Associate professor Dr. Jane Marcellus is an Associate Professor who teaches media history, feature writing and cultural studies at Middle Tennessee State University. Her research focuses on media history and gender, with a particular interest in representation of employed women in the 1920s and 1930s. Her work has been published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, American Journalism, Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Journal of Popular Culture, and Journal on Excellence in College Teaching. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Oregon, master’s degrees from the University of Arizona and Northwestern, and a bachelor’s from Wesleyan University in Connecticut. She is a former journalist.
How do you define mass communication?
I would say mass communication or media communication refers to the institutions and practices through which public discourse is mediated, using a variety of technologies and imbricated in political, economic, and cultural concerns.
How do you keep your students excited about working in the field of communications in light of shrinking job opportunities?
Part of the joy of teaching history is that offers a way to keep change in perspective. Change happens. Old technologies die; new ones arise. (I’m sure a lot of 15th c. scribes were bent out of shape by Gutenberg’s press.) But many things are constant. The need for clear information is a constant, and I believe it will be more in demand given the critical issues facing the globe–the economy, the environment, terrorism. So I try to get students to keep their eyes on the big picture, while pointing out that they do need to learn a wider variety of skills than journalists in the past.
What changes do journalism and mass communication programs need to make in order to stay relevant today?
Realize that the Internet has broken down some traditional barriers, so the old gatekeeper roles are called into question at best. Find ways to work with the interactive nature of new media while still providing useful information. There’s a teaching function in here. Even before new media, a lot of intelligent people just didn’t know what journalists do and how they should function in a democracy. Now, it’s even harder because people think they can do it themselves. So at a fundamental level, we need to teach literacy–the difference between information and propaganda as well as the ability to critically analyze media of all sorts. We also need to be a lot more humble. Stop acting like political-economic issues don’t influence content. Stop claiming to be “objective.” Objectivity in news is a 20th-century construct. Its time may have passed. I think news in the future will be less static, more like an ever-shifting conversation. Within that, though, there has to be a place for carefully researched and documented information presented in a clear way, while acknowledging that it’s prepared by human beings who do have a point of view.
If you could save one journalism and mass communication course from extinction, what would it be and why?
Media history! If you don’t understand the roots of a field, its evolution, then you have no hope of understanding the field itself in any meaningful way. I take a broad view of “history.” I see it not just as a static story of the dead past, but as a way to study the process of change. We are living through an incredibly critical historical moment in the evolution of media. Without the study of history, and without understanding change in the past, how can we make sense of this moment? I want my students to leave my class with a sense of their own lives in historical context–not just to get a first job but to make their whole, hopefully long lives more interesting. My hope is that studying history will help put the ephemeral nature of media technologies in context and be better prepared for the many changes that will occur throughout their lifetimes.
What new media tools or applications do you incorporate in your teaching? Why these in particular?
I have been experimenting with blogs both in media history and in skills courses such as feature writing. I’ve found having a closed class blog somewhat useful in a small seminar, because it can become an informal, communal space where we can continue the discussion outside the classroom. It’s a little more fun than having a “Discussion Board” on D2L, which is rather dry. In my honors media history course, which I organize around the idea of emerging media technologies, the first post I ask them to write is to explore what blogs have to do with media history. In the writing classes, it’s a space to post multimedia examples everyone finds, to share ideas, and to post their own work. Of course, it’s like any other assignment–it has to be part of a grade or they tend not to do it.
If you could offer a piece of advice to both your fellow educators and media professionals in the field, what would it be?
Don’t make the mistake of equating “journalism” or even “media communication” with technological skills. Technology is a tool. To equate journalism with, say, editing video makes no more sense than equating a poem with typing. Unfortunately, a lot of people are running around frantically trying to catch up with technology–which is a never-ending battle–and in the process run the risk of sacrificing the enduring issues of the field in favor of ephemeral skills. There is a tendency to fetishize whatever is new just because it’s new, and to accuse those who criticize that stance as out-of-touch Luddites. That misses the point entirely. Embrace the new–but keep it in historical context.
What do you see for the future of journalism and mass communication both in general and in higher education?
I hope that it will mature into a much more thoughtful role of mediating public discourse through emerging technologies. In academia, I hope it will mature into field that’s considered fundamental to the academy–one that’s grounded in the liberal arts tradition and that teaches job skills and critical thinking both.