Paul Ingles talks with Ben Boyington, teacher of English and Media Literacy, Vermont

BB: Well, I think you get a lot of “so?” when you talk to people about advertising, when you talk about media in general, but certainly when you talk about advertising. Advertising has concerns attached to it. “Well, they’re just ads. We just tune them out.” Nobody successfully tunes anything out.

We had this discussion, argument really, with a bunch of college students several years ago. I taught an online course in media, Introduction to Media Studies. One of the things that we were exploring was a documentary called “Mickey Mouse Monopoly” which presents a whole bunch of Disney issues.
           
One of the issues that it presents is the idea of how stereotypes are used. Of course, advertising relies heavily on stereotypes as well. What happened was they got upset with me because they loved their Disney. “How could Disney be bad for me?”
           
I’m not saying Disney is all bad. That would be a foolish thing to say. We have to accept that we get enjoyment from our media as well and we shouldn’t squelch that as media educators.
           
They got really annoyed and really upset. One of the responses that I got was “They’re just kids. They are not understanding these messages.” As if that excused it, as if that made it okay. No, that’s exactly the point, they are not understanding the messages because the messages are subconscious. They come into our heads. We don’t think about them.
           
If we do think about them, that’s better. If we’re thinking about the messages and reflecting on what is being put into our heads, then maybe we can combat that deleterious effect and that soul crushing effect.
           
If we just accept every media message that comes into our heads, advertising fiction or music or whatever it is without reflection, deliberation, questioning, challenging that damage is much more likely to accrue and develop.

PI:  There is no truth in advertising concern anymore. There is no conversation about advertising seeping past any gatekeepers into the minds of young people or towards adults.

I want to briefly turn the conversation toward adults. This report that I quoted earlier said, “While older children and adults understand the inherent bias of advertising, young children do not.” Do you believe that most older children and adults understand the inherent biases of advertising? Who has taught them about that if it is not in your class which is not pervasive, your kind of media literacy education?

BB: No, and we could talk about that as well. To answer your question, “Do older children and adults have an inherent understanding of biases in advertising?” No! My flat answer is no.

I think that the older that we are the more experience that we have with television. The older we are, the more skeptical we become. Cognitive maturation rights say that as we get older, we learn to differentiate better between reality and fantasy, although as we’ve seen in politics lately, maybe that is not so true.
           
As we get older, we do develop greater critical thinking, both through training and through life however I don’t think that there is an inborn or simple growth through life greater advantage beyond that basic level of understanding biases better. What we do know as we get older is that ads exist to sell us stuff. We get that better.
           
When we are eight years old, it is just another piece of media message being thrown at us. If it is couched in such a way as advertising to children using their favorite characters from their favorite TV shows, which certainly happened a lot when I was a kid.
           
When I was a kid, we had entire shows that came out of toys like He-Man and Masters of the Universe. The toy came first and then they made a show about it to sell the toy, so the show was an ad. All of that. By the way, the Lego Movie is a great flick, but it’s still a two-hour ad. I can say both of those things.
           
Kids will say to me, “You are overthinking.” No, I am thinking. There is no “over.” It’s just thinking. It’s called reflection. It’s called criticism. It’s called judgement, evaluation and exploring ideas.
           
I said to my students just today, “I can’t teach anyone anything, but what I can do is get them to think.” That’s our goal as media educators when we talk about the role of education in all of this work. It’s our goal to get people to think. I’m not interested in protectionism. I am not interested in banning anything.
           
I have major challenges and problems with Fox news. I am not interested in saying that Fox News should go away. What I am interest in is critical thinking and regulating some things. Protectionism isn’t the answer, critical thinking is the answer.
           
It goes back to what you were saying about understanding inherent biases. As we age, do we naturally get better at those things?
           
Some of the work that some media educators do is go to libraries and talk to people who are in their 60s and 70s. It never ends. Media literacy is cradle to grave, especially because now that we are dealing with all this other stuff, the new and ever-changing media landscape that we are all in. I know people in their 70s and 80s who are on Facebook. They are being subjected to those ads to those algorithms. They are being datamined. They need to understand it too.
           
