Critical Media Literacy in Light of Nuclear Spectacles: Approaches and Problems For the Field
The term "media culture"...signifying that our culture is a media culture, that the media have colonized culture, that they are the primary vehicle for the distribution of culture, that the mass media of communications have supplanted previous modes of culture like the book or spoken word, that we live in a world in which media dominates leisure and culture.Douglas Kellner, Media Culture (1995)[1]
Though it may have reached unprecedented dimensions in 21st century America, it is not a mark of contemporary novelty that culture dominates nature.[2] In fact, it is one of the defining marks of Western civilized sensibility -- since at least the time of Gilgamesh in Ancient Sumeria -- that it identifies with the production of specific forms of social culture built around cultural representations of "nature" that imply its repression.[3] These representations, which correspond to the onto-theological establishment of the "human" as a dynamic essence of subjectivity and power, also have been shown to have had the real political intention and meaning of denying groups access to human-power based on distinctions of race, class, gender and species.[4] In this sense, then, human technology and culture unfold along the transverse lines of material power formations and hence they can be read as both the tools by which elites entrench oppression (i.e. as that which divides the socially dominant from the subjugated) and as an avenue by which dominated groups may intervene in and gain access to the structures of power (i.e. as that which helps to dissolve the dichotomy between ruler and ruled).
To this latter end, strategies have been developed, like those by Stuart Hall's working group at the Birmingham Center for Cultural Studies in the 1970s, in which the "high literacies" of the Humanities where deconstructed and put in equal relation to the "popular" literacies of mass culture (thereby valorizing the everyday practices and identities of non-elites). Occurring alongside this project were certain interventions into the high literacy structures of meaning by French post-structural theorists like Roland Barthes. Barthes noted that in a "high" print culture if one wanted to "properly" understand a literary text, it was a normative assumption that one needed to interrogate the author of that text (its creator and thus its ultimate arbiter of meaning). Yet, in works like Mythologies (1983), Barthes unfolds the natural polysemy (i.e. many meanings) at work in texts and exposes the goal of a clear, univocal (i.e. single meaning), and final authoritative definition as being little more than a leftover cultural habit of bourgeois ideology.[5] What is important for Barthes about the new cultural terrain, then, is not the "author" but the "author's death" and the corresponding "birth of the reader."[6] Drawing from both the British and French insights, the popular culture theorist John Fiske moves to express the extraordinary amount of literacy and "readerliness" at work in newer popular media forms. In his Television Culture (1987), for instance, he describes the numerous levels of encoded meaning at work in even the most basic sit-com, delineating the complex ideological dimensions of the negotiations that occur between directors and viewers and the numerous aesthetic factors that are built into the construction of the simplest of T.V. images -- e.g. camera work, lighting, editing, music choices, casting, setting and costume, make up.[7]
In the wake of such theoretical work, the claim often made -- in one form or another -- by nations, institutions, and even singular individuals that their culture and social norms are "natural," and therefore unquestionably legitimate, is now problematic. For the divide between culture and nature -- as co-constructions in a certain historical dynamic -- has been seized upon and it is now possible to articulate that it is part of the very meaning of terms such as "culture" and "nature" that they defy singular definition and transparency. Instead, they mark highly contested terrains in which powerful forces have established dominant interests and practices and which, in response, sub-dominant groups have attempted the formation of counter sub-cultures that might both contest and/or evade such hegemonic legislation. From within this perspective, then, there is neither "culture" nor "nature," per se, there is only a complex hybridity between the two, with a multiplicity of voices and interpretations, a sort of endless series of historical markers signifying the ways in which power relations determine unity and difference. Yet, in as much as "culture" also delineates a form of enduring imbalance in the power structure, and "nature" is made to connote all that within culture is denied the privileges of power, it might also be said that it is characteristic of civilized pathology that there is only culture and that nature cannot be found except as a sub-dominant voice within culture.
