The more active and aware you are when you engage with media, the more you will get out of your experiences with media.
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Key Idea: You have the power to develop media literacy strategies to influence society and other individuals, but first you need to increase your own level of media literacy.
· Helping Yourself
o Ten Guidelines
1. Strengthen Your Personal Locus
2. Develop an Accurate Awareness of Your Exposure Patterns
3. Acquire a Broad Base of Useful Knowledge
4. Think About the Reality–Fantasy Continuum
5. Examine Your Mental Codes
6. Examine Your Opinions
7. Change Behaviors
8. Become More Skilled at Designing Messages
9. Do Not Take Privacy for Granted
10. Take Personal Responsibility
o Illustrations of Milestones
§ Cognitive Ladder
§ Emotional Ladder
§ Moral Ladder
§ Aesthetic Appreciation Ladder
§ Examples of Levels of Literacy
· Helping Others
o Interpersonal Techniques
o Interventions
o Public Education
§ Current Situation
§ Barriers
§ What Can You Do?
o Societal Techniques
· Summary
· Keeping Up to Date
· Exercises
Congratulations for having worked on building a full range of media literacy knowledge structures throughout the previous chapters. By now, you should have a fairly good awareness about what it means to be media literate and have a good base of knowledge about the media industries, their audiences, their messages, and their effects on you and society.
You should now be asking yourself: How can I continue to improve my skills and knowledge structures? And how can I help others improve? In this final chapter, I will help you fashion good answers to these questions. Think about what I say in this chapter as a springboard—a jumping-off point for you to take greater control of the trajectory of your thinking as you glide through the rich atmosphere of media messages throughout the course of your life. First, I will help you understand how to develop your own personal strategy for continuing to increase your media literacy. Second, I will make some suggestions about how you can help others increase their media literacy.
HELPING YOURSELF
The first thing you need to do is to develop a personal strategy for increasing your media literacy. The purpose of developing a personal media literacy strategy is to increase your control over the process of influence that is currently dominated by the media themselves. Here are 10 guidelines to help you develop your personal strategy.
Ten Guidelines
1. Strengthen Your Personal Locus
My first guideline is the most primary, because unless you have a strong personal locus, you will not have the energy or the focus to find value in any of the other nine guidelines. Remember that your personal locus is a combination of an awareness of your goals along with the drive energy to search out information and experiences to attain those goals.
Begin by analyzing your personal goals by asking two questions. How clear are my goals? If your goals are fuzzy, then you are likely to wander around looking for a better life and never find it. Clarity is required to give you direction. To what extent are these goals really my goals? If the goals you seek to achieve have been programmed by someone else—such as the media—then the achievement of these goals is not likely to make you happy or satisfied.
Once you clearly understand what your goals are, you need to ask yourself: Do I have enough drive energy to achieve my goals? A plan has little value unless you have the energy to enact it. With media literacy, you do not need a massive amount of energy because you are not going to change everything in a day or two. Instead, you need only a small amount of energy each day; the key to improvement is to keep at it. Each day, pay a bit more attention to how you use the media and continually evaluate whether your media exposures are really achieving your goals. Evaluate those messages using your own standards in place of the standards imposed upon you by advertisers. When you continually engage in this process, you will find that you gradually increase your awareness of your own goals and standards, and you will find that there are many alternative ways of achieving your goals—some of which are more successful than the habits you have been relying on in the past.
We all have expectations about the appropriate amount of mental effort that is necessary to play a digital game, watch a video, listen to a song on the radio, or read a book. Each medium requires a different amount of mental effort; each medium also requires a different kind of cognitive engagement. When a message meets our expectation, we typically continue our exposure but do so in an automatic state. However, when a message requires more effort than we expect, we might stop our exposure to that message and look for another message that requires less mental effort. While it is a natural reaction to avoid expending energy, sometimes it is helpful to stay with challenging messages and try to work through those challenges. The greater the mental effort expended, the higher the comprehension, learning, and eventual recall. Also, when you are willing to expend more mental energy than other people, you are getting more value from those messages and developing a stronger perspective that sets you apart from other people.
2. Develop an Accurate Awareness of Your Exposure Patterns
Periodically (maybe once a year), keep a diary of media usage for a week. By repeating this exercise, you can monitor your changing interests in media, platforms, and messages. As you monitor changes, ask yourself the following types of questions: Am I broadening my exposure to different media or am I staying primarily with only one or two media? Am I broadening my exposure to different platforms?
