of Asia (National Geographic-Roper Public Affairs 2006, p. 8). While locating places on a map is only one of many geographic literacy skills, the National GeographicRoper report presents some alarming statistics that seek to provoke an affect, a response—but what kind? A typical response from geographic educators is to use this as evidence for the need for more education at all levels. A second response is to rally support within the discipline to show the need and validity of geographic information in general. With this essay we would like to outline a third response: that
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geographic literacy is intimately tied to media literacy, and as such, we need to begin addressing it within our discipline. While geographic literacy is widely written about and discussed in geography (Stansfield 1998; Rogers 1997; Saarinen and MacCabe 1995; Liben and Downs 1994; Davis 1987; Backler and Stolman 1986), media literacy is not (however, see Lukinbeal et al. 2007). But what does geographic media literacy actually mean? Literacy is, to some extent, an unfortunate term because it implies a literary approach which would exclude audio and visual communication. In 1993, an international body of educators agreed that media literacy consisted of five components including an understanding that: (1) mediated information is always already socially constructed; (2) mediated information is contingent on the society and era within which it was produced; (3) mediated information affects how we live in and view the world; (4) mediated meaning is relational or ontogenetic, in the sense that meaning emerges through the practice of production and consumption; (5) and, media has its own unique language and system of communication (Hobbs 1998). These tenets are fundamental aspects of visual methodologies widely used and accepted in film and cultural studies as well as in critical geography. Rose (2001) seeks to apply these concepts through the use of Christian Metz’s (1977) term ‘‘scopic regime.’’ In terms of visual media literacy the scopic regime points out that vision is often aligned with truth, where vision is an objective act. The scopic regime differentiates vision from what Rose (2001) terms visuality. Visuality stresses that vision is not natural or objective, but rather, is socially constructed, historically contingent, and effects how we view and live in the world (cf Lukinbeal and Zimmermann 2008). Geographic media literacy is also related to but not wholly subsumed under information literacy and information technology literacy, each of which have their own specific relevance to geographic pedagogy. The ability to recognize when information is needed and to locate, evaluate, present and effectively use pertinent information is referred to as information literacy (American Library Association 2000). Fluency in information technology revolves around contemporary skills (current application knowledge), foundational concepts (basic technology principles) and, intellectual capabilities (application of contemporary skills and foundational concepts to solve
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normative problems) (Committee on Information Technology Literacy 1999). Media literacy, then, is ‘‘the knowledge, skills and competencies required in order to use and interpret media’’ (Buckingham 2003, p. 36). Media literacy is therefore not just about the interpretation of media, but also includes the use of media. This is important because it moves geographic media literacy beyond the hermeneutical analysis of texts and into information technology literacy. It also positions geographic media literacy within a field of praxis. The term literacy, as applied to the public perception of geographic literacy, seems to focus more on information (recall) rather than knowledge and as the saying goes, if information were knowledge, we’d all be geniuses. Similarly, over two decades ago, Naisbitt (1982, p. 17) argued that ‘‘we are drowning in information, but starved for knowledge.’’ Which brings us to an important hypothesis by Baudrillard (1994, p. 79)—‘‘[w]e live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.’’ According to Baudrillard (1994), rather than producing meaning, information functions purely in the operational realm and not in the realm of signification. Information does not stage communication, rather ‘‘it exhausts itself in the act of staging’’ it (Baudrillard 1994, p. 80). In essence, Baudrillard is taking McLuhan’s maxim, ‘‘the medium is the message’’ to its inevitable conclusion: that the medium not only naturalizes but also neutralizes all content. Furthermore, if the medium implodes the message, there is a simultaneous impulsion occurring of the medium and the real. No longer is there a dialectical interplay between media and the real, rather, there is only a single model that ‘‘simultaneously generates the message, the medium, and the ‘real’’’ (Baudrillard 1994, p. 82). If the medium is the message, and the message and the medium are imploding, then in the near future, there will be a ‘‘catastrophe of meaning,’’ an annihilation of all meaning, an implosion of signifiers for every signified, an end to the modern vision of an accumulation of meaning with more information (Baudrillard 1994, p. 83). This leads us back to our opening quote that suggests that media literacy presents us with a double challenge: (1) to understand the reception, and perhaps more importantly, the affect of mediated meaning upon the masses; and (2) to critically interrogate the meanings produced by media.
