Youth Multimedia Magazine Program
Mission: To empower youth through creative exploration of multimedia technology as a means of communication and transmission of ideas and information.
Goals: To facilitate a media canvas that will serve as a multifaceted approach to communicating information and ideas in an interactive and engaging way.
In our current media landscape, the means by which previous generations got their information and ideas about society have multiplied and mutated beyond all previous comprehension. All of these previous formats, from newspapers to broadcasting to internet forums have been folded into a system of multimedia that leaves no stone (or silicon chip) unturned when it comes to engaging young people in the market economy that it supports and is supported by. Teenagers today have very little trouble navigating their way through the hundreds upon thousands of media messages that are thrown in their direction every single day. That does not mean, however, that they are equipped to make educated decisions regarding the way that they consume these images.
While the means by which we as a society communicate has changed rapidly over the last century, our awareness of the tools that have swiftly replaced one another in a quest for a global community has not made the same strides. The ever-changing media landscape has been a much discussed topic in scholarly texts during the 20th century and into the beginning of the 21st. Perhaps most renowned is the Marshall McLuhan text, The Medium is the Message, wherein McLuhan highlights the ways in which we as a people have failed to keep up with the technologies that we are constantly inventing. He says, “We actually live mythically and integrally, as it were but we continue to think in the old, fragmented space and time patterns of the pre-electric age” (4). That is, we as a people have not yet aligned our awareness with the possibilities that even the simplest technologies allow us in evolving beyond conventional modes of communication.
There needs to be a paradigm shift in the way that we as a society treat the evolving interactive media that so actively engages the vast majority of our population, especially our youth. We cannot continue to view the new technology through an old set of standards.
It is worth noting that the concept of adolescence is, historically speaking, relatively new. The first acknowledgement of teenagers as a condition of humanity that is uniquely separate from both childhood and adulthood was in 1904 by G. Stanley Hall. Since this discovery, and especially since the years following the baby boom, teenagers have often been the target audience of the constantly evolving media. Quickly it was discovered that this subset of our population had more expendable time, money, and attention than adults. However, even as they are a target audience they have had little more than a marginalized voice in creating mainstream media. There is an opportunity for change, though, as the young are the most equipped to complete the paradigm shift that we so desperately need in order to stop trying to make today’s technology serve yesterday’s purposes.
As technology becomes more and more interactive, the potential for all citizens to become reporters, creators, and innovators to a mass audience is being realized. In 2001, the newsmedia marveled at the role that cell phones played in the collective knowledge of the tragic events of September 11. Only four years later, the role of weblogging and video weblogging (blogs and vlogs) made it nearly impossible for the corporately owned media to blindside anyone as to the horrific goings on in the Gulf Coast during the days following Hurricane Katrina. As the interactive potential of the internet increases, we as a society are already deciding how much of a role we will allow it to play in shaping the way that we communicate. In previous broadcast technologies, there have been systems in place to keep marginalized groups in the margins. However, the internet is constantly providing us with new ways to give voices to the voiceless on an international scale. The sheer magnitude of the internet, coupled with the evolving ways in which we can use it for creative expression makes it more difficult than ever before for the conglomerates who own the mass media of television, radio, newspaper, and magazines to exercise the same exclusive control.
It is popularly assumed that because our youth are growing up in a media saturated society that they are inherently media literate. True, younger people are at an advantage, having come into the technological world with less preconceived notions about the pre-technological world than their elders. Their capacity to interface with many different types of media is more automatic, and they have a vast working knowledge, whether they understand it or do not, of the conventions of film, television, and radio. However, to assume that because teenagers use the media every day means that they understand it would be a dangerous assumption. Mass media is a code, or a language, which would lead one to believe that saturation would ensure fluency. However, the mass media is not that simple; the messages that it contains are well hidden and based in a market economy that is best served if those messages stay that way. In essence, the market economy of mass media is a language that is designed to be secret, changing to protect its invisibility much in the way that children invent secret languages and change them as adults catch on to certain words. Without ensuring that youth are given the proper tools to decode these secret messages, we are essentially setting them up to be living their lives in a foreign land.