With this in mind, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner have recently described the manner in which the post-structural deconstruction of the human subject of print literacy has combined with a global revolution in science and technology to create a whole new range of social challenges that might be properly called "post-human."[8] Taking an ethical and post-foundational approach similar to Jurgen Habermas's notion that "All we can do is reconstruct the Ought that has immigrated into praxis itself," Kellner has also called for the radical reconstruction of education based on the needs and possibilities inherent in the current moment.[9] For if it is indeed a condition of a just and equitable society that it will manifest a culture tolerant and responsive to the entirety of its constituents (and not dominate or repress some sector of them), then such a society must to forward the utopian project of a democracy in which every voice contributes and has meaning. Modern education, says Kellner, had as its emphasis the "submission to authority, rote memorization, and what Freire called the "banking concept," but in a new post-Humanities, postmodern network society there is now both the possibility that people will become the outright slaves of the global economy and culture of extreme technocapital or that education will reorganize itself around the multiple literacies required to navigate the new technological and societal demands and so intervene on behalf of a democratic model of well informed and informing citizens.[10]
Remembering that, for Kellner, post-World War II culture has increasingly become a politicized "media culture" in which the very contests of culture play themselves out as any number of media spectacles and sub-cultural interventions, he sees the current cyber-transformations in society as being at once both the greatest cultural delineation of the haves from the have-nots (i.e. digital divide) and a revolutionary media opening that could allow for robust democratic communications, multicultural exchange, and meaningful mass-political organization for social change.[11] If it is to be more of the latter than the former, he argues, then education must rise to meet the new cultural challenge set before it and integrate curricula that will cultivate the diverse number of literacies required for a radical multicultural democracy. Central to this project should be an expanded notion of critical media literacy that incorporates computer and multimedia literacy. This form of critical media literacy would foster student attempts at constructive, participatory, and self-actualizing approaches to social engagement, on the one hand, thereby offering students the fluency required in the new technologies to survive being alienated and labeled socially incompetent and, on the other, it would also promote a rigorous socio-poltical and historical understanding of culture and technology, pointing out the forces at work that serve to gird the manipulation, isolation and subjugation of various social groups.[12]
Certainly, considering the omnipresent reality of the dominant media forces at work in the present moment, the staggering amount of power invested in national leaders and the Chief Executive Officers of transnational corporations, and the awe-inspiring complexity of modern science and technology proper, a critical media literacy that attempts to intervene via education and call attention to the forces at work, while also attempting to popularly train in the use, hands-on understanding, and manipulation of contemporary media tools seems like a profound message and one that is desperately needed. Additionally, that a range of relatively affordable multimedia may now exist that are capable of storing encyclopedic amounts of information, which they can then present in rich tapestries of audio and video -- thereby reinvigorating the popular historical imagination -- is reason enough for feeling hopeful about media literacy projects.[13]
Yet, as Kellner himself notes, media literacy faces numerous challenges, chief of which may simply be its relative infancy as a field, its lack of agreed upon standards, and its inability to generate a sure methodology up until now.[14] This has allowed for a multitude of educational ventures to adopt the name of "media literacy" in both its critical and uncritical forms since the 1970s.[15] Interestingly, this is a distinction that it shares with its "natural" counterpart -- environmental education.[16] But there may be a larger problems still for critical media literacy, if it is to be an authentically democratic response to the current social deployment of power and if it is to educate in a fashion that seeks to go beyond support for establishment cultural values and normative goals. I will now examine three potential problems for critical media literacy as a counter-hegemonic pedagogical field.
The first issue for critical media literacy -- even in what I take to be its most rigorous formulation (e.g. Kellner) -- is that it is tied to a "critical thinking" pedagogical approach that has a problematic history of complicity with modern establishment educational practices and which is presently the centerpiece of both state and national standards. Critical thinking as a modern education movement hails from the work of John Dewey and, in particular, his use of the terms "reflective thinking" and "inquiry" -- both of which he based on the scientific method that he thought sound.[17] Now, there can be no question that Dewey's thought -- even as the basis for the critical thinking approach -- ultimately promoted a vision of powerful citizenship and strong democracy that was not at the service of any particular ideology, nor was it a mere instrument for the techno-science industry. Yet, Deweyan progressivism is also inextricably linked with the very modern industrial ills and social organization that a critical media literacy is expected to transform.
