The Genie is Out: How Some in Iran Understand Democracy Better than We Do

Everywhere but my classroom, media literacy dominates the lives of our American (and global) public.

The average college-bound student may read eight books each year, but will read nearly 3000 web pages and 1200 Facebook profiles. Students may write 40 pages of essays, but will write over 500 pages of email messages. They will be online 3 ½ hours each day, listen to 2 ½ hours of music each day, 2 hours on the cell phone and another 2 with television, all while being full-time students with work and study—all multi-tasking. They will have careers that don’t exist today which sort of begs the questions of what we are preparing them for. (www.mediatedcultures.net) How will the Scantron help them repair the global problems they are inheriting?

And make no mistake, healthy civic participation (which includes literacy) is what public schools are about. We need our students to be critical participants in the democracy. Of course, this means discussing the Clinton election victories through his work with MTV’s “Rock the Vote” in our civic textbooks. Logging on to Obama’s YouTube Channel is out of the question; participating in the online forums of the 2008 candidates was disallowed.

In other words, so much of what we do in teaching authentic civic literacy in public schools is to deny access to it.

The concern is simple enough: if we allow minors to go online, they may see images which are scandalous. This is true. Yet two points seem salient, to me: 1) if a student is online, we know their web history and who it was that visited the offensive site. In other words, there is more proof of the offense than was ever true about the naughty deck of cards or offensive note passed; 2) they are seeing it, anyway, and in our classes. Phones and iPods dominate the classroom as do “sexting” and Parental Advisory lyrics.

Our response is to seek it out, try to confiscate the tools for the new literacy, truly an endless and futile task. In other words, we have cast ourselves in the role of censors, compelling 2.0 students into a 1950s-model of literacy. (As I often say to my AP students, we are 21^st century readers engaging 17^th century texts with early 20^th century theory.) So much for relevance.

While the rest of the world is bombarding our students with images and digital pitches, they are often naively vulnerable to its impact. This is not a slam against my students so much as it is a statement that critical literacy, the close examination of digital texts in order to discover their capitalist (or worse) agenda, is absent from our curriculum. Worst of all, rather than help them, we as teachers are often the last they will ever ask about what they encounter—after all, we’ll just confiscate whatever they’re using.

As a small example, consider the immediacy of digital text in comparison with any other. That is, an unfounded claim goes viral and makes itself news. A recent one is the Facebook Group which claims that the social network site may charge about $4 each month starting in May. Almost 500,000 users joined to protest. Of course, there is absolutely no truth to it: none is offered, none is asked for, and yet FB users leave the service in protest. Consider—how do “innocent” pranks like this one condition, teach, our young people to respond to the next wave of influences? It is in this sense that our youth are vulnerable, that we fail in our responsibility to civic literacy.

While at a recent conference on digital texts and social networks, I was social networking instead of giving the PowerPoint presentation my full attention. Our students use Facebook in our classrooms from their phones and on our school computers through proxy servers (and our tech department spends no small amount of time seeking out the newest proxy server in order to shut it down). One of them showed me a YouTube video on her phone the other day—it was a video linking Heart of Darkness and the TV show Lost. If I was truly a professional, I would have chastised her and taken the phone.

But then, that’s what Iran’s government has done with the internet there. In the wake of wildly corrupt elections, the protests of the moderate and well-connected youth in that country have continued to swell. They want free and fair—democratic—elections, and they want the world to know it. Rather than allow the protests to be spread, however, Iran has limited internet access—and proxy servers have proven invaluable for video and news to escape, anyway. Even the mullahs cannot stop technology. GoogleEarth shows images of crowds filling the squares of Tehran; the Iranian protests now have their own Channel on YouTube.

As I write this, YouTube celebrates five years of video work today. It is rightly proud of what it has accomplished. More than “Kitten Surprise” or Megan Fox videos, it has in its words, “given people a voice” (https://youtube-global.blogspot.com/), shown us firsthand the need in Haiti, and helped shift the current of a US election. Entire classroom semesters from universities are online in their own channels (YouTube EDU), dozens of news stations host documentaries (including SkyNews, Fox, Al-Jazeerah, Reuters, ChinaTimes, and the CryGuy29)—remember, our goal is not to find a location of only approved digital texts, but to teach how to discern between them. The US President’s YouTube channel has nearly 2000 videos on it, including all of his speeches, commentaries, dialogues, and special calls for participation (https://www.youtube.com/user/BarackObamadotcom). (And there are dozens of other politician channels!) Even Angelina Jolie has her own channel of United Nations videos. There are channels for science and math, and there are hundreds of student-produced projects assigned, apparently, by their high school teachers. Other students are vlogging, but I’m not sure that most of us know what this is. And now television programs are being uploaded by the networks that produced them, including Anderson Cooper’s 360 and Digital Planet.

The goal of the literate is to use their tools of literacy to forward their critically-considered agendas. Gutenberg did it with a printing press and put the monks out of business. Iranian students are doing it with their Sony HandiCams and YouTube. But for us, Bess won’t go there.