It’s not just for kids, it’s for all of us, especially when we start to look at how it impacts the body of politics. If we’re talking about public health, if we’re talking about elections, if we’re talking about climate change, global warming or any of the issues of the day, they are being impacted by our engagement with advertising, our engagement with media and our engagement with social media.
           
We cannot just say that it does not matter. “Just let go. You’re being too critical.” I don’t think that there is such a thing as too critical. I think the line for me is when critical becomes “don’t watch that.” When critical becomes protectionist, that is over the line for me.
           
When critical is talking about an idea and engaging with it or asking questions and finding out what people think, it is not protectionism. I work with high school students primarily. My work has to be more balanced anyway. I have clients who are not in the building who I have to not rile, so I can’t lecture. I wouldn’t anyway because it does not work.
           
If you tell students that they are wrong to enjoy TikTok or Instagram, you have lost them right there. What you’ve got to do is say, “What are you getting out of that? What is the value for you? Show me something you enjoyed.” Get them to share what they like and then steer or lead or ask questions.
           
Or just let someone else in the room say something because somebody in the room is going to have something critical to say about TikTok or Instagram or whatever the platform is and by someone in the room, I mean another student. If you can get them to talk to each other about that, that’s where the power is and that’s where the learning happens.
           
Me standing up and saying X, Y and Z, there is something to that if the kids are into it, if I’m on my game and I’m doing engaging talks, but it’s better to have the conversation back and forth. The advertising work that I always did had deconstruction. It was always a fun, competitive game of showing ads, building knowledge of techniques as we went such as what was being used, for example beautiful people, testimonials or appeal to authority.

PI: When are they using comedy, cool music? The list goes on and on.

BB: Absolutely! Humor is huge. Then when you get the students to start noticing that stuff, they get into it then you can take it to that deeper level of why are the advertisers using those techniques and is advertising good for you? “Oh, it tells me about the product.” “Does it really?” That’s the question.
           
The colleagues that I work with talk about critical media literacy. When you’re talking about media messaging, the message isn’t just to get you to buy the product, it’s where you started with the underlying messages. What are those messages? That is the underlying message.
           
When we talk about media literacy whether advertising or representation in film and television, we start talking about whose messages, who is telling the stories, whose stories are being told, whose stories are being neglected and what is the underlying power dynamic?
           
That’s the part that is the most interesting and, in a way, the hardest to get to because of the dismissive natures of consumers, of most of us, of me 15 or 20 years ago. I had a basic suspicion that something was going on, but I loved movies and didn’t have a lot of criticality going on.
           
To get to those people who say, “It’s just a move, relax!” No, communication has effects whether we see them or not. Power. Whether it rises to the level of propaganda, that is a whole separate level of labeling but anything we do, any way that we communicate when the media is the message has the power to impact other people and ourselves.
           
If we’re not talking about what that impact is, who wants to create which impact and why, if we’re not looking at a political economy then we’re not really doing critical media literacy. You can just look at a message and treat it like a novel or a short story and do old fashioned analyses. Cool. That’s a great starting point, but it’s not the end point. The end point has to be what does it mean, who is behind the message, what message are they really trying to send? How insidious is that?
           
What can we now do about it? That’s the next level of media literacy, using the tools to do something. Go out and use these tools to make change. My goal in education has always been and continues to be whether media literacy or otherwise to get people to think about what concerns them in the world, how can they understand it more deeply and to provide them with or foster in them the tools to do that work to do something about what they want to see changed in the world. That all sounds platitudinous, but that’s what I want.

Paul Ingles talks with Allison Butler,  Director of the Media Literacy Certificate Program in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst

AB: I think it’s safe to say that if we happen to be working with a screen, we’re seeing advertisements all day long.
           
If we happen to be going on social media for work or for fun, there are popup advertisements that are coming into our newsfeeds.
           
If we are reading a newspaper online or if we’re reading a newspaper in print, a daily newspaper, we are seeing advertisements.
           
If we’re listening to it on the radio, we are hearing advertisements.
           