Thus, while it might prove helpful to draw upon a "critical thinking" tradition in which students inquire and reflect upon the ways in which their practices are tethered to a larger encapsulating social ecology, it must also be remembered that Dewey was the very engine by which the directors of that ecology formed a massive monopolistic and industrial class structure, indoctrinated a mass-working class to the required values of a growing corporate techno-science society, and covered their trails with the Deweyan language of progressivism, democracy, and collaborative equality. At best, therefore, the Deweyan lineage at work in critical media literacy is a complicated and ironic matter -- educators would have to use methods like problem-solving inquiry and team work with students in order to attempt to discover the very dubious corporate social history that has recently been built around those very educational forms. Further, as present critical thinking guidelines also obscure the real industrial and social realities behind techno-science, by talking instead of a post-industrial information society in which students "gather, evaluate and use information effectively," the critical thinking element in critical media literacy could be a real political drawback and exactly the same type of weakness that pervaded Dewey's tenure as the dean of American educational letters.[18] To borrow from the language of the radical educator Paulo Freire, it seems that critical media literacy really wants to utilize a "problem-posing" approach to learning, but that it is unfortunately related to a "problem-solving" tradition. Considering the history of that tradition and its present integration in mainstream education, critical media literacy needs to adequately raise the "critical thinking" foundation of its approach to the level of a thorough-going meta-critique if it is to purposefully cast itself as a liberation pedagogy.
A more complicated matter for critical media literacy practices, however, is that even in their problem-posing guise they would risk undue reliance upon a Western tradition of rational emancipation that is also complicit with establishment power in both its liberal and conservative aspects. The connections between the continued growth of human civilization as the evolved divergence of culture and nature, with rulers perpetually associated with Reason at the top of great-chain-of-being and with society's ruled cast either as mindless, reproduction-crazed animals deserving of the bottom or mid-range beings prone to conflagrations of irrational emotion and hysterics, is well documented. This tradition, it has been pointed out, represents a long-standing cultural code of elitism and anti-democratic spirit that has had social repression as a conscious goal since the emergence of the origins of Western civilization.[19]
Considering the current negative role, however, that the globalization of techno-science in its many capital aspects plays in the mass extinction of both non-modern indigenous cultures and the planetary environment (at a rate as high, some experts believe, of 10,000 species a day), it seems that critical media literacy is un-thoughtfully caught up in a sort of double-bind with a cultural movement that is bottom-line quite happy with its modern trappings, isn't very considerate of their real cost, and doesn't really care to be either. [20] While it is not exactly uncommon at present to find the liberal romanticization of nature and pre-modern communities at work in even the heights of the academy, if such philosophy meant actually committing to a sort of Thoreauvean project of "living deliberately" and de-modernizing to "live like a savage," it is clear that it would involve few takers. In this sense, then, critical media literacy should perhaps take special pains to emphasize the ways in which knowing the system can lead to its dissolution and not just progress it. If there is indeed no reasonable manner in which to articulate breaking the system from within, then critical media literacy should be honest with its students that while it aspires to counter-hegemony, taking up systemic practices necessarily involves the furtherance of a number of hegemonic codes from the outset. My personal conclusion is that critical media literacy cannot escape being a participant in what Jacques Derrida has labeled the "phallogocentric" character of Western modes of being. This makes its claims to radical reconstruction all the more dubious the more it comes to rely upon Enlightenment models of reason as a guide and illuminator. However, it may be that by highlighting a new role for reason, and integrating it within a theory that centers a revolutionary Marcusian "life instinct" or Levinasian Otherness, that a critical limit of bodily checks and balances to the language of reasonableness could be maintained. This might assist critical media literacy's aims by serving to distinguish how its reliance upon reason differs from more liberal attitudes.[21]
Finally, a problem inherent in the practice of critical media literacy is that for it to work successfully it must achieve a tenuous balance between teaching to use the technologies that are its object and critically exposing and, thereby, limiting them. As I have mentioned, for such criticism to have real power -- and not be merely a mode of rhetorical nihilism -- it would require as a condition of operation that whenever information was encountered during the act of critical inquiry such that consciousness dawned upon the inquirer that the culture of science and technology (which pervaded the inquiry) spoke more to the reality of domination than liberation, then at such time the precautionary principle could/would be implemented as a humane limit to the pathologies of a science and technology society. Being able to draw upon the precautionary principle -- which dictates that a particular cultural mode should not be acted upon simply because the possibility exists to do so, but only if a real assurance exists that acting in such a manner would not prove to exhibit more general harm than good – would strengthen the ethical ground of the critical aspect of media literacy studies. Again, however, it is unclear whether most (if any) media educators are ready to relinquish the tools of their trade and radicalize their relationship to mainstream American culture for a principle.