Let’s say you spend a great deal of time trying to increase your list of friends on Facebook. Ask yourself whether increasing your quantity of friends is really all you want to do. Perhaps increasing the quality of friendships becomes more important to you, so you seek out other internet platforms where you can develop stronger friendships based on shared interests. Look for blogs and interest groups with people who share the same hobbies, concerns about social issues, or political attitudes as you do. You will have more in common with these kinds of people and this will offer a greater opportunity to build more meaningful relationships.
Explore a wider range of websites, new musical artists, new kinds of television shows, and different magazines. You don’t have to like all these exposures; in fact, you are likely to find little value in many of them. But by trying new vehicles, you are giving yourself opportunities to find even better experiences than those delivered through your habitual exposures. And you are likely to discover new experiences that you might like even better than the experiences you usually get in your habitual patterns of exposure. If you do not occasionally explore the range of media messages, you will likely default to a narrower and narrower focus over time.
Think about the degree to which your current patterns of media exposure are meeting your personal goals. Make it a practice to ask yourself: Am I planning my media exposures to serve my own purposes or am I just exposing myself to whatever comes along? If you are engaging in habitual exposure patterns with no personal goals, then you are clearly letting yourself be used by the media to serve their needs.
3. Acquire a Broad Base of Useful Knowledge
The key to knowledge is that it is useful; acquiring knowledge that is not useful does not help you. This means we must be continually aware of our needs for knowledge and focus on satisfying those needs.
Try Exercise 15.1 and make an assessment now about your knowledge structures concerning the media. What have you learned from reading through the core instructional chapters of this book? And what supporting experiences have you acquired throughout your life that would contribute to your knowledge base about the media? If your assessment reveals gaps, do not let those deficiencies lead you to believe that you have failed in some way. Instead, use this diagnosis as a way of showing you where you can direct your efforts to make the most difference in increasing your knowledge base.
How will you improve your media literacy skills to be a more discerning consumer?
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There is always a gap between the knowledge we already have and the knowledge we need in order to understand the world better. Only you can close that knowledge gap for yourself. The means for closing the knowledge gap on a topic is under your control because the knowledge gap is influenced more by your interest in a topic than by our general level of education (Chew & Palmer, 1994). If we have high interest on a topic, we will search out information from many different media and many different sources. But when we have low interest on a topic, we allow the media to determine for us how much information we acquire.
4. Think About the Reality–Fantasy Continuum
Continually ask yourself about the degree to which something you see in the media is real or fantasy. Remember that this is not an either/or distinction but instead is a continuum. Some messages will be easy to regard as largely fantasy, such as Looney Toons. But other messages may not be so obvious. Some have a realistic setting and some present realistic situations but are still fantasy, such as Grey’s Anatomy or Two and a Half Men. Others may have a fantasy setting but deal with situations in a realistic manner, such as Game of Thrones or the Harry Potter novels. Distinguishing reality from fantasy in the media is often a difficult task that requires you to think about the many different characteristics of a message. You must think analytically and break a message down into its component parts and then assess which parts are realistic. Do not try to categorize messages as simply being either real or fantasy; media messages always have elements of both.
Being aware of the fantasy–reality continuum is especially important now, when there are so many “reality” programs on television (e.g., Bachelor, Survivor, Housewives of Beverly Hills). Although all of these programs have reality elements, they also contain many fantasy elements. And some of these “reality” shows may have a mix of elements that make them less real than some fictional programs. The distinction between shows labeled reality and those labeled fiction is not a sharp, clear line. Be careful of accepting the simple labels for messages.
Do not go on a quest to avoid fantasy merely because fantasy elements are dangerous to use in real-world expectations. There is a place for fantasy in the enjoyment of the media. Fantasy messages can be very entertaining because of their imaginative or humorous appeal. They can stimulate our thinking creatively; however, we must realize that fantasy is a tool to stimulate our imagination, it is not a model to imitate.
5. Examine Your Mental Codes
As you engage in your habits of media exposures, periodically ask yourself why your habits are the way they are. To what extent have you programmed your habits to serve your needs? And to what extent have the mass media programmed your habits to meet their needs? By considering answers to these questions, you can reprogram your code to satisfy your own needs better. After this reprogramming, you can return to your routine exposures in a state of automaticity, but from that point onward, your code will automatically be running in a way that delivers more on your goals rather than the media’s goals.
Periodically examine your mental code to determine whether or not the beliefs that you currently hold are making you unhappy because they are not realistic or not reflective of who you really are. Examine your beliefs about the purpose of life, the meaning of friendship, the meaning of family, the nature of success, the role of a career in your life, what it means to be attractive, and the value of romance and love.
