By Ralph Beliveau, University of Oklahoma
Bob Trumpbour, Pennsylvania State University, Altoona
In an article written over four decades ago, Jake Highton teased out the tensions between the “green eyeshades” and the “chi-squares.” Highton wrote about the differences between individuals with practical experience in the field and those who plied their academic craft with the statistical tools that were, and still are, embedded in the social sciences. Individuals such as Philip Meyer did much to connect social science with journalistic practices, yet the challenges faced in today’s complex landscape are unlikely to be resolved by the infusion of a single set of core practices into the media landscape. And what had been missing in these pictures of the arena of journalism education was recognition of critical approaches to the media that stretched back at least to the discussions of Lippmann and Dewey in the 1920s.
Despite a continuing line of critique from Lippmann and Dewey through the Chicago School, and the early years of critical theory, when a “green eyeshades and chi-squares revisited” article was presented at AEJMC in 1992 by Dickson and Sellmeyer, this critical line was ignored. The 1992 piece stated that “press criticism” was one way that scholars and theorists could offer “an area of research that (was) ultimately practical for newspapers.” So the debate between the “green eyeshades” and the “chi squares” and those assessing it suffered from a tunnel vision that left critical and cultural scholars on the sidelines. For some in the field, that omission may have been a desirable outcome. However, in a rapidly fragmenting and transforming media world, cultural and critical studies are more important than ever to better understanding the past, the present, and the future of our media environment.
Although tough economic times may make it tempting to pull back and teach “real-world” skills, we ought to consider such a tactic at our own peril. Unless we want our students to be short-term hired help that is interchangeable and readily replaceable, as seems so common today, we need to give them tools to conceptualize how things will change and how they might understand the nature of this change so that they are not paralyzed by it. In short, students and educators need to expand their horizons beyond the limits of industry experience and social science in order to consider how form and content are established within media. A critically framed approach through media literacy offers an essential direction.
But the development of attention, understanding, and conceptual inquiry in media literacy will be hampered if mass communication and journalism schools do not attend to the way form and content are interrelated. We need to discuss how the evolution of “new” media changes both form and content. Unfortunately, many of the signs of movement in the field indicate a simplification of the relationship and a reliance on form, which is to say, on tools.
How do new faculty positions descriptions, for example, discuss form vs. content? Most list the forms (i.e., tools) they want taught, suggesting that the skills are grouped under form and that the content will just follow.
It begs the question why would the content follow so automatically? Does the old dog need the new trick of a new software platform, or really a fundamental transformation in the way content is finding its audience? And do the transformations in media mean dog fights between old and new ways of teaching, or are we learning better ways of all getting along? Media literacy suggests that we pay greater attention to form. A critical perspective would have us carefully consider what the biases inside these forms mean for our students and our media culture. How does meaning change when it squeezes through, say, as a 140 character micro-blog?
What are the implications of this focus on form over content? What we find most interesting about it is how little attention to the form actually takes place in the status quo of media practices and teaching. Much valuable work has come through what we could call the theorists of form—some media ecologists, some not—like Joshua Meyerowitz, Neil Postman, Sherry Turkle, Janet H. Murray, Marshall McLuhan, and new media form theorists like Henry Jenkins and Donna Haraway.
Media ecology draws from many disciplinary influences, including the work of Harold Innis, Walter Ong, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Eric Havelock, Susanne Langer, Erving Goffman, Edward T. Hall, George Herbert Mead, Margaret Mead, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Gregory Bateson. Yet many of these thinkers are typically left out of the conversation, either because their differentiation of form and content is intellectually problematic, or because their focus on form suggests—sometimes explicitly—an agentless technological determinism.
But the agency producing change is often center stage, as the current media environment turns much more critically attentive on itself. The patterns of content presentation in traditional TV news become a satirical critical target for other TV outlets. The spread of the critical satire appears to be changing the patterns of content presentation. James Carey might suggest that the media’s own transmission of media criticism is changing the rituals of media presentation.
So from the critical side, reaching from mass communication to criticism and media literacy studies, the implications of form are saturating the content. On the social scientific side, however, questions of form tend to be over-instrumentalized, like the way questions of page layout or ideas about the formal presentation of local news are questions of market research regarding whether the content is delivered by a blonde or a brunette.
We don’t think this is a new problem. In fact, we would argue that theories about media form/content relationships have been playing catch-up throughout their history, only now the rate is accelerating. Part of this “catch-up” has to do with Marshall McLuhan’s observation (in The Gutenberg Galaxy) that we are plummeting into the future with our eyes on the rear-view mirror (“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”)
Can we do both at once? Can we look where we are going while looking at where we have come from?
The introduction and diffusion of new forms of media are experiencing a kind of compression on an accelerating curve. These changes are happening in technology as much as by changes in models that might or might not be successfully monetized. The will that supports these transformations in the way information and entertainment are experienced needs to be understood to prevent misplacing agency into technological changes or changes in form.
As business models that have worked for generations implode amid a weak economy and the technological advances that inspire new efficiencies among media professionals, students will push educators, often rather vigorously, to teach “skills” rather than complex concepts that force them to struggle mightily. Skills will change as software packages and broadcasting equipment are replaced by newer versions of the latest gadgetry. Yet the deeper ideas that we impart in our theory-based classes have the potential to give our students the mental acuity to forge ahead in challenging times. They might make better sense of opportunities when others might be perplexed, but in some instances they may understand more clearly that models are changing at such a rapid rate that no one—including those with narrow expertise—has a firm handle on what might come next.
No single perspective can claim to fully prepare anyone for a highly uncertain future, but adopting a “trade school” mentality should not be a default option, no matter how hard our students push us to teach skills at the expense of deeper thought. An academic dialogue that gives proper respect and allows for better understanding of the critical and cultural implications that are embedded in our media systems and the routines of which they are a part can go a long way to improving our students’ understanding of the world in which they live, in addition to the industries-to-come which they will hopefully lead.
Ralph Beliveau is an assistant professor at teh University of Oklahoma. His research areas include critical media pedagogy; media criticism; morality & literacy; critical theory, and rhetorical theory. He is working on a study of critical communication and education theory focusing on Paulo Freire.
Bob Trumpbour is an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University, Altoona. His research areas include media, sports, and society; mass media and public policy; media history; sociology of sports; media campaigns; and the economic impact of stadium construction.