By Any Media Necessary: Mapping Youth and Participatory Politics

Agenda Shifting

This is the original prompt that the MAPP project shared with Pivot TV and HitRecord in creating the Credibility video:
 
How might identity groups use media to react to, reshape, or even control the narrative being constructed about them in mainstream media? We are seeing many of the groups we study -- but especially the DREAM activists and the American Muslim networks respond quickly to news stories or popular culture programming that they feel places them in a negative light. They are using their collective capacities to pull together information, critique representation, construct alternative narratives, and get them into circulation, often in ways that commands the attention of major news organizations. In part, these strategies work because of the ways they are able to quickly mobilize dispersed and decentralized networks that are invested in helping them spread content.
 

Questions you can ask to get a conversation about shifting the agenda started in your community

 

Suggested key points to include

 

Key term definitions

 

Culture Jammers

Culture jammers seek to disrupt/subvert mainstream media culture (perceived as dominated by corporate advertising) to promote social change. According to Henry Jenkins, “Culture jammers in the 1990s overtly opposed their targets, in particular global organizations and their brands . . . The media landscape was much different in those days: Television was dominating mass communication, and the culture jammers’ objective was to block and jam the flow of what they perceived as manipulated images created by Madison Avenue and the culture industry. Back then, activists felt they could remain on the outside looking in and did not participate in the culture of consumption they were critiquing.” (Jenkins 2013, 35)
           

Cultural Acupuncture

According to Henry Jenkins, like the culture jammers of the 1990’s, “Today’s change-makers are still strongly invested in appropriating and remixing content from ‘the empire of signs’ and are still holding corporations accountable for their unhealthy impact on our lives.” However, where culture jammers seek to block the flow of mainstream media, cultural acupuncture entails “[tapping] into the culture’s circulation.” Jenkins states that “this generation moves seamlessly between being socially and culturally active to being politically and civically engaged, applying skills they learned making fan vids or recording skateboarding stunts to capture and share what was happening at their local Occupy encampment. Popular culture is their shared mythology; remix is how they share meaning and motivate others to action. This isn’t a Twitter revolution; they are trying to change the world through any media necessary.” (Jenkins 2013, 36)
 

Media Literacy

The National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) offers the following explanation when trying to understand media literacy:

Media refers to all electronic or digital means and print or artistic visuals used to transmit messages.
Literacy is the ability to encode and decode symbols and to synthesize and analyze messages.
Media literacy is the ability to encode and decode the symbols transmitted via media and the ability to synthesize, analyze and produce mediated messages.
Media education is the study of media, including ‘hands on’ experiences and media production.
Media literacy education is the educational field dedicated to teaching the skills associated with media literacy
(Source: NAMLE)

 

Participatory Politics

Participatory politics is one of the means through which individuals/groups seek to shift the agenda to accomplish political goals . According the the Youth and Participatory Politics network:

Participatory Politics are interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and groups seek to exert both voice and influence on issues of public concern through the following types of activities:

Investigation: Members of a community collect, and analyze online information from multiple sources, and often provide a check on information circulated by traditional media outlets.

Dialogue and feedback: Commenting on blogs, or providing feedback to political leaders through other digital means is increasingly how young people are joining public dialogues and making their voices heard around civic and political issues.

Circulation: In participatory politics, the flow of information is shaped by many in the broader community rather than by a small group of elites.

Production: In addition to circulating information young people increasingly create original online digital content around issues of public concern that potentially reach broader audiences.

Mobilization: Members of a community mobilize others often through online networks to help accomplish civic or political goals.”

(Source: YPP)

Included resources on private vs. public
 
Hobbs, R. (2001, April). Classroom Strategies for Exploring Realism and Authenticity in Media Messages. Reading Online, 4(9).
 
Jenkins, Henry. 2014. “Participatory Culture: From Co-Creating Brand Meaning to Changing the World.“ GfK Marketing Intelligence Review 6, no. 2.  

Slack, Andrew. 2010. “Cultural Acupuncture and a Future for Social Change.” The Huffington Post. July 2.
 
Soep, Lissa. 2014. Participatory Politics: Next-Generation Tactics to Remake Public Spheres. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. 
 

Looking to Start Your Own Conversation?


If the HitRecord Agenda Shifting video and information contained here inspired you to action, you may want reach to the original call for submissions that inspired this video to be made in the first place. While the deadline for submissions has expired, you are always free to create your own responses to it!
 

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