Politics and Education: What’s the politics behind Channel One? Is it fragmenting popular culture or unifying it?

Like any type of argument, I found that there are two sides to the story of politics and education. Specifically talking about the issue of Channel One, there is both strong opinions for and against this new media educational program. Though sometimes people seem to be overreacting about the “severely negative” effects of Channel One, there are some legitimate arguments that support these concerns. At the same time, there are clear benefits of having programs such as Channel One in classrooms. The question that it comes down to ultimately is whether the benefits out weigh the costs when it comes to children’s education. (Which is easier said than done)

In Service of What? the Politics of Service Learning
By: J Kahne, J Westheimer
Journal: Phi Delta Kappan, 1996

Often times in popular culture different aspects of society overlap in many areas. One such area that involves every aspect of society is politics. In this article, Kahne & Westheimer state that often times politics is deeply embedded within the education system and in how “we” as a country want to educate the youth. This makes sense because we’re basically educating our future leaders (including political) and therefore it is only natural that politicians would want to be heavily involved in this.

And Deliver Us from Segmentation

By: E Katz

Journal: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 546, The Media and Politics (Jul., 1996), pp. 22-33

This article brings up in-depth questions on segmentation in the United States culture in general. It asks difficult questions like how much power should the government have over public broadcasting in television and who actually has the rights to contribute to such public types of media? Katz brings up a great point about how important it is to have public forums in which people can share opinions and debate, but that television is more one way, just feeding information, but receiving no feedback from the viewers.

Other resources I found interesting:

Power, Meaning and Identity: Critical Sociology of Education in the United States

By: Michael W. Apple

Source: British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 17, No. 2, International Perspectives on the Sociology of Education (1996), pp. 125-144

Channel One: The Dilemma of Teaching and Selling

By: Jerome Johnston

Source: Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 76, 1995

Young People, Politics and News Media: Beyond Political Socialisation

By: David Buckingham

Source: Oxford Review of Education, Vol. 25, No. 1/2, Political Education (Mar. - Jun., 1999), pp. 171-184

Television News and Advertising in Schools: The "Channel One" Controversy
By: Bradley S. Greenberg, Jeffrey E. Brand

Source: Journal of Communication. Vol. 43 Issue 1 Page 143 March 1993

Toward Critical Media Literacy: Core concepts, debates, organizations, and policy

Authors: Kellner, Douglas and Share, Jeff

Source: Discourse, Volume 26, Number 3, September 2005 , pp. 369-386(18)

Literature Review on Popular Culture and New Media

Compiled by Hauwa Otori

Popular culture is defined as what is socially acceptable among the masses. With old media, television programs were programmed for a particular time. If your favorite primetime show came and went, your only option was to fake your way through the water cooler conversation the next day and hope that no one caught on to you. According to Chris Andersen, new media has created a fragmented culture through what he calls The Long Tail effect on popular culture. The theory basically says that with more and more content and available media platforms, our culture and economy is continuously moving away from a focus on a relatively small number of mainstream products and markets at the top of the demand curve and moving towards a huge number of niches in the tail. On the other hand; however, it can be argued that new media also allows a shared culture through other mechanisms such as recommendations, tagging, most viewed, most commented, etc. Below is a list of related sources that will help gain a better idea of whether new media leads to a shared or fragmented popular culture.



On-going Scholarly Sources

• The Extinction of Mass Culture by Marc Gunther, Fortune Senior Writer
  http://money.cnn.com/2006/07/11/news/economy/pluggedin_gunther.fortune/index.htm

• The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, Wired Magazine, 2004

• Rethinking the fragmentation of the cyberpublic: from consensus to contestation; New Media & Society, Vol.9, No. 5, 827-847 (2007)
  http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/9/5/827

• Media, Communication, Culture: A Global Approach by James Lull, 2000

• New Media Cultures by P. David Marshall
  http://www.newmediacultures.co.uk/

• Jenkins, H. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York:
  New York University Press, 2006.

• Benkler, Y. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. USA, 2006.
  

On-Going Blog Sources

• http://www.tedfreidman.com/ – TedLog – Culture, Politics, and Technology

• http://www.longtail.com/ – blog based off of the article entitled The Long Tail by Chris Anderson – both basically talk about the relationship between the increasing number of media outlets and decreasing amount of choices

• Logic + Emotion: Influence Ripples + Social Fragmentation
  http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2007/09/influence-rippl.html

• http://www.prsquared.com/2005/10/cultural_fragmentation_the_lon.html