Politurca

Myers, J., & Beach, R. (2001). Hypermedia authoring as critical literacy. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 44(6), 538-546.

This week’s reading reminds me of the multifarious nature of knowledge and of course the role that social milieu plays in its construction—I am aware that there are many who have wrestled with the epistemological questions of what knowledge is and how it comes about, just take Plato from the pre-historic times.

And you may as well have heard (in many venues especially in College of Education courses at one point in your PhD journey) that information is never neutral even in the case of hard-scientists who putatively control for all known, possible extraneous variables. The route to constructing and searching for information always, it appears, entails a degree of bias emanating from our own view of the world. (Myers & Beach, 2001). In the same vein, information we constantly receive in media carries, in the very least, someone’s bias, and worldview—Of course the whole gamut of this discussion runs volumes, but this little summary serves the purpose.

As the authors see it, adolescents and young adults may be very prone to “basking in” volumes of (media) texts with little or no critical perspective, as they are “infamous” for being impressionable. The worst case is found in the particular type of music they choose to listen to and the pop culture icons they tend to idolize; some of this of music often glorifies violence or degrades women, which end up as most common refrains in their everyday language. The article of course does not touch on this, but the implications are hard to ignore. There was a rallying cry in the recent past over rap singer Nelly’s disparagement of women in his video clips, and a recent CNN news of a gay rapper resisting the lyrics of his favorite rapper MnM in his own songs.

I was very happy on this note to see that there are success stories out there to guide young minds to develop skills for critical consumption of music, information, and reality through the means that are capable of unveiling the agendas presented to them. Hypermedia, with its great potential for multi-sensory appeal, is beginning to help us through this goal.

From this reading I am sure that I will see youth on myspace use this potential of hypermedia as they create and recreate their individuality in their “own spaces”. As a team, we will look for patterns that hypermedia are used by these young people in unraveling hidden agendas and reconceptualizing the taken-for-granted reality of our fast-paced and hi-tech modern lives.