bell hooks, in discussing her role as a critic of film media, speaks to the seduction that films (and by extension – media culture) have on our psyches. hooks feels that images and media tend to make us submit to their will “no matter how sophisticated our strategies of critique and intervention…They have power over us and we have no power over them.”
[22] Whether hooks is correct or not in celebrating the transgressive pleasure of submitting to media's overt and covert seductions, she is at least honest and perceptive about the real forces at work that serve to problematize approaches to critical media literacy that seek to move beyond consumerism and fandom. For his part, William S. Burroughs often noted the same difficult elements at work in media culture and tended to speak of them as an "addiction" -- a state in which the junkie knows that the fix is junk, has moved beyond the idealization of it and knows that it is unhealthy, but takes it anyway, uses it, and makes his life's commitments based upon it. This, one could argue, is a very subtle form of critical media literacy indeed; but is this sort of anti-Platonism -- where one knows the good, and does otherwise as proof of one's humanity -- really the sort of foundation that today's critical media educators aspire to and wish to utilize? It seems not. My graduate experience of critical media literacy at UCLA afforded me plenty of experiences in which media was energetically presented with great optimism, a language of critical empowerment, technological deployment and of the professional ease that was now at hand for the average person, but I cannot truthfully remember any equally scathing attacks upon the media culture at large or on the world genocide that it breeds and intends. A presenter from the Los Angeles-based Center for Media Literacy made a witty and persuasive Microsoft Powerpoint presentation as an example of critical media literacy about critical media literacy, but while the presenter knowledgeably and passionately pointed out media myths, traps, and issues, he never managed to raise his own analysis to include and comment upon the meanings of his own ironic status as a pawn in the game. Bill Gates, counted as the world's richest individual during the tech boom of the late 1990s was never invoked once, though his presence pervaded the very form of the room's centerpiece experience and it is for reasons such as this that there is real reason to fear that even the most well-meaning critical media educators might have about them something of the booster for the corporate status-quo.
