číslo 1/2013 - Paneurópska vysoká škola

Výskum & Eseje/Research & Essays 13
they continue, ‘that even more mischievous than misrepresentation and the exploitation of ignorance and the
whipping up of herd-prejudice is the habit of irresponsibility about public matters that the Press fosters’ (1933,
p. 103). Much of the ensuing discussion in the book’s remaining pages is devoted to considering various
‘exercises in observation and comparison’ intended to help break this ‘habit of irresponsibility’ in the interest
of the wider community.
One can only speculate about what Leavis and Thompson would think about media studies as it is taught
today, of course, but it is readily apparent that that the arguments they advanced reverberate in debates about
media literacy. If the participants in current discussions tend to be less inclined to use a language of ‘taste’
and ‘discrimination’ to express their beliefs, many of them nevertheless continue to sound the alarm over what
they perceive to be the damaging ‘effects’ of media representations on young people. The rationale for media
education, as a result, is often couched in the terms of first identifying and then resisting the pull of harmful
influences. A media-literate student, it follows, is one who has been sensitised to the ways in which various
media institutions seek to ‘distort’ or ‘falsify’ reality, usually in accordance with commercial interests, in order
to further the cause of consciousness raising. As such, she or he needs to be sufficiently inspired to uphold
higher values of decency, that is, a strong sense of moral purpose. Underlying corresponding notions of media
literacy, then, is the assumption that media education needs to operate at the level of inoculation. That is to
say, the student must be partly exposed to the debilitating forms of media influence in the classroom so as to
ultimately enhance their immunity from manipulation. In this way, the teacher fulfils their role of ensuring the
‘improvement’ of the student’s personal sense of refinement and her or his capacity for cultivated judgement.
It goes without saying, of course, that prefigured in any approach to media pedagogy is an array of presuppositions
about how students actually learn, and – equally crucial – why they want and need to learn in the first
place. Approaches striving to reaffirm the tenets of Leavis and Thompson’s guidelines risk taking for granted
the belief that students are willing to be instilled with the desire to resist the enticements of media texts and
imagery. In other words, they assume that students can learn to share their teacher’s ‘finer sensibilities’, and
that once so qualified will feel compelled to elevate themselves from the realm of ‘low’ or ‘popular’ culture into
that of ‘high’ culture or the ‘fine arts’. No doubt there are contexts where such an approach might be deemed
relevant – the teaching of aesthetics in art history, for example, may be one – but there is little chance that this
will prove to be the case in the media studies classroom. Far from regarding the media as pernicious purveyors
of ‘cheap thrills’ or feeble-minded ‘distractions’, today’s student is much more likely to consider different
genres of media content as sources of intense self-identification, and all the more pleasurable for it. Moreover,
many such students are passionately committed to securing their own forms of media-making, finding in the
tools of do-it-yourself composition and critique the means to articulate their own perspectives in a manner that
recurrently calls into question ‘proper,’ ‘appropriate’ or ‘legitimate’ value predispositions.
A multiplicity of literacies
While young people’s interest in media-making is hardly a new development, it is often framed in related
academic discussions as a matter of ‘media literacy’, whereby instruction in the critique of mainstream media
forms and practices serves as a worthy end in its own right. Interesting to observe in this regard is the extent to
GMJ Book.indb 13 21.1.2013 9:44