Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
From these mediascapes, people are able to construct scripts of others' imagined
lives and of events beyond their direct experience, to gain information communicated
by big global corporations, public broadcasters, international agencies or small groups
of indigenous peoples harnessing the opportunities of new media technology to tell
their stories to whoever will listen in the rest of the increasingly 'wired-up' world.
Related to the concept of mediascape is that of ideoscape, which refers to chains of
ideas, concepts, images and values like freedom, democracy, growth and perhaps
sustainability that constitute individual and group worldviews and perspectives. There
are many debates and discussions about the economic and ideological power of
global media corporations, with fears that global culture is being standardized,
simplified, homogenized and Americanized. Ritzer (2000) writes of social, cultural
and business practices suffering from 'McDonaldization' and Bryman (1999) sees
the 'Disneyization' of much of our cultural leisure practices. A form of cultural
imperialism is often evident through the ubiquity of Hollywood movies and the
Hollywood-style, adaptable reality television and game-show formats and global
sales of popular entertainments like Friends and Big Brother . However, this argument
is contested by those who see consumers as being producers too - of meaning and
interpretation that culturally mediates alien ideas and values, and also of media
artefacts such as films, video shorts, blogs and advertisements that increasingly find
distribution in the still largely unregulated globalized cultural commons known as
the Internet (Tomlinson, 1991; Ginsburg et al. , 2002; Couldry and Curran, 2003;
Roth, 2005; Parks, 2005; Thussu, 2006). The advertising, marketing and public
relations industry is also viewed by many as a direct influence, or even cause, of the
insatiable growth in global consumerism (Schiller, 1989). However, as Silverstone
(2007) states, the mediated space of appearance he calls the 'mediapolis' is important
because ultimately its degree of freedom from corporate or government restrictions
will influence not just the free flow of communication - our access to others' worlds
and worldviews, ideas and ideologies - but the very possibility of social dialogue,
human growth and development. To enable this, we need global standards for media
practice that will combat the pollution of the global media environment - the
mediascape - by powerful corporations and reactionary governments. Securing the
future of our physical environment, Silverstone argues, will in the end be of limited
value if we allow our symbolic one to be fatally eroded or destroyed. We need both
eco-sustainability literacy and media literacy, combining knowledge and skills with
morality and ethics from both cognate fields: 'For without an adequate expression
of the plurality of the world which the mediapolis must provide, both on the screen
and in the interaction of screen and spectator, then there is little to look forward
to' (Silverstone, 2007: 55).
Indeed, the concept 'mediapolis' updates the work of Jurgen Habermas (1974)
whose earlier notion of 'the public sphere' - a site (or sites) where free, rational,
popular and passionate debate can occur, where political understanding and
engagement can be nurtured and where learning can continually take place. For
Habermas the public sphere is an essential component of any democracy worth its
name and the media, both traditional and new (analogue and digital), is central to
its maintenance or (alternatively) its erosion. Thus the public sphere exists whenever
individual citizen voices come to share, question or communicate 'in an unrestricted
fashion - that is, with the guarantee of freedom of assembly and association and
 
Search WWH ::




Custom Search