Technology Guru Touts Media Literacy

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September 13, 1999 (6:27 AM EDT)

By Malcolm Maclachlan,

Douglas Rushkoff thinks schools aren't teaching the right subjects.

Rushkoff, who has written six books on media and technology, said schools ought to teach children how to deconstruct the messages coming at them through television, the Internet, and other media.

In Playing the Future, first released in 1995, Rushkoff laid out the idea that adults are immigrants in amedia-rich world where children are the natives. While adults think today's children are deficient in basic skills, Rushkoff said they are rich in skills that let them navigate the information-saturated environment in which we now live.

Rushkoff furthers his ideas about media manipulation in his seventh book, Coercion: Why We Listen To What "They" Say, expected out later this month.
Listen here for more information from Douglas Rushkoff. (requires RealAudio player)

He spoke with TechWeb's Malcolm Maclachlan about media education and why advertisers should be kept out of schools.

One of your ideas is that media literacy should be taught in schools. Could you explain why this is important and how this subject could be taught?

The United States is the only developed nation that doesn't have a mandated program of media literacy in the public schools. You almost have to ask, why is that the case?

My suspicion is both educators and the people who fund education understand once you start teaching someone how to deconstruct the McDonald's commercial one day, the day after that, they'll be deconstructing what the teacher says, the day after that [it will be] what the priest says and what the politician says.

The easiest way to teach media literacy -- which is just the subject or skill of understanding how a message is put together, why it's put together, who's putting it together, and what he wants you to believe as a result -- is put a kid on a video editor for half an hour. Once he sees the way a video is edited together, he'll never be the same.

With more commercial elements trying to get into the public schools, do you think it's going to become that much harder to teach media literacy?

It's going to make it worse, not better. The problem is, marketing and education don't mix, especially when becoming educated means learning how, in some cases, to resist the thrall marketers might want to put us in.

Becoming educated means learning how to act and think deliberately. Marketers' objective is to get us to act passively, because the more active you are, the less you can be either lulled to sleep or provoked into making spontaneous purchases, which have nothing to do with your real needs.

In your book Playing the Future, you say children arguably have some skills that are very relevant to the media-rich atmosphere they live in. What are those skills?

I consider most children to be natives in an interactive media space where adults are immigrants. Like any native population, they are going to speak the language better than those who came to it later in life.

In terms of everything from channel surfing to Web surfing, something that would drive most adults insane or into an epileptic fit is something that can actually be understood as a video language by a young person.

Do you feel the acknowledgement of these skills could lead to changes in education?

Teachers are a little bit afraid and threatened that their students are not just not speaking the same language, but using what had been the language as reference points for a meta-language the teachers can't even understand.

What teachers are needed for -- and what adults are needed for in general -- is to provide some sense of analog reassurance, some sense of continuity in an environment that's increasingly discontinous. That's what young people are looking for.