By Anjali Nair
The program was a collection of diverse lectures under the larger theme of Media Literacy in the context of new media. It served as an urgent call to empower people with the critical capacity for accessing, creating, evaluating, and analyzing media.
Prof. Sherri Culver's lectures were instrumental in understanding the need to go beyond using media merely as a means to achieve ends (such as leisure, building professional skills, news production, content generation, etc.), and to also question the ethical implications of one’s media habits. What does it mean to be literate in consuming news? What choices must people make while consuming media? What skills are necessary to differentiate between media-literate and misleading content? These questions evaluate not just the morality of our media usage but also compel us to deconstruct the ethics behind media production and consumption.
The talk on Media Literacy highlighted another significant concern: the possible consequences of media use and the risks and benefits therein. Youth, being one of the most influential stakeholders in internet media practices, require engagement in producing and consuming ethical content. This approach aims to foster ethical media use by altering existing habits, such as uncritical news sharing, lack of fact-checking, and a reconsideration of the impact of circulating images on sensitive issues.
An illustrative example used in class was an interpretative exercise analyzing a social media image depicting teenagers fighting in school, with one of the kids recording and posting the video online. This exercise encouraged us to reflect on the motives and ethics behind sharing content on social media, and led to further questions: What are our responsibilities as media users? What factors influence our personal ethics in engaging with different media forms?
Lectures titled "VisionByte: Approaching Vision in the Digital Age," hosted by Prof. Holger, provided a refreshing exercise in contemplating the “phenomenology of images” and how images shape our understanding of the world. This lecture offered new perspectives on understanding images beyond their aesthetics, the cult value of images, and the contrast between visual and textual stimuli in our perception of the world. It also introduced new discourses in image representation, such as the use of AI in art production, and the implications on themes of "Creativity" and "Authenticity."
This lecture was part of a broader exercise in Media Literacy, encouraging speculation on media images as reflections of both "Truth" and "Half Truths." The ethical questions raised were particularly relevant in exploring several themes: the portrayal of violence in media, advertisement and propaganda, the politics of visual and textual representation, media as "Frames" in the context of conflicts and wars, representation of indigenous and marginalized communities in media, and the role of different stakeholders (media outlets, journalists, filmmakers, or academic scholars) in ethical content creation.
Overall, the THISAM program was enlightening and prompted us to contemplate what it means to be a media ‘user’ and a ‘reader’.