6. Examine Your Opinions
Ask yourself: Are my opinions well-reasoned? Opinions are easy to create, but if they are not supported by facts and logic, they can get you into trouble. Also, if you do not act in accordance with your opinions, then they are useless. People will often hold critical opinions about things but then do nothing but complain. One example of this is that people like to criticize television in general as well as particular shows, but they keep exposing themselves to the shows that bother them. The Roper Organization, under the sponsorship of NBC in the early 1980s, had respondents in a national survey express their reactions to 17 particular television shows—16 of which had been the targets of complaints about sex and violence from religious organizations. Only 13% of respondents said there was too much violence on the Dukes of Hazard, and 10% said there was too much sex on Dallas—these were the most negatively rated shows! But when asked about television in general, 50% of the respondents said that there was too much sex and violence on television (The Roper Organization, 1981). While this study was conducted before you were born, are the findings still valid for you? Do you simply accept the opinions you hear other people express without examining whether those opinions are supported by credible facts?
7. Change Behaviors
To what extent do your behaviors match your beliefs? For example, if you think society is too materialistic, do you avoid buying material goods as much as possible? If you do keep your consumption of material goods at a minimum, then there is a match between your behaviors and your beliefs. But there are people who continually complain about waste in our materialistic society, then go out and buy lots of new things they don’t need. In a recent survey, 82% of Americans agreed that most of us buy and consume far more than we need. And 67% agreed that Americans cause many of the world’s environmental problems because we consume more resources and produce more waste than anyone else in the world. And yet we in the United States continue to consume nearly 30% of the planet’s resources and services each year, although we account for less than 5% of the world’s population. We can choose from more than 40,000 supermarket items, including 200 kinds of cereal. Do we really need all these material products?
Another example of a disconnect between beliefs and behavior is with pollution and cleaning up the environment. The media have put the issue of pollution on the public agenda; the prominence and length of these stories have increased dramatically from the 1970s to the 1990s (Ader, 1995). During that same period, air pollution went down about a third, but solid waste went up about 25%. Then many people became concerned with recycling solid waste, and the amount of trash that is recycled has increased each year. But even with the increases in recycling, the total amount of solid waste that is not recycled continues to increase each year (Environmental Protection Agency, n.d.).
Changing your behavior to correspond with your beliefs demonstrates commitment to a moral responsibility of following through on your beliefs rather than simply blaming someone else and doing nothing, which has become a popular strategy for many of society’s problems. The first step in behavioral change is a realistic assessment of the match between your beliefs and your existing behaviors.
You could boycott advertisers, cancel subscriptions, and write letters when you see something you don’t like in the media. This action, of course, will have almost no effect on the media themselves, unless large numbers of other people feel as you do and do the same things. However, that is not a reason to stop yourself from doing these things. By taking action, you give yourself a sense of gaining control over the media, and this new sense of power will make a difference in your personal life.
8. Become More Skilled at Designing Messages
Many media not only offer you the chance to create your own messages, they require it. The best example of this is when you create a Facebook account: You must design your own page and you are expected to update it continually. How does your Facebook page compare to the pages of your friends? How well designed is it aesthetically? Do you have photos and graphics with your text? Would people want to visit your page just to see how well designed it is?
How well designed is your Facebook page from a personal information point of view? What have you decided to reveal about yourself? How will the information on your page affect your friends? Your parents? Future employers?
9. Do Not Take Privacy for Granted
In past generations, an individual’s use of the media was a relatively private thing. However, your media exposures today are tracked in minute detail; that information is sold to advertisers or to anyone else interested in your media use habits. When you post a message on your own page or a blog or send a tweet, you initially have some control over who will see your message. But you soon lose that control when the web page server, browser, blog owner, or internet service provider makes copies of your messages, repackages them, and sells them to other users of the internet. Once your message is sent in digital form, it can be endlessly copied, stored, and distributed to anyone. Therefore, before you digitize a message and put it out on the internet, think about all the potential audiences who could read that message—marketers, potential employers, friends, parents, government officials, future spouse, children, and on and on. What impression are you likely to create among all those audiences?
