The discussion about the latest primary and what the numbers mean was good but it was hard to get them to understand what information came from good sources and what information is more opinion. Some were just so enamored with Obama that they didn’t care.

Next school year we will be working more on how to determine good and bad places for information along with doing some blogging.

Are you sure that the Obama Campaign is purely top-down?

I know of a site where the common delegates organized themselves in a very “Web 2.0″ manner to get the opportunity to represent their candidate in Denver. It started here in Washington State and has spread to other caucus states.

http://www.obamadelegates.org

If even his base is using their own, unofficial, community-generated tools to create change…. perhaps there is something to the idea of “people power.”

The concept of media as being something distinct from literature lies in the concept of ‘a cannon’ of superior texts in a ‘content’ driven curriculum. If we are assume that all texts are created for an identifiable audience to send a particular message in a specific medium then all texts are united. Within that frame effectiveness can be valued. Questions of critical, artistic and commercial success can be debated after that.

The recent interest in communication literacy by educators in general is the concern that students lack discernment when responding to the huge diversity of messages now being created and broadcast by the prosumer community.

As a practitioner and teacher of Media for 20 years I find the depth of concern intriguing, as it evidences greater fears over diversity and access to distribution than the fears we held over the monolithic and closed media structures of old.
My cynicism aside, I do agree that it is time to act and this was the content of my last post on my blog.

I do not think it is really that complicated if you just come back to the triumvirate of medium, message and audience. The underlying message in Obama campaign is the same not matter what the medium or audience – ‘vote for me’.

Designing political media campaigns represent one of the most difficult challenges to media experts, as the audience is often broad and difficult to target (what do the swing voters want to hear, what will keep my current supports happy, etc.) and it is always a trade off with costs.

The use of online communities provides while not a defined audience by beliefs (as such) certainly defined by their use of technology and therefore some leverage can be gained with this knowledge.

Levi-Strauss anthropological work suggests that ‘media text’ become part of our transactions with others and define our values. As we shifted from broadcast to volkscast (my own derivation) the discussion ‘around the water cooler’ or in the playground sudden became media texts in themselves. The dialogue is captured and can be distributed, consumed, responded to and most importantly built upon with more dialogue.

The really interesting thing is that Obama is so willing to engage in this ‘dialogue’ form – but the asynchronous nature of it gives politician a huge advantage. It is like a ‘town hall meeting’ where not only does the speaker control the microphone (choice and focus of debate) Obama (and his ghost writers) are not expected to respond immediately and have time to think. They do all this while gathering huge amount of profiling information for free.

Still if your school authorities are still shutting these technologies down then you are not even going to get to this level of deconstruction. I noted in another comment, we do not give drivers licences without proper training and a scaffold programme of development. Yet we all posses the means to broadcast and distribute what ever messages we want. To those who say that’s why we should ban it in school, I say well lets ban cars as well they kill far more people.

When I hear Westerners complaining about Chinese control of their internet, I remind them that Chinese students have far greater access to information from within their schools then the vast majority of their contemporaries in the US.

I do think this is a kind of info literacy that we aren’t conveying very well to students. And it’s not just blogs–what about erroneous political emails that go flying about, and falsified videos and even rumors that circulate by word of mouth/or Facebook? We should be teaching them good sources for verifying information, working through lessons where they evaluate candidate websites, blogs, chase down rumors, and the like.
I do think this does happen in government classes but it should happen in more than one venue for it to really “stick” for kids, I think?

The idea that this is somehow a non-hierarchical campaign is a crock.

1. The Rolling Stone article you mention carries with it the conventional “crossfire” accusations. Post seem to be either echo chambers or ad hominem attacks. Part of what we need to teach is how to have a conversation with people we don’t agree with.

2. The other link mentions this histogram of mentions of US presidential candidates. One of the undiscovered countries here is how data mining the web might provide us with useful political pictures along the lines of what phone surveys have done in the past. Also another educational task, more mathematical this time: learning how to read and evaluate such data.

Tangential question: I’m curious about your take of Doctorow’s Little Brother (if you’ve had a chance to read it yet). It deals very directly with questions of political action and networks. It strikes me as a great way to introduce these issues with students, including my own college students. Do you think it’s a book teachers might take to?