Other presentations confirmed my suspicions that critical media literacy needs to make clear its commitments as regards the many codes of media professionalism. In this respect, the cultural theorist Dick Hebdige has spoken of subcultures as a form of "noise" capable of jamming dominant media transmissions and he has thusly valorized the punk modality because he feels that punk is a core-subversion of the hierarchical codes of a high-status professional literacy.[23] Yet, many presenters at UCLA seemed unconcerned (or oblivious) to the problems in developing a professional approach to the technologies at hand. Rather they related to their media much in the way Eric Schlosser's fast food consumers relate to mass food: they consumed it, allowed it to enter and become one with their bodies, "without giving it much thought, unaware of the subtle and not so subtle ramifications of their purchases."[24]
One presenter, an undergraduate student involved in producing relatively decadent television shows along with his friends, regularly utilized the university's advanced media equipment and computer editing facilities to create his own broadcast episodes for UCLA's cable television network. Regardless of the overall worth of his material, the student's commitment to his own media projects was truly admirable -- he obviously had spent a great deal of time in learning the literacies involved in being a director and video creator and he had learned to make a variety of decisions about both the form and content of his various productions. Unfortunately, this latter assumption was soon proven false when he candidly offered the following film editing advice as if reading a scriptural commandment -- "Never allow your shot to last more than two to three seconds without moving or cutting away from it." In fact, the truth is that this is not scripture -- though it is questionable whether the young director knew this or if he had simply watched so much MTV, Comedy Channel, and HBO that for him it might as well have been. Rather, what his commanding advice really did amount to was a clear complicity with a rather jarring and ubiquitous media industry aesthetic of the moment -- one designed to desensitize, hypnotize, and befuddle. It was hardly surprising, then, to find that the student director later confessed that all his work was a form of training and portfolio-building towards a future directing opportunity with one of the major corporate studios in town. So this is critical media literacy?
As part of my graduate studies in critical media literacy, I engaged in a media project of my own -- producing a 27 minute video entitled: Seeing the World Through Nuclear Spectacles.[25] The title was both a reference to a sort of Barthesian position that the media are the optics through which we come to see the world, and a reference to the Situationist leader and media radical, Guy Debord, who theorized the contemporary formation of an "integrated spectacle" characterized by:
1) incessant technological innovation;2) fusion of state and economy;3) unanswerable lies;4) the perpetual present; and5) generalized secrecy.[26]Work on the project involved locating and gathering stock footage of United States DOE and DOD films about atomic weaponry from 1940s through the 1970s, downloading choice files, translating these files to a workable digital format and importing them into the software Final Cut Pro. Additionally, I translated and imported scenes of some Hollywood representations of nuclear war -- Wargames, Planet of the Apes, and The Day After -- as well as a brief clip of a Japanese Godzilla classic in which Godzilla, a monster born of nuclear holocaust, represents Japanese tradition against the creature Gigan, who is clearly symbolic of American atomic aggression. While the project was not about didactically delivering a fixed meaning and sermon about nuclear weapons, over the course of the work I did develop certain criteria that moved me in the direction of the auteur and away from a free play of representations placed entirely by chance (my original idea).
The nuclear bomb and the network society, it is my contention, are both godheads of Debord's society of the integrated spectacle and, as such, attempts to capture their meaning and represent it accurately prove especially difficult. For instance, the network society often represents itself as the efficiency and freedom of the autonomous computer user, but the real meaning of this image may in fact be delayed by decades and may ultimately take place in another cultural environment thousands of miles away. In this the internet spectacle reveals its deep kinship with the nuclear spectacle, which I also found has been constructed by media representations from the first that attempt to reconstruct a reality for it that is in line with dominant social aims. In the case of the nuclear spectacle, the icon of an eerily beautiful mushroom cloud over an expanse of desert became fixed and iconic. But, just as the growth of the science and technology society itself is masked by iconic images of internet liberation, representations of nuclear spectacle have tended to downplay or disregard the real social meaning of nuclear weapons -- represented better by the invisible radiation that they release, that pervades the environment and destroys culture and nature for up to a millennium.