By introducing any new medium into a society, we in some ways reshape it. This has never been more apparent than in the present. The rapid shift in the way that we as a society communicate with one another based on the saturation of computers, cell phones, and PDAs, to say the very least, is apparent in even underdeveloped nations. The immediacy of communication, and the means for anyone, anywhere to move, at least virtually, beyond their surroundings has exponentially and expediently changed the way that people communicate, relationships, and even conventions of family units. It has certainly begun to change the way that people relate to the ideas of time and space.
An invention as simple as the light bulb and the means to independently power it in our homes has given people the power to live outside the lighting conventions and sleeping patterns of the natural world. Imagine then, the possibilities of the shifting conventions of space and time as each generation’s communication on an international scale becomes more immediate and interactive. It is not unreasonable to assume that the concept of time zones could be altogether wiped out within the next century in order to accommodate communication between people who would otherwise be working on opposite schedules. This is, of course, a far reaching claim, but our newfound capacity for immediate travel and communication cannot be introduced into society without some consequence.
The trick is to think of this consequence as an evolution, and not a nuisance. For example, today’s youth are often targeted on many different media fronts at once. No longer is it sufficient to have a magazine or a CD or a movie. Based in large part to the saturation that they have been brought up in, today’s youth demands a more engaging pace of activity. It would not be a stretch to imagine a teenager working on their homework while listening to music on their computer and instant messaging with friends all at once. This multitasking is almost an expectation in today’s developed world. The example of CNN is often brought up, in that the channel often employs the use of different frames within the television screen to communicate many different news items all at once. Teachers and parents complain that this need for engagement is difficult for them to keep up with. How can a person at the front of a classroom compete with a handheld game, a cell phone, a computer, and an online community? They can’t, and to continue to look for ways to do so is simply stunting progress.
Many adults would seek to blame the flashing images of the media for the influx of Attention Deficit Disorder diagnoses and for youth violence. Because many adults are just as blind to the secret language of the media, they would not be able to tell you that while statistically, violence among youth has gone down over the last ten years, the reporting of it has gone up. They also would probably not tell you that the swarm of Attention Deficit Disorder and hyperactive youth is a byproduct of a society that is failing to change its expectations with its technologies. Just as a teacher cannot compete with a computer, often times, a parent cannot compete with a movie or video game. So why does it have to be a competition? If we as adults learn to evolve with the evolving technology in terms of our methods and expectations for engaging with youth, not only will our attempts be met with more success, but also less frustration.
In the 1990 film Pump Up The Volume, Allan Moyle creates a world where teenagers are able to hijack the broadcast airwaves as a means of communicating with one another outside of the world of their parents and teachers, who, as Will Smith would have said some fifteen years ago, just don’t understand. Teenagers today have the capacity for this, and more. Whereas Christian Slater’s Mark Hunter is able to reach out to his local peers in Pump Up The Volume, today’s teenagers can podcast to the whole world.
Within the opening pages of The Medium Is the Message, Marshall McLuhan says “Every culture and every age has its favorite model of perception and knowledge that it is inclined to prescribe for everybody and every thing. The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns” (6). In the nearly fifty years since its publication, we as a society have not lived up to this proclamation. We have not revolted against imposed patterns of newsgathering and reporting, and we have not revolted against imposed patterns of how to engage our youth. We are still asking a new dog to do old tricks, and it just doesn’t make any sense. By engaging youth in information gathering and idea sharing in a way that it is not only interactive, but international, we can not only facilitate media literacy, we can facilitate global community and civic engagement. As an added bonus, we as adults can learn from creative minds that have not yet been molded into the model of perception that we have decided is law. As a society we can begin the process of shifting the paradigm and teaching the dog some new tricks.
In today’s world, there are two digital divides, the divide that separates privilege from poverty, and the divide that separates youth from adults. More than ever before, the youth of today represent the unknown. Not only do adults often forget what adolescence really feels like, but as our society moves faster and faster, today’s teenagers are occupying a completely different time and space than their parents. They have grown up in a world where, space travel is an every day occurrence, where movies can be seen on Saturday afternoons on cable if you wait a year or so, and where telephone communication can be kept in their pocket. They really do speak a different language than most of the adults in their lives. However, they are perpetually being asked to communicate in a language that is not their own, putting them at a distinct disadvantage.