10. Take Personal Responsibility
This may be the hardest to do. We as Americans are fond of placing blame on others because it allows us to feel that the problem lies elsewhere and therefore it is someone else’s problem to fix. For example, let’s consider the problem of overeating. The American Medical Association tells us that one-third of Americans are obese and another one-third are overweight. This would seem to be a personal problem, but most people continue to eat too much and exercise too little. They wait for the government to impose some solution. By 2006, 16 states had imposed restrictions on junk food sales in public schools and it appears that those restrictions were working to reduce weight gain. In a study of 6,300 public school children in 40 states, it was found that children gained less weight from fifth through eighth grade if they lived in states with strong, consistent laws versus no laws governing snacks available in schools (Tanner, 2012). That is good news, but we need to ask whether people are so weak-willed that they need the government to ban something before they will cut down their consumption of something harmful. Many people are that weak. Are you one of them?
Illustrations of Milestones
To help increase your awareness of differences in media literacy development, let’s look at some examples of how people can react to different types of media content. Those reactions are best understood when compared to positions on the learning ladders of cognitive, emotional, moral, and aesthetic appreciation.
The learning ladders remind us that we can improve our degree of media literacy in four areas: cognition, emotion, morality, and aesthetics. Progress up each of these ladders is accomplished by mastering the key skills of analysis, evaluation, grouping, induction, deduction, synthesis, and abstraction.
Ever post about a product or activity and then find yourself getting ads for it? Anything you post online can be tracked and sold to companies interested in your media use habits.
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Cognitive Ladder
The first step on the cognitive ladder is awareness, which is the ability to perceive information elements in media messages. This requires the use of analysis. The next step is understanding. This is the ability to perceive the relevant components in any messages and then group them to see how those elements are related to each other. The next step is evaluation, which requires a good deal of contextual information so that you have templates with which to compare current messages. To do this well, a person needs a great deal of context in the form of elaborate knowledge structures. At the highest step, people are able to appreciate a message by comparing it to their understanding of the constraints and resources of the people who produced the message. The more elaborate a person’s knowledge structure is about the media industries, the more the person will be able to appreciate the valuable elements in those messages and discount the other elements.
Emotional Ladder
At low levels of emotional development, people’s emotions control them. They get aroused and angry without being able to control those reactions. They experience fear so strong they cannot shake it or they cry at a movie and cannot stop even though they are very embarrassed. Or they may be unable to feel any emotions even though they long to do so.
At higher levels of emotional development, people can use the media to shape and control their emotions. For example, stressed women watch more game and variety shows (as well as more television in total) whereas stressed men watch more action and violent programming (Anderson et al., 1996). Depressed people especially use social media to escape unpleasant feelings and real-world stimuli and their use of social media has been found to increase those feelings of depression (Shensa et al., 2017).
If people are aware of what they are doing, then the use of media to manage moods is a sign of high levels of media literacy; that is, people are consciously using the media as a tool to satisfy a particular need. If, in contrast, people are depressed and don’t know what to do, they may watch television by default until they are tired enough to fall asleep. This is not an example of people controlling their exposure, so this is evidence of a low level of media literacy.
Moral Ladder
Increasing your level of media literacy morally requires the development of opinions about the ethical nature of media messages. Typically, we infer themes from shows by comparing elements in the portrayals against our personal values.
At the lowest level on this ladder, you construct your moral judgment of a message based purely on intuition or because someone else makes the judgment for you and you simply accept it. You see the elements in the show as an undifferentiated mass or blur. You make quick intuitive reactions about whether the show feels right or not according to your values. If there is a fit, you are happy; if there is no fit, you have a negative reaction. You really can’t articulate your reaction very well because it is primarily emotional. For example, if a respected friend tells you that American Idol is a morally reprehensible program that belittles people and crushes their dreams, you may simply accept this opinion without watching the show. If you accidentally find yourself exposed to it, you are likely to experience a negative reaction and turn it off.
At the middle levels of this ladder, you make a distinction among characters on their values and find yourself identifying with those characters who have the same values as you do. If those characters are portrayed positively (rewarded, successful, attractive, etc.), then you are happy.
At the higher levels, you think past individual characters to focus your meaning making at the overall narrative level. You separate characters from their actions: You might not like a particular character, but you still like their actions in terms of fitting in with (or reinforcing) your values. You do not tie your viewing into one character’s point of view but try to empathize with many characters so you can vicariously experience the various consequences of actions through the course of the narrative. During a narrative, you are able to assume different moral perspectives and more fully appreciate the action from all participants’ points of view.
Aesthetic Appreciation Ladder
Development aesthetically is oriented toward the cultivation of an enhanced enjoyment, understanding, and appreciation of media content. At lower levels on this aesthetic ladder, people have a very simple categorical opinion that the show is either good or bad. Not much reasoning goes into the intuitive decision, so viewers are not able to explain why they like something.