Trying to find a way to articulate a response to this problem through the manipulation of the technology itself proved an especially troublesome and ironic predicament. This was compounded by my conclusion that attempts to strike a parodic note concerning the obvious absurdity of the propaganda that was my direct material would be a reactionary response that spoke more about my discomfort with the reality of the material than the greater meaning indexed by the footage itself. In the end, though the technology at my disposal often failed and posed its own plethora of difficulties and challenges, I did ultimately achieve a finished piece of media. This was then placed on the Internet for free viewing, and I must confess to feeling a sense of empowerment that developed along with the process as a whole -- as Nietzsche put it: that which did not kill me, made me stronger.[27]
I should point out my own relationship to critical media literacy. I am a critical media educator. Born in New York in 1969, I was raised on a steady diet of media and counted myself a part of the slacker Generation X that made a particular statement about its relationship to media culture and its aspirations for life as a result of it. All through my youth, while always possessing a deep kinship for nature and the physicality of outdoor experience, I was also saturated with an evolving moray of video games and then computers. I can still remember talking my father into purchasing our first Apple IIc in 1982, learning to program in Basic and issue simple commands in the machine language that really made the whole thing run. By 1985, along with a friend, I developed a range of simple computer simulations: one that involved the user in a random phone conversation, another that simulated a strategic match between one's favorite World Wrestling Federation stars like Andre the Giant and Sergeant Slaughter, and my masterpiece -- a 60-page long series of code that allowed one to input a variety of statistics for a given baseball player, which were then analyzed, normalized to a relative value, and used to construct a highly accurate card that could be used in a simulation baseball board game we created (which was later stolen by Milton Bradley).
In 1990, I became involved in investigating the early public internet domain and logged on to a variety of underground B.B.S.s (Bulletin Board Systems) where users traded simple information, communicated, and downloaded pictures at a rate of 600 baud (current DSL subscribers can pull about 250,000 baud by comparison). In 1995, I began investigation of the emerging World Wide Web, learned HTML programming, and made my first simple multimedia website -- where one could download songs by my band The Degenerates. By 1997, I was actively chatting on AOL and using it as a sort of personal dating service -- through which I met my wife. In the years following, up until now, I have honed by my skills as a web developer/researcher and the computer (in its many functions) now seems to dominate my days and determine the course of my livelihood. Yet, despite my apparent trajectory, my theoretical orientation has always been philosophical and questioning: Why this? At what cost? Who chose? This has led to my recent work in "blogs" -- Internet weblogs -- where I have created a noted blog (read daily by hundreds of people in over 20 countries) devoted to proliferating and commenting upon media issues regarding ecological consciousness, animal rights, and environmental degradation.[28]
While there are no doubt many involved in media education whose skills with technology (and their sociological understanding of the same) dwarf my own, my standpoint is not so humble as to deny that I must represent a sort of vanguard. My nearly three decades of close literacy with the new technologies, when combined with my decade of training in philosophic criticism and educational practice, implies a certain responsibility of leadership -- irrespective of my desires or professional stature. It is the real commitment to the responsibilities that comes with this leadership that I take very seriously, and while I might better serve my own career in media literacy by taking a more optimistic tone and sounding more enthused about the possibilities inherent in the new technologies or the social revolution that they afford, I believe that this would be a misguided strategy at this time. For leadership means being invested with the power to articulate courses of action, and ethical leadership also involves charting a course of action that will bring voice to the voiceless.
In this respect, considering the contemporary attempt being made by the dominant monoculture to re-colonize most of the globe through the cultural exportation of information communication technologies, both in the face of the modern precautionary principle and the well-established fact that such globalization only serves to increase the desperate plight of the world's 3 billion-plus poor and catalyze an unprecedented mass environmental extinction now occurring, leaders in the field must speak for those whose very death serves to help construct the positions of leadership and privilege. Of course, to be put in the position of enunciating how I might act as a double-agent and work to better the system from within (even as those I love are extinguished around me through my own behavior) is a complex and potentially impossible task. Therefore, I am led to think in a similar direction as Ludwig Wittgenstein, who in reflecting about the ethical constraints in logical utterance once remarked, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."[29]
We who are born of technology -- let us use our technologies, then, the best we know how, attempting always to hack and jam the network, turn it away from its present course of action, and make way for a better world. But let's not be boosters for the network -- perhaps the truly effective mark of today's critical media educator is the degree to which he/she goes about his/her business quietly and unnoticed -- rejecting any attempt to be branded twice. Working positively with the tools at hand, but with a guiding pessimism fueled by the enormity of present-day horrors, critical media literacy could function as an underground method -- word of mouth, operative to operative. As I live among the bourgeois splendors of cinematic Los Angeles, writing these very words on Bill Gates's Microsoft Word, and attend a University of California system which is directly responsible for the creation and management of the ongoing nuclear holocaust, it may be that for me my emphasis upon the importance of tone is all that is left me in the form of a great refusal.