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Wright (1947) and later Burgess and Gold (1985) argued that popular media was just as important as ‘‘high art’’ in geographic analysis. Similarly, there appears to be a normative belief that academic literature holds privilege over other mediated forms of information. Rather than ‘‘high information’’ academic literature is another mediated form of meaning production, one that is already facing the ‘‘catastrophe of meaning’’ which is partially, but not wholly, related to the crisis of representation. The crisis of representation exposed modernity’s mimetic belief—that it is not possible to create ‘‘True’’ representations of the world, rather ‘‘the simulacrum is never what hides the truth—it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true’’ (Ecclesiastes, in Baudrillard 1994, p. 1). What many misinterpret about a poststructural position towards the crisis of representation is that ‘‘deliberation does not mean the abolition of categories and centers, for this would be an impossible project, but rather implies that attention be directed toward the sociohistorical context within which any category is deployed and the ramifications of its deployment’’ (Dixon and Jones 2007, p. 94). Furthermore, truth is always relative to sociohistorical contexts because ‘‘every combination of images exceeds the calculus of the real and the rational’’ (Doel and Clarke 2007, p. 899). Geographic media literacy must address the problem that, to many, ‘media’ is an ambiguous term in and of itself. To Kittler (1999), ‘‘media determine our situation’’ while to McLuhan (1964) ‘‘the medium is the message,’’ an insight into information meaning and technical expression that has important implications for our understanding of media today, especially within the context of geographic literacy. While there is indeed a sort of technological determinism to the creation and consumption of media in all its forms, the authors here have sought to address the most fundamental theoretical challenge posed by media to geographers—that of updating geography’s study of media. It is important for this issue of GeoJournal that we ‘place’ media into geographic discourse both contextually and methodologically. Thorne (2004, p. 793) makes this apparent: Visual literacy is an important new skill that geography as a whole needs to embrace for both constructing and deconstructing images. The creation and interpretation of visual images has
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always been important to geography and is what makes geography unique. It is an exciting time to propose that visual literacy is a common goal of both human and physical geography and that it may act as a common denominator across geography. Common techniques and methodologies are required to both critically understand and to create powerful visual images across the whole discipline of geography. As the work of our authors shows, there is a certain geographic clarity that can be derived from the study of media representations—one of Thorne’s ‘common techniques and methodologies’. Clarity about what media is requires an acknowledgement of the affective and the kinetic aspects of media—by ‘placing’ the cultural context of the topics contained herein within the domain of geography we get some specificity of time and space and this clarity furthers our understanding of the nature of media and protects any insights from simple generalization. Media literacy would allows geographers to take as an object of analysis how media productions are often presented as universal and make visible alternative narratives that allow us to see more than we already know. This collection of work presents geographic methodologies that explore the content and construction of various forms of media, the contexts of their conception, production, dissemination, consumption and preservation, and, most importantly how geographers can engage media. The authors of these articles make the various forms of media, technologies and practices both visible and comprehensible through new ways of engaging media spatialities. As discussed above, media, in all its forms, is produced and consumed in historically specific and carefully constructed ways and many factors combine to frame how meaning is generated. Thus, media cannot be engaged in isolation from, but rather must be linked in multiple and complex ways to, other forms of material evidence. Our authors are concerned with media not merely as a visual reflection of the ‘real’ world or as the intention of their maker but as discrete moments in the production and circulation of cultural meaning. Media is not only a technology of meaning construction but, more important, it is a technology of information transfer. Media functions as an act of communication. It is a chain of practices and processes by which geographical information is
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gathered, geographical facts are ordered and our imaginative geographies are constructed. To best engage the representational spaces of media and its role in the promotion of media literacy, the geographers in this volume of GeoJournal employ methodologies that incorporate new geographic thought as opposed to a reliance on notions of theory and criticism imported into the realm of geography from other disciplines. By doing so, we get a better understanding of the geographical information located within these unique datasets. Our authors present new forms of analysis that can open up and denaturalize previous geography/media discourses, especially ostensibly objective research on the technologies for observation and classification of media. This allows us to better understand the typically modern phenomena of media as technologies for value and power. Media is an excellent subject for geographical study because geographers can take into consideration their philosophical grounding, their history and their production, considerations that works to great effect in Minelle Mahtani’s discussion of the Iranian–Canadian diaspora and Joseph Palis’ exploration of the various constructs of orientalism and othering in the early films of Thomas Edison. Some authors in this volume explore and explain the bond between media culture and nationalism or gender relations—this will help us understand the motivations of media producers to prioritize history by enmeshing the media consumer in systems of visibility and normalization. The Jason Dittmer/Zeke Spears exploration of the Left Behind series and Johnny Finn’s investigation of the commodification of Cuban music are examples of how geographers can gain some understanding of how dominant classes set themselves and their icons up as examples to recognize and follow—we can then understand the political interests underlying the production of these cultural representations by using critical geography to study their transparency. As a number of our authors note, artistic quality mattered less than the faithful representation of the achiever or, conversely, the complete subversion of the achiever in an attempt to resist the reinforcement of gender, sexual, and racial stereotypes. Our authors also promote the role of the consumer—understanding production comes first, followed by the perception it guides. We can thus be exposed to the interconnections between private
