“…exploring young people as actors within the techno-media culture circumvents the effects paradigm in that young people are shown as ‘active’ rather than being constructed as merely consumers” (293).

“Youth, Technology, and Media Cultures” by Sefton-Green

As someone who has taught media literacy to middle schoolers, I witnessed firsthand the “media consumerism” of adolescents. At the beginning of the course, students often had innocent conceptions of the media and the media’s goals. They made naïve claims about the purpose of a commercial, the effects of a television episode, or lyrics in controversial music. Through the study of how and why media is produced, students slowly gained the critical ability to dissect forms of media to identify implications about politics, race, gender, beauty, etc. within the images. In this way, they became active participants of the media instead of just passively taking it in at face value. This is especially important considering their age group is targeted heavily by marketers due to their spending power in America.

The article goes on to provide examples of ways that students can become increasingly active with the media. Although my class focused on analyzing and discussing messages in the media, the article presented activities for students to participate in writing and rewriting media “text” and the value of “nonprint texts.” Considering I was also a writing teacher, I also witnessed the struggle of some students to engage with and write traditional texts. Thus, the idea of using media culture to promote alternative forms of writing appealed to me and made me realize what my media literacy class was missing. My students could have “rewritten” some of the commercials or scenes from television we analyzed in class to change the messages. They could work in groups to write a script and perform it to the class. In their script, they would have to think critically about their word choices and media features (e.g. sound effects, use of music, visual presentation, angles) to ensure that their “rewritten text” gives the message they intended. Through this work, they would gain valuable practice that would increase their chances of not being passive consumers of media.