[1] Douglas Kellner, Media Culture: Cultural studies, identity and politics between the modern and postmodern, (London, Routledge, 1995), p.35.[2] Matthew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, (New York, St. Martin's Press, 2002).[3] Jim Mason, An Unnatural Order: Why We Are Destroying the Planet and Each Other (New York, Continuum Press, 1998), pp. 165-72.[4] Riane Eisler, A Blueprint for Partnership Education in the 21st Century (Boulder, Westview Press, 2000), p. 4.[5] Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, (New York, Hill & Wang, 1983), pp. 158-159.[6] Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath, (New York, Hill and Wang, 1997), pg .148.[7] John Fiske, Television Culture, (London, Methuen Press, 1987), pp. 4-10.[8] Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium, (New York, Guilford Press, p. 151.[9] Jurgen Habermas, A Berlin Republic: Writings on Germany, trans. S. Rendall, (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1997), p.145. For Douglas Kellner, see "Technological Revolution, Multiple Literacies, and the Restructuring of Education" in Silicon Literacies: Communication, innovation and education in the electronic age, ed. Ilana Snyder, (London, Routledge, 2002), pp. 154-169.[10] Douglas Kellner, "Technological Revolution, Multiple Literacies, and the Restructuring of Education," pg. 155.[11] Ibid., pp. 155-157.[12] Ibid., pp. 157-160.[13] Rhonda Hammer and Douglas Kellner, "Multimedia Pedagogy and Multicultural Education for the New Millennium," Religious Education, Vol. 95, No. 4 (Fall 2000), pp. 475-489.[14] Douglas Kellner, "Technological Revolution, Multiple Literacies, and the Restructuring of Education," pg. 160.[15] Marjorie Heins and Christina Cho, Media Literacy: An Alternative to Censorship, (New York, Free Expression Policy Project, 2002), pg. 1.[16] Richard Kahn, "Whither Environmental Education? A Survey of the Field in Comparative Perspective (2002) at: http://getvegan.com/ee.html.[17] James T. Streib, History and Analysis of Critical Thinking, (Unpublished Dissertation for The University of Memphis, University Microfilms International, 1992), Abstract.[18] On the connection between information analysis and critical thinking, see B.K. Beyer, "Critical thinking: What is it?," Social Education, 49, (1985) 270-276.[19] Richard Kahn, "Paideia and Humanitas: Western Civilization's Contribution to Our Global Ecological Crisis?" (2002) at http://getvegan.com/paideia.html.[20] C.A. Bowers, Let Them Eat Data: How Computers Affect Education, Cultural Diversity, and the Prospects of Ecological Sustainability, (Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2000), pp. 190-195.[21] Though, again, it's not clear that either Marcuse or Levinas would feel much at home working within a given framework of global capital processes of information communication technologies or how this could be resolved happily.[22] bell hooks, reel to reel: race, sex, and class at the movies, (1996), pg. 3.[23] Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, (London, Routledge, 1979), pp. 90-92.[24] Eric Scholosser, Fast Food Nation: the dark side of the all-american meal, (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001), pg. 10.[25] This 27 minute video is online for viewing at: rtsp://media.gseis.ucla.edu/kellner/kahnnukefilm.mov.[26] Len Bracken, Guy Debord -- Revolutionary, (Venice, Feral House, 1997), pg. 198.[27] Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or How One Philosophizes With a Hammer, 467 in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (New York, Penguin, 1982).[28] See: Vegan Blog: The (Eco) Logcial Weblog at http://getvegan.com/blog/blogger.php.[29] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C.K. Ogden, (London, Routledge, 1922) at: http://www.kfs.org/~jonathan/witt/ten.html.