Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
for sustainability
Aims
This chapter will examine various aspects of communication and learning for
sustainability. The role of marketing, public communication campaigns, the Internet,
cyberspace, film and television will be explored using a range of examples. In many
ways, the mediascape can be seen as being an environment through which we make
sense of the world and of ourselves. The chapter will close with a brief discussion
of the main features of Education for Sustainable Development, referencing both the
formal learning taking place within institutions like schools, colleges, universities,
etc., and the informal learning occurring outside the classroom in the community
and in everyday life.
Mediascapes, the mediapolis and the public sphere
The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1996: 33) has written of the global cultural
economy and the interrelationship of five global cultural flows: ethnoscapes, media-
scapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes. He uses the suffix 'scape' to
highlight the variability of these environments and to 'indicate that these are not
objectively given relations that look the same from every angle of vision, but rather,
that they are deeply perspectival constructs shaped by language, politics, space and
place:
Mediascapes refer both to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce
and disseminate information (newspapers, magazines, television stations and film-
production studios), which are now available to a growing number of private
and public interests through the world, and to the images of the world created
by these media. These images involve many complicated inflections, depending
on their mode (documentary or entertainment), their hardware (electronic or
pre-electronic), their audiences (local, national or transnational), and the interests
of those who own and control them. What is most important about these
mediascapes is that they provide (especially in their television, film and cassette
forms) large and complex repertoires of images, narratives and ethnoscapes
to viewers throughout the world, in which the world of commodities and the
world of news and politics are profoundly mixed. What this means is that many
audiences around the world experience the media themselves as a complicated
and interconnected repertoire of print, celluloid, electronic screens and billboards.
(Appadurai, 1996: 35)