If we drive to work and we driver through one would presume our community, we’re going to be seeing advertisements in our neighborhood.
           
If we drive on a major highway, we’re going to be seeing billboards as we go down the highway.
           
There is not much of our day that doesn’t have some degree of a brand attached to it.

PI: Let’s talk about the kind of meta impact of all of that persuasive energy when you’re talking to students and teachers to the point where you want them to care about this sort of thing, what do you communicate about all of that energy coming at us so constantly?

AB: I think the first step is to stop ourselves from taking all of that stuff for granted. It’s a little bit frightening if we really start to block out and write down all of the advertisements or all of the media that we see.
           
When you ask about students, one activity that I do with my university students is ask them to document for 24 hours all their media use. That includes but goes beyond advertisements. I asked them to do it on paper, pen or pencil and paper and write down for 24 hours everything that they encounter.
           
Almost inevitably, there are two things that come of this. One, they didn’t realize how much time they spent with the media and two, they get a little bit embarrassed. Some of them will say, “I couldn’t do this. I just couldn’t keep writing things down.” There is no punishment in that at least on my end.
           
In order to make change, in order to stop something or to start something, we have to know what it is that we are doing. If the first step is a little bit of a frustrating one, I don’t think of that as necessarily a bad thing. I think once we know what we are up against, we might be able to make more productive or more proactive change.
           
It’s true, the advertising industry wants our eyeballs, and they want our attention. They want us to be, if not buying on a regular basis, primed to buy on a regular basis, ready to buy and dreaming, the aspirational quality of what we might buy next when we get a better job or get a raise or get a promotion. They are absolutely setting us up to purchase more.
           
But before we put a value judgement on that, we need to take a step back from it too. That is the media culture in which we live. The vast majority of mainstream media in the United States are private, for-profit companies. It is their job to make money off of us.
           
I’m not saying that I personally like that, but once we start to understand and make sense of the structure that we are facing, then we might be able to make some different decisions for ourselves. But overall, I think we’ve got to get to know ourselves and what we’re looking at before we can make productive change.

PI: This will sound a little self-serving because our program is carried on public radio stations, but does that awareness lead to a conversation about other countries whose taxpayers put more money into public media that does not depend so much on advertising?

AB: Absolutely. I think one of the things that we need to think about regularly in the United States is that this is how our media systems work. This isn’t how all media systems work. We happen to live in a country whose media systems grew up in that private for-profit realm. That is one way of organizing things.
           
This is not the way the rest of the world works. For the most part, I think that can be really hard to wrap your mind around, for students in particular for two reasons. One, the United States is the largest producer and exporter of media on the globe, so even if another country’s media organizing system is different, they are still importing a great deal of American media.
           
Two, for the most part, in my classrooms, my students are United States citizens which means this is the only media system they have ever known. They are, by the time they get to my class, to some degree, taking the whole system for granted because they haven’t necessarily been exposed to or lived among a different type of system.
           
When I have students in my class that have spent a system studying abroad or students who have traveled abroad, they are able to put those puzzle pieces together in a different way.

I think it’s important for us to really recognize that this is how our system works, it’s not how every system works.

PI: Well, and the awareness thing has really been hitting home for me lately. I’m in my mid-60s and I’ve been in the media all my life. I spent some time in commercial radio and commercial television too, so I’m a little bit more attuned to it than others might be.
           
I’ll just use a couple of examples. I like to get up early and watch the Sunday morning news program, CBS Sunday Morning and also there is one on NBC, Sunday Today. I noticed that from about 18 minutes after the hour on the Today Show to the half hour, there is literally ten minutes of national and local commercials.

With commercials now coming at us about every 15 seconds generally, in that ten minutes you could get 40 commercial messages of people trying to get your attention and trying to get you to do something, pounding us with the message of consuming.

What is an even higher level than that? This business about you’re not good enough. You don’t have enough. Something is missing. You’re missing out. Having to absorb those 40 different ways in ten minutes if you happen to leave the TV on on Sunday mornings, what does that do to us? What could it be doing to us?

