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Do New Media Technologies Contribute To A More Democratic Polity |
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Since the introduction of mass media, academic debates in the field of
communications and among the everyday discussions of citizens around
the world, tend to emphasize on the importance of news and
entertainment media as mediums of political discourse, and especially
on their role as dynamic forces to nations' democratization. In United
States particularly, scholars and observers place considerable
responsibility upon the shoulders of new media for the current state of
U.S. polity and culture.
When the term new media was first introduced, critics that studied
it entered the sphere of hope, trying to evaluate whether the new
technological forms could foster participation, increase the level of
awareness regarding politics among citizens, and reestablish
interaction. Internet chat rooms, talk shows, live TV shows, and all
interactive multimedia networks of various forms, fueled and continue
to feed this hope, which makes contemporary critics believe that the
significance of politics could be understood by the vast majority,
decreasing lack of interest. But have things changed due to the
introduction and use of these new media forms? Do people feel more
democratized and are they better involved in the political processes
that govern their everyday lives?
Unfortunately, as different studies suggest, new media have altered
not the number of people involved, but actually the scope of their
interest in public policy and politics. That is mainly because new
media technologies provide both new challenges and dangers. There is
the danger that a new technopoly will further colonize everyday life,
as consumers passively absorb 500 plus channels of the same old
cultural forms. Yet the new technologies also provide individuals with
weapons to produce new forms of culture and to program their own
cultural environment. The overwhelming increase in media technologies
ready to enter the consumer market and attract attention, suggests that
there is still hope out there for new media to realize their role in
the democratization process of contemporary citizens.
At the same time, one has to keep in mind that a variety of studies
argue that a person's critical media pedagogy ultimately requires the
restructuring of the media, schooling, and everyday life. Contemporary
societies are producing wondrous new technologies and immense social
wealth, but it is unequally distributed and often used as forms of
domination and destruction, rather than to promote human betterment.
Critical media pedagogy must intervene in this challenging and
threatening situation and struggle to overcome the worst features of
existing societies and cultures by striving to create better ones.
Critical media pedagogy actually inevitably intersects with progressive
politics and the project of radical social transformation. To the
extent that these outcomes contribute to the democratization of today's
citizens, they are advancing both the theoretical base of analysis and
peoples' political interest, in the present ambiguous political moment.
A rich American tradition of critical media analysis and pedagogy
can aid people make their way further into the corporate-dominated,
advertising-saturated, information-and-communication-based, world
economic order of this century and beyond. As more and more people are
getting increasingly sick of politics as theatre, confrontation,
conspiracy, cynicism and policy emptiness and they do have a hunger for
substance, they search for ideas that really do seem to be addressing
the problems they are experiencing and feeling in their daily lives,
will lead them to find the political players who will share those
pre-occupations and be able to relate to them at a direct and human
level.
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