Pop is Political

"The personal is political"
 - feminist slogan from the 1970's
 attriutbed Carol Hanisch


Note to Reader:  I wrote the following entry about a project that my students were working on at the time. It was a frustrating 
project for both myself and the studens, and I asked the students 
to read this entry as a way of sharing my feedback and moving them forward.

This final project is an act of faith, a bet on the talents and initiative of my students but also on the future and promise of media technology  In this project, the entire class works as a single group and will use social media - specifically Facebook, to manage both the content and themselves.  In part, it is also an experiential study of whether the students, as representatives of their generation can by their efforts prove that they can use the revolutionary communication and social networking tools that they carry  - the technology that gives your average media savvy teenager access to a global network that is equal to Viacom and other media giants (as long as the FCC maintains net neutrality), toward a positive end.

First, I’ll outline the challenges with this project. One aspect of the problem is a lack of confidence that the class has in its ability to cooperate at a highly functional level as a group – that they falsely believe that their group wisdom is just plain dumb. Yet, why should they have faith in this type of process considering  that they – indeed,  we are all  part of a society that promotes an individualism that inculcates into its citizens a deep cynicism about the value of intense cooperative efforts, especially those that are non-hierarchical?  Group wisdom creates culture and by doing so allows individuals to become individually great. The genius of Louis Armstrong would have have gone unnoticed if it had not stood of the shoulders of the the ordinary people who created a rich musical culture.

Can our students truly work on a group project for which success depends upon not only on their own participation and performance, but that of the group?  While watching them today, I saw students who were the usual leaders step forward and those who were the usual side-liners drifting off to the margin. However, isn’t true leadership ensuring everyone participates, that everyone is heard, that no one drifts, that everyone – including the side-liners, can make valuable contributions?

The final challenge is whether the students believe media offers opportunity for critical engagement and more importantly, for making change in the world.  When deciding on a theme the class was divided, with one vocal group preferring politics as a theme and another group wanting to go with pop culture.  If this class on media and society was to demonstrate anything, if there was to be one take-away from this course, it would that pop culture is the real political force in our society.  I'm reminded of an anecdote about a young man who involved himself in a political party not because he thought the message was important - no that was just “politics,” but because he loved the singing, the marches, the uniforms and the crowds.  Now that was fun. The final debate about the theme is testament to a similar confusion about what constitutes politics and what constitutes entertainment,  – perhaps the students still don’t understand that a multi-billion dollar global networked message-making-machine that determines how you speak, what you say, what you don’t say, how you dress, what you listen to, what you eat, what you buy and how you spend your work and leisure time, whether in their hands or on the big screen, is politics itself, regardless of how trivial or “important” that message is.