AB: think above and beyond the consumption, which can be a very tangible thing is the idea of desire and that idea of aspiration. As you said, we are definitely not enough in and of ourselves.
           
It’s also about purchasing, which we don’t necessarily do with our dollars, it’s about purchasing the idea. It’s about purchasing a goal. It’s about purchasing an aspiration. I will be a person who (fill in the blank) will buy a certain type of product and have a certain type of lifestyle. Bigger than the actual consumption which lightens our wallets is the consumption of a belief, a desire, an aspiration.

PI: Allison Butler is a Media Literacy Advocate and teacher at the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She’s online with us from there.
           
Allison, this series is called Peace Talks Radio. We look at peacemaking and non-violent conflict resolution. I’ve been presenting this whole thing as an inner struggle, a challenge to inner peace. We talked a little bit about how advertising can really shake up our sense of whether or not we are good enough, we have enough and all those kinds of things.
           
All of the analyses are very interesting. I’m sure it’s fascinating to the students too. What are your anecdotal ideas about how to protect that inner space, that upset to our sense of self that even if we accept the model of our media landscape in the United States that is going to continually be challenged, what ideas do you or your students have?

AB:  I usually start that by using myself as an example. With the utmost respect for my students and their busy lifestyles, they don’t always feel great about all of their media use. I usually
           
One thing that I do is start off with myself as an example by getting away from it. I like to spend a lot of time outdoors. I like to do a lot of hiking and camping. I will try to model my example of telling my students that I am off the grid because I’m going to be out in the woods. I say this in part because I don’t want them to think that I am ignoring an email if they are trying to get in touch with me over the weekend, but also because of the benefits.
           
Maybe they are just benefits for me. Maybe it just makes me feel better. Maybe it’s not scientifically valid. But I know that when I come back from being outdoors, off the grid, no access to technology, I feel better from all that fresh air, sleeping outside and so on. Overall, as a whole being, I feel so much better. I try to give them that space.
           
That being said, they are in school and doing a lot of homework on the weekends and they have to be online. Maybe it doesn’t have to be for a whole weekend but see how much time you can take away and just sit and be quiet without technology.
           
I spoke earlier about a project that I do in my class where I have them document all of their media use for 24 hours. I also have them try to go as long as they possibly can without media. Some of them get pretty creative. They think of it as their sleeping time, but it can’t be their sleeping time. Again, it’s not a judgmental thing. There is no one who wins by spending the most time off of media.

Paul Ingles talks with Pamela Pereyra, Media Savvy Citizens / Taos, New Mexico

PP: One of the places where we start is through discovering meaning. We will look at asking some very key questions about the ads like who is the author? Ask questions about authorship. Who created the message? Who paid for the message? That’s really important to know, where is this message coming from?
           
Then we can move onto another area which is purpose. Why did someone create this message? Are they trying to sell me a lifestyle, a way of thinking? If it’s an ad for beer for instance, usually there is a lifestyle involved with that. Why did they create this message? Are they selling me something?
           
That always is interesting because some people think that it’s entertainment, that they did it for entertainment, but then once we start asking questions, they realize that they’re trying to sell something even though the ad might not say, “Buy this product!” The advertisements are more polished now than they used to be.
           
Usually asking the purpose really gives a space for exploration on that and understanding who the audience is, who the target audience is. Was this made for teenagers? Was this made for young kids? Was this made for older adults?
           
Really asking these questions of author, purpose, audience.

PI: Pamela, when they’re selling a lifestyle, they are associating product with a lifestyle, whether or not there is a direct connection between the product and the lifestyle. Most commercials show people having a great time and the product is there suggesting a lifestyle and suggesting that engaging with this product brings you the lifestyle.

PP: Yes, and thank you for bringing that up because we see very clear examples of that in especially beauty ads or prescription drug ads. Usually, the lifestyle is that everybody is healthy and there is greenery in the background and smiling and having fun while the words that are being said are the side effects that are going to affect you in ways opposite of what is being shown. They are not showing that. That is a lifestyle for instance.
           
