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"Fact is, everything's changing. Used to be - in the old days - the media roughly corresponded to reality. But now it's all reversed. The media image is the reality, and by comparison day-to-day life seems to lack excitement. So now day-to-day life is false, and the media image is true. Sometimes I look around my living room and the most real thing in the room is the television. It's bright and vivid, and the rest of my life looks drab. So I turn the durn thing off. That does it every time.
Get my life back."
Amos
quoted in "Airframe" by Michael Crichton
Media Literacy is not only about television, but about our society. Living in the mountains of northern New Mexico is a choice that some of us have made which "deprives" us of much of the cultural world of billboards, buildings painted with advertising, flashing neon signs, and all the other visual signs of our times. We can look out our windows, and drive through the villages and small towns of our community here and not be besieged with "Amerika", but enjoy the vast empty spaces and views of "America the Beautiful". For this, we need to to remain vigilant as well as thankful.
The message is the medium
(Marshall McLuhan)
The work in Taos Talking Pixels examines the dynamic relationship that exists between multimedia and film, and the fertile zone that develops when the two mediums overlap; the intersection between new technologies and contemporary art; and the exciting three-dimensional virtual worlds being created by emerging digital artists. Have fun with these works. These artists are both engaging the medium of large-scale web use, and fusing it with large-scale grass-roots political dialogue. Many of these are art sites as well as sites of social resistance against anti-democratic mono culture.
Youth Media at the Taos Talking Picture Film Festival
"Media education can and has revolutionized the way we think about public health. The shift to a focus on the environment
rather than the traditional focus on the host or agent has come about largely because of media education. We've begun to see
all kinds of problems that used to be seen as individual choices or flaws -- from violence to substance abuse to eating disorders
-- as partly the result of the environment in which people make their choices. And the most important aspect of our environment,
of course, is the media."
"Huge and powerful industries -- alcohol, tobacco, junk food, guns, diet -- depend upon a media-illiterate population. Indeed
they depend upon a population that is disempowered and addicted. These industries will and do fight our efforts with all their
mighty resources. And we will fight back, using the tools of media education which enable us to understand, analyze, interpret,
to expose hidden agendas and manipulation, to bring about constructive change, and to further positive aspects of the media."
Jean Kilbourne, author: Deadly Persuasion : How Advertising Manipulates Us in an Age of Addiction
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