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and public, especially private meanings and uses in memories. Finally, and most basic, the intertextual relationships between media, as a set of objects or texts, and our different participating senses, require these new forms of analysis. One can, of course, view media as a text and the use of the textual metaphor runs deep in geographical theory. Johnston (1999) and Smith (1999) discuss the concerns of qualitative methodology as to how the world is viewed, experienced and constructed by social actors while also stressing the importance of systems of meanings to any qualitative textual analysis. This methodology provides access to the motives, aspirations and power relationships that account for how places, people and events are made and represented. The interpretation of texts can include landscapes, archival materials, maps, literature, or visual images—all forms of media—is one of many qualitative methods. Said (1993) points out the importance of ‘fictional’ texts to the production of geographical knowledge particularly how the interpretation of texts can provide insight into the ordering of society and space. Texts are culturally coded and contain clues to the political, social and economic circumstances of the society that produces them. Other recent work within the discipline has stressed the importance of moving geographical theories of media in new directions. Sui (2000) discusses how visual geographic metaphors are being replaced by more evocative aural metaphors more common to electronic communication media resulting in a reconfiguration of geographic discourse in the late twentieth century. Importantly, however, Sui (2000, p. 336) emphasizes how geography will become ‘‘intellectually handicapped’’ if the discipline confines itself to a single set of metaphors and argues that sight and sound are interconnected in many ways and should therefore be more fully appreciated for what they can bring to the exploration of geographic data. Hallisey (2005) examines positivist, realist, postmodern, feminist and anarchist approaches to visualization finding that the capacity to combine differing conceptualizations of visuality does indeed exist and should be utilized in future research, a proposition addressed in Kevin McHugh’s application of movement ontology to David Lynch’s film The Straight Story and Jim Craine’s study of the affective properties of The Shield television show and its fan-based webpage.
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Becoming literate in media theory will allow us to grasp how geography is embodied in media representations, be it a single static photograph or an animated series of photographs projected at a set rate (which is indeed what ‘cinema’ and television are) or even in the application of subtitles as explored by Giorgio Curti or the Suikoden video games as discussed by Leigh Schwartz or Chris Moreno’s engagement of Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream. One could argue (successfully, we believe), that the nineteenth century was the formative period when applications of photographic technology and habits of photographic seeing were shaped by, and in turn shaped, geographical concerns. During that time period, as ideas about vision and knowledge codified photographic practice, photographs influenced ways of ‘doing’ geography, and shaped issues of geographic concern. One could further argue that photography as an image-making technology and photographs as visual images—independent of their status as art or science—helped people to know the world and articulate their relationship in it. Thus, if the geographical imagination can be conceived broadly to include those practices and processes by which we situate ourselves in space and time, then media participates in three fundamental ways: in the empirical practices of gathering factual information in visual and aural forms; in the cognitive processes of ordering that information to produce knowledge of places, peoples and events; and in the imaginative processes of visualizing the world beyond our immediate experience. While media might be engaged from the perspective of agency and causality, its narrative detail, its circulation, consumption and impact, the authors here are more interested in focusing on the way in which geographers might use media to allow our technologies and our critical geographies to intertwine in a useful discourse so that we might more fully understand the spaces, identities and power contained within the performance of a particular media form or representation. Using media to think geographically can illuminate issues far beyond the narrative content of the media itself. The constructions and performances with which our authors are concerned are central elements in the ongoing and increasingly visual and aural encounters between diverse cultures, including our engagements with our own cultural productions and social relations of the past. Vision for example, and thus its media manifestations, can
