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43
ordinary people. His essay “Culture is Ordinary” offers a critique of the idea of
culture as “the best” of a civilization. Williams writes:
Culture is ordinary…Every human society has its own shape, its own
purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these in
institutions and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of
common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and
amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing
themselves into the land.24
According to Williams, even non-elite cultural products and practices have meaning
and should be considered in relations of power. This is a radical change from
traditional conceptions of culture, as well as a critique of literary theorists such as
F.R. Leavis and Dwight McDonald, who associated mass culture with chaos and
sought to educate people on ways to resist the lure of mass culture.25
Disdain similar to that expressed about mass culture by Leavis and
McDonald, as well as by Horkheimer and Adorno26 is regularly voiced about popular
culture—for example, the criticism that its content is insipid and tactless, that it
encourages or at least reinforces a loss of social graces, that it is a waste of time, etc.
In particular, popular culture that is associated with people of a low social status—
women, children, minorities, and poor people—is regularly criticized for its lack of
intellectual, moral, or cultural value and categorized as low culture. This criticism is
not only top-down; that is, criticism of low culture is likely to come from people who
are not a part of the social elite. As Jason Mittell27 and Ien Ang28 found in their
investigations of various television programs/genres that fell into the low culture
category (Dallas and daytime talk shows), concern about low culture is socially
pervasive. Even regular viewers of such programming express concern and disdain
Object Description
| Title | Kids as cultural producers: consumption, literacy, and participation |
| Author | Stephenson, Rebecca Herr |
| Author email | rherr@usc.edu; bhs@hri.uci.edu |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | Communication |
| School | Annenberg School for Communication |
| Date defended/completed | 2008-08-25 |
| Date submitted | 2008 |
| Restricted until | Unrestricted |
| Date published | 2008-10-17 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Banet-Weiser, Sarah |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Gross, Larry Seiter, Ellen |
| Abstract | This dissertation looks closely at the practice of digital media production within a group of special education students and their teachers. Using ethnographic methods of extended participant observation and semi-structured interviews with students, teachers, and parents, along with textual analysis of students' media projects, this work examines the types of learning that emerge from making media at school and the ways in which that learning relates to media and technology use in everyday life. Over the course of one school year (2005-2006), the students who are the focus of this dissertation undertook eight different multimedia production projects, ranging from designing PowerPoint presentations to digital video production and stop-motion animation. Through media production, the students found opportunities to practice traditional and digital literacy skills as well as to explore issues of identity and self-expression.; This dissertation provides empirical support for recommendations made by several media literacy scholars to include media production as part of critical media literacy curricula and contributes a unique case study -- one situated in special education -- to a growing body of work on digital literacy. Three interdisciplinary themes--consumption, literacy, and participation -- are used to organize the description and analysis of the students' media production activities. These themes connect the specific production that took place in the classroom to larger discourses about youth, media, technology, education, and access, working to complicate existing constructions of young people as either helpless victims of manipulative media or naturally savvy media and technology users. Instead, this research emphasizes that the relationships kids have with media and technology are complex, dynamic, intrinsically linked to their identities as consumers and participants in society. Media literacy is thus theorized as a tool for understanding and controlling consumption, participation, and the construction of young people as both current and future citizens. |
| Keyword | media literacy; media production; special education; middle school; digital media |
| Geographic subject (city or populated place) | Los Angeles |
| Coverage date | 2005/2006 |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m1674 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Rights | Stephenson, Rebecca Herr |
| Repository name | Libraries, University of Southern California |
| Repository address | Los Angeles, California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Filename | etd-Stephenson-2393 |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume29/etd-Stephenson-2393.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 48 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Full text | 43 ordinary people. His essay “Culture is Ordinary” offers a critique of the idea of culture as “the best” of a civilization. Williams writes: Culture is ordinary…Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these in institutions and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land.24 According to Williams, even non-elite cultural products and practices have meaning and should be considered in relations of power. This is a radical change from traditional conceptions of culture, as well as a critique of literary theorists such as F.R. Leavis and Dwight McDonald, who associated mass culture with chaos and sought to educate people on ways to resist the lure of mass culture.25 Disdain similar to that expressed about mass culture by Leavis and McDonald, as well as by Horkheimer and Adorno26 is regularly voiced about popular culture—for example, the criticism that its content is insipid and tactless, that it encourages or at least reinforces a loss of social graces, that it is a waste of time, etc. In particular, popular culture that is associated with people of a low social status— women, children, minorities, and poor people—is regularly criticized for its lack of intellectual, moral, or cultural value and categorized as low culture. This criticism is not only top-down; that is, criticism of low culture is likely to come from people who are not a part of the social elite. As Jason Mittell27 and Ien Ang28 found in their investigations of various television programs/genres that fell into the low culture category (Dallas and daytime talk shows), concern about low culture is socially pervasive. Even regular viewers of such programming express concern and disdain |
