No, I'm not kidding. It isn't real. Those people auditioned, were hired, relocated into that gaudy house, and then filmed. The episodes aren't real, either… No, I'm not kidding. Those episodes are edited together based on a storyline the writers create by putting The Situation and his crew into situations where the writers know how they will react. It isn't "real."
It is amazing how much convincing it has taken to prove to my freshmen that the Jersey Shore is not real. These are the same kids who have no problem suspending disbelief long enough to just accept that Peter Parker can climb walls when he wears the right spandex suit but who cannot just accept that the animals on Animal Farm speak English and build a windmill.
These conversations help to illustrate a critical shift which ought to be happening in literacy instruction in American schools: rather than studying literary works, we need to be studying literary processes.
- We need to study the process by which 360 hours of Jersey Shore footage gets edited down to 44 minutes for a one-hour weekly episode.
- More importantly, we need to understand the process of acculturation and normalization which occurs in a viewer when they watch entertainment labeled as reality.
- We need to study the process by which lighting, angle, score and juxtaposition are used by news organizations to communicate a message beyond the news.
- More importantly, we need to study the subtle and not-so-subtle biases which shape the decision-making about what makes air and what doesn't.
- We need to help young readers learn to discern which sources on the internet are valid and which are not, and even what we mean by "valid."
Are these lessons more or less important than Shakespeare or great novels and poetry?
As with the television news, whose producers must pare hours upon hours of worthy news into 20-22 minutes of air time (including sports and weather), when we must choose what literacy lessons to keep and what to cull for our limited amount of instructional time, on what should we base that decision?
Mark, this is a fascinating post and applaud you for tackling the topic. I would assert (as I believe some of your other posters did) that some of the same principles need to be studied in the world of the 24 hour news network. Much of what is sold as news (reality) is entertainment parading as such. Our students are bombarded with media imagery that, while creative, fascinating, and sometimes genius, simply isn’t real. I see a close parallel to critical thinking courses, but also the science behind fear triggers and even probability in mathematics. Again, great post!
g… that is truly horrifying.
Best response ever from a former 3rd grade student:
(in the middle of a discussion about how the skills we learn in class have value outside of school)
Kid> “Teacher, I don’t need to know how to read or do math for my future job.”
Me> “Huh? What job is that.”
Kid> “I’m going to be a star on my TV show like BIG BROTHER.”
Me> *groan* *facepalm*
http://scienceblogs.com/sunclipse/picard-facepalm.jpg
Mark, that sounds like a great activity.
There is some great stuff going back and forth between Fox News and Rachel Maddow at MSNBC about what is “true.”
I also think part of the digital literacy is that many of the headlining stories are there because internet hits have made them jump up into “most read” status – so the internet is reacting to popularity and popularity is driving what is news and what’s hard to find news.
Exactly. I think the “normalization of stupid” would be a great title for a book which examines pop culture over the last 10 years (or more).
With one of my class periods, we got a little deeper into language theory than I would have expected possible–the whole idea of nonfirsthand experience and how media “mediates” all messages. I had them do this activity where they were new producers and had 65 minutes of “stories” (a bunch of slips of paper with a topic and a time…Lindsay Lohan back to rehab, 30 seconds; Progress in the war in Afghanistan, 1:15) and it was interesting to see what they kept and what they edited out for their pretend 22 minute news broadcast. That helped drive home the mediating nature of television.
I’ve never seen Jersey Shore, but I’ve seen shows like it. It seems to me that television, which used to just make us stupid, is now showing us how stupid we’ve become.
Which only makes it that much harder to be a teacher.