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be irrevocably tied to domains of knowledge, arrangements of social space and lines of force and visibility (Lalvani 1996, pp. 2–3). While this constitutes the cultural formations that make visual media possible, these forms of media cannot simply be reduced to signifiers of social forces and relations premised solely on models of media theory, nor to models of spectacle within a political-based culture war (cf the recent controversies related to both Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and the Al Gorenarrated An Inconvenient Truth—discussed in more detail below). While most—but not all—media representations emerge from a clearly articulated contextual base, the topics chosen by our authors have a particular density of dynamic variation that identifies them as sites of interpretative activity. Films such as Requiem for a Dream, The Straight Story, Night Watch and the Left Behind series, postmodern Los Angeles television in the form of The Shield, and the early work of Thomas Edison all exemplify a full working out of the spatial dynamics within media—dynamics that are themselves part of and dependent upon the broader translation of cultural spaces in our postmodern world. Geographers who engage media believe that it is the spatial elements that give meaning to the experience of the participants, giving meaning to those concrete spatial elements that form the geographies and give shape to cultural performances within them. Thus, as these works exemplify, a much richer engagement with media will promote geographical media literacy thereby adding to the pedagogic tools already available. Our call for a geographic media literacy seeks to move beyond modernity’s progressive pedagogic platform that posits with more geographic information there is more accumulated meaning. In the case of global warming, for example, more scientific information has led to less, rather than more, consensus in the mass media as to what is deemed ‘‘Truth.’’ With the release of the The Day After Tomorrow and later Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, debates relating to the relationship between science, politics and media come to the forefront. The Day After Tomorrow and An Inconvenient Truth have been condemned for their unrealistic or overt ideological portrayal of global warming (Lewis 2007; Balling 2006; Vergano and Bowles 2004; Davidson 2004; Michaels 2004; Revkin
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2004; Waxman and Lee 2004). With regards to The Day After Tomorrow, Patrick Micheals (2004), a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, writes that ‘‘as a scientist, I bristle when lies dressed up as ‘‘science’’ are used to influence political discourse.’’ Similarly, Lewis (2007, p. 1) calls An Inconvenient Truth ‘‘a colorfully illustrated lawyer’s brief for global warming alarmism and energy rationing.’’ While The Day After Tomorrow was a fictional film and An Inconvenient Truth a documentary, they both are mediated information that address issues of science, mimesis and politics. These mediated representations are information to global masses just as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 Synthesis Report1 and, the Union of Concerned Scientists report, Scientific Integrity in Policymaking2 (cf Lukinbeal and Zimmermann 2006). Whereas scientific information works towards absolute mimesis, the use of scientific information for political ends operationalizes information to meet specific affective ends. With this in mind, political policy briefs about global warming are just as if not more influential in affecting mass mediated consensus of Truth. In this regard, the memo written by Frank Muntz3 for the Bush administration is described by PBS’s Frontline as a ‘‘memo that laid the groundwork for efforts by skeptics to discredit the scientific evidence for global warming’’ (Frontline 2007). But, Muntz’s retort to the Frontline interview4 is even more telling about the issue of media literacy: Listen to the word you just said: You were going to say ‘‘majority,’’ and then you corrected it and said ‘‘consensus,’’ because you believe consensus is a stronger word. That’s the whole point. A majority could be 51 percent of the scientists: Which scientists? Which science? There are still people who argue, is the right definition of this global warming or climate change? 1
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-syr.htm. http://www.ucsusa.org/global_environment/rsi/page.cfm? pageID=1322. 3 A pollster and media adviser for the Bush Administration during Bush’s first term. 4 Muntz’s retort came after the interviewer stated the following: ‘‘By 2000 the scientific consensus actually was not uncertain. It’s essentially how it is today, which is the majority—a consensus of scientists believe that global warming is a fact.’’ 2
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Whereas understanding meaning focuses on how information works to produce signification, affect bypasses knowledge production and goes straight to consensus building; affect modulates a response first and signification second. In short, meaning production does not hold a one-to-one relationship with information production. Rather, meaning is operationalized through consensus building and information provides the tools through which to build consensus. With the crisis of representation the belief that absolute realism can be mediated is no longer tenable. As Doel and Clarke (2007, p. 896) explain, ‘‘[t]he crisis of representation does not amount to finding oneself cut off from the reality of the referent and trapped in the prison house of language, but to finding oneself halved together in the place of dissemination.’’ We draw attention to the debates over global warming to show how a geographic topic is affected by issues surrounding media literacy. Our concern, then, is with how geographic media literacy should interrogate and educate differential sources of information that promote claims to ‘‘Truth.’’ Further, interrogation must examine and reveal how global warming information modulates affective responses by science, media and politics as well as by different types of media. The double challenge that Baudrillard speaks of is a call for action, a call to move beyond the acceptance of media saturation and meaning obliteration and attend to a critical pedagogy of media within academy. Therefore our call for geographic media literacy is a recognition of this challenge, one that moves beyond pedagogic standards of knowledge and places academic mediation within a wider culture of consumption where our lectures, our books and articles must compete with, challenge and analyze other forms of mediated information on the same topic. Further, our academic mediations are not ‘‘high information’’ but are placed within, and compete with, large circulations of mass media information. In this sense, our PowerPoint lectures are simply antiquated MTV videos of our profession, pale consensus builders in comparison to the latest hit songs on the Billboard charts. Rather than be alarmed at the fact that more young adults in the US know where the first CSI was filmed in comparison to Iraq, we see it as a challenge to geography to reshape how pedagogy is done. Rather than being affectively
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alarmed and position geographic literacy within discourses that promote a cultural of fear (Glassner 2000), we need to attend to, develop, and practice, geographic media literacy in our research and our teaching.
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