Media Literacy and Creative Boom
As we enter the increasingly global, mobile and interactive digital age, so the social impact of new media becomes ever more important. Becoming part of everyday activity much earlier in life than print literacy of previous generations, parents of the first generation of ‘Digital Natives’ (John Palfrey & Urs Gasser) will probably struggle to keep up with the ever changing face of social media while those kids ‘Born Digital’ will continue to shape the future of our culture, economy, politics and social roles in the global digital world. Media literacy is essential to promote the analysis and production of various texts & media through greater access to information and the tools required to produce them. Whilst it is important to teach the foundations of new media within education systems, it is out of the classroom where students will produce, distribute and critique the cultural pieces they create through global open source networks. The freedom of expression that has been unlocked is not without its potential pitfalls and brings along new concerns of safety & legality but as is already evident will feed the tidal wave of inventive creativity which will change the way we experience art, music & life.
In ‘On Photography’ Susan Sontag describes the transformation of the photograph through industrialization -
“That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption – the toy of the clever, the wealthy and the obsessed – seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was gratuitous, that is an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. as industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.”
Parallels can be drawn with the domestication of digital media – no longer the specialized knowledge of the academic or wealthy and increasingly open source resulting in the snowball effect of creativity and skill of the ‘amateur’. Interactive social communities and Web 2.0 sites allow content to evolve to that which the users want to experience. This in turn changes social consciousness as the consumer becomes more than a viewer – producer, critic and collectively, content editor.
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