We see a lot of that in alcohol commercials. You can think about lifestyle in that way too because in alcohol commercials, everybody is having a good time. Nobody is passed out or throwing up or any of the realities of alcohol. Nobody is showing those. They are only showing people having fun with friends in community, looking good and thin and all those things. That is a lifestyle.

PI: And car ads are like that too. What is the warning sign to suggest to young people or adults about that? We’ve established that that’s what they do. Why is that a problem?

PP: Because what happens is it is subliminal, even though we don’t realize that it’s happening. Our brains are processing information and thinking that is the reality. Our brain will process information with images. We are being taken on a journey to believe something, to manipulate how we feel, how we act with certain products. While we might now realize it, it does influence us.
           
For instance, I was talking about prescription ads. In Australia, those ads are not allowed. Prescription drugs cannot be advertised directly to the public. It’s against the law.

PI: They’re not allow almost anywhere else on the planet.

PP: And there is a reason for that. In the United States, that’s allowed. What happens is repetition causes first awareness, but then having certain feelings towards that product and then using that product. We see high numbers of people in the United States using prescription drugs, higher numbers than in other places. People self-diagnose and then go to their doctor.
           
| You’ll see a lot of ads say, “Ask your doctor about,” whatever the product is. Then people go to their doctor and say, “I have this, this and this wrong with me. Could you give me that drug? I know that’s what I need.” That happens a lot more often in the United States. It affects our health. It affects our lifestyles. It affects how we think. It affects how we act. That really is all of media.

PI: That is part of brain science. I don’t know that there has been explicit research on that, but could you explore that and talk about that more?

PP: Thank you for asking that. What we actually do with media literacy is explore the foundation of it, which is what you see and hear, the text and what it means, but also what is in between those lines. What is the subtext? How are we being persuaded?
           
The persuasion techniques are in line with advertising. People use different techniques. Every advertisement is made by someone with the purpose, with the intention to get people to do something, whether it is to act on something or to create fear or to get them to have good feelings towards a product or whatever it is.
           
The use of celebrities and the use of famous people to influence beliefs, thoughts and actions.      
           
Also, there are experts with direct quotations from academics or scientists. They present information for it to look like it is true. We might see that also in the news. We have to question expertise. Sometimes I look at that as even being a form of advertising.
           
Asking questions is really key to media literacy. It’s not necessarily telling people what to think, but it’s really asking people to think and to ask questions. What are the words? What is the language? Is it repetitive? What are the images?
           
Does it use humor? Humor is used a lot. It’s called emotional transfer, to transfer the emotion of laughter to the product such as “I love Coca Cola” or “I love Geico” or whatever the brand may be.

PI: Is a good starting point when you’re talking to young people, maybe even a first suggestion, “What you’re about to see is a simulation. These are almost all the time actors that are going to depict something to suggest a mood. Everything in commercials, called stop sets in the media, is a fabrication, potentially an exaggeration.”
           
You should see how big the chicken sandwich looks on my TV screen in my living room! It’s not that big. It looks pathetic when you open it up. Is that a lie?

PP: Right and one of the things that we talk about are two realities. There is advertising world and then there is real world. There are food artists to make the food look enticing and delicious. The burger may look not flat and unappetizing but actually, beautiful with the perfect bun, the perfect angle, the perfect lighting. There is a lot of money that goes into advertisements.
           
I think that’s really important because once we start unpacking some of those advertising world/real world ideas, then it becomes really apparent that yes, there is an intention. Just having that understanding that there is a story, but no one tells the whole story. That’s another concept.

PI: Are young people built for this sort of thing if you come at it the right way with them?

PP: Yes, you have to come at it the right way. They are media creators. We are all media creators. Anybody who has a social media account and presses the button “like,” that is creating media. Every time we take a photograph, that is media. If we share the photograph, that is media. We are all media creators.
           
You work with both where students are not just deconstructing but also constructing. If we’re talking about advertisements, we might have an activity to construct an ad about something. That really helps bring it all together.
           
The National Association for Media Literacy Educators will define media literacy as the ability to access, analyze, evaluate (discussing how we feel and what we find), create and act.