So how can we change this system of communication, and create a level playing field on which both adults and teenagers can communicate. Given the changing climate of international communication, we need to fully accept the concept of the youth as leaders of tomorrow. In fact, we need to take it one step further and make them leaders of today. Today’s youth are equipped with the capacity to understand the potential of evolving multimedia technology in ways that very few adults can, based solely on that fact that they are one step further away from the old paradigm. It is common perception that both youth and the media are evils in today’s society, and that the solution is to keep our kids in our sight and turn off the television. This solution is as antiquated as the idea that the way to bring your family together is to sit around the phonograph on Sunday night.
It is not fair to continuously ask youth to communicate on the turf of adults. We need to meet them on their playing field, and let them teach us what is important to them in their own language. There is more to their language than words, and as the internet creates a higher and higher capacity for Marshall MCLuhan’s concept of “global community” it is the images, sounds, and motion picture that is now called multimedia that will make this type of community possible. Facilitating this new move to multimedia language in way that youth can use it to create their own ideas and information is not enough. There are many different corporations out their that have already co-opted this idea and further involved youth in a market economy that does not support them. In order for youth to use multimedia to truly have their own language, they need to own it.
The idea of changing the system of advertising and the whole market economy of the media is a daunting one. However, the first step is educating youth in this system. Instead of making them watch advertisement after advertisement created by adults for their consumption, they can sell advertising on their own virtual space. They can co-opt this system for their own gain, personally and as a community. Not only can today’s youth tell us what is important to them in their own language, they can do it as a means of supporting themselves.
So how does this idea work? Well, as in any multimedia project, there are two components: the medium and the message. The medium, in this case, is a multimedia portal that supports a whole range of technical expression, from text, to images, to streaming audio and video, and video blogging. The message is constantly changing, and is determined by the youth that author the portal. It could be anything from local politics to upcoming trends in fashion. It could be a means of community building and homework help, but it is important, as an adult, to not assume that it will serve any one function, or to have a specific idea of what purpose it will serve. In order to facilitate a voice of the youth, we cannot clutter it with our own ideas of what this voice should be.
Technically speaking, there are a number of steps to the successful implementation of this model. First, in order to facilitate the medium itself, there needs to a be a brainstorm session about what technologies exist and what formats and equipment need to be learned in order to creative a truly interactive multimedia portal. This needs to be followed up by a comprehensive training in the equipment and software necessary to facilitate the portal. These could include, but are in no way limited to digital camcorders, sound mixing boards, Final Cut Pro, Avid, Imovie, Pro Tools, Itunes, Dreamweaver, and/or Flash. This training would cover the medium, leaving then the message to fill in. With the training provided, the involved teenagers could then begin to fill in the site with their own blogs, vlogs, information, ideas, and exchanges.
It is all well and good to provide a haven for these voices, but without bringing others to the place that the exchanges are being made, it may as well exist in a vacuum. By targeting similar groups and parties that would be interested in the material provided in the portal, teenagers would next develop a grassroots advertising plan, including but not limited to email lists, postcards, and flyers. Coupling this with extensive person to person networking, focusing on building strong personal and professional relationships, the teens would be able to build a strong readership. From this readership, they could extend their business plan into advertising and sustainability. Through the process of creating an advertising policy, a strong literacy of advertising media would be cultivated.
Partnered with the technical skills that they learned in the first phase, the information skills in the second, and the networking skills in the third, the fourth stage of advertising literacy would be the final stone in building a strong foundation of skills that would be useful in almost any chosen profession. Most importantly, it would enable the teens involved in the project to understand the market economy that is already in place. While many would argue that allowing, or even worse encouraging teenagers to willingly participate in this market economy goes against the foundation of creating an independent media outlet. While this is necessarily an unfounded claim, the knowledge that they will gain of the market economy and the way it functions will not only allow them to think critically about it, but also give them the first step to changing the system from the inside out.