At the middle levels, people are able to distinguish acting from writing and directing. Viewers have the ability to perceive that one of these might be good while another is bad. Also, people are able to compare an artist’s performance within this message with past performances and infer a trend in the work.
At higher levels, there is an awareness of media content as a text that provides insight into our contemporary culture and ourselves. An awareness of artistry and visual manipulation is also needed. This is the awareness about the processes by which meaning is created through the visual media. What is expected of sophisticated viewers is some degree of self-consciousness about their role as interpreters. This includes the ability to detect artifice (in staged behavior and editing) and to spot authorial presence (style of the producer/director).
Learning about visual conventions is not a prerequisite for interpreting visual messages. However, learning these conventions can help heighten our appreciation of artistry; it also provides viewers with the ability to see through the manipulative uses and ideological implications of visual images. This helps enhance critical viewing.
Can you make a quick assessment of your position on each of these four ladders? If you can, then your awareness is fairly high. But if you are unclear how to position yourself, then think about these ladders as you watch television or surf the web. As you reflect on your media exposures as they are happening, you will develop more insights about the levels at which you normally operate. Remember, your positioning on the ladders will fluctuate depending on the type of message and your mood. When you are simply looking for fantasy experiences to help you relax, you will likely be operating at lower levels on these ladders. But you may be capable of operating at higher levels at other times. As you are exposed to media messages over a long period of time, develop a sense of where your home position is—that is, at what level you usually operate.
Now let’s use these learning ladders as templates to examine some examples. This analysis will highlight the important differences across levels of media literacy.
Examples of Levels of Literacy
There are many different reasons why people expose themselves to different kinds of content, and there are many different benefits people can get out of any particular message. Because of this, it is not possible to analyze a message and assume that all those who are exposed will extract the same meaning or have the same experience from it. To illustrate these ideas, let’s consider two examples: a reality series on television and a Facebook page.
In general, exposure to a reality series can appeal to viewers at all levels of media literacy. At a low level of literacy, people feel that the characters are real and that the situations actually happened as presented. They cannot explain in much detail why they like the characters or the show because they are not interested in analyzing the series or their experience with the series in much depth.
At a bit higher level of development, people who regularly watch a reality series are more aware of their motives for exposure and the emotions that are triggered during those exposures. They are likely to feel that the series provides them with people, problems, and experiences that are more exciting than what they encounter in their real lives. They enjoy their parasocial interactions with their characters. They pay special attention to how characters dress and act as they actively evaluate the elements they see. They appreciate and understand their emotional reactions to the series.
The reality show Keeping Up with the Kardashians can be viewed at a low level of media literacy—simply enjoying the family drama and over-the-top characters—or more highly scrutinized for themes of family values, celebrity culture, and class in America.
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At a higher level, some people will try to blend their exposure into their real life by viewing the reality series in groups so they can discuss the action as it unfolds. Or they will call their friends later and use the action as an important topic of conversation. These people use the viewing to maintain a community of friends that they would not have without the reality series. This requires a considerable amount of cognitive processing and emotional attachment.
At a higher level still, the viewing takes on an in-depth analysis of the aesthetic and moral elements displayed there. Viewers marvel at the editing that focuses their attention on the most exciting parts of the participants’ lives and overdramatizes their mundane problems by blowing them up into huge moral dilemmas.
Now let’s consider an example about creating a Facebook page. At a low level of media literacy, creating a Facebook page entails uploading snapshots a person thinks are cool. The person adds elements and sends messages to maximize their list of friends. Then the person spends a lot of time monitoring the growing list of friends and sending them all short, superficial messages to maintain contact.
At a higher level, users try to improve the artistic quality of their images and sounds so as to impress visitors to their page. They take pride in the increases in hits and friends that are attracted by their more frequent updates and higher production values in their postings.
At the highest levels of media literacy, users are very strategic in using Facebook as a tool to create and maintain a personal image to satisfy specific goals, such as reinforcing a few key friendships, attracting a specific kind of romantic partner, or showing off skills to a prospective employer. They are very conscious of what they reveal about themselves and make sure those revelations contribute substantially to the continual construction of an increasingly positive image over the long term.
Remember that it is not the type of messages you watch or create that make you media literate. Instead, literacy is key to what you think and how you feel while you are engaging with the media. The more active and aware you are during those engagements, the more you will get out of the media and the more those experiences will help you achieve your personal goals.
HELPING OTHERS
In the previous section, the focus was on helping you increase your own level of media literacy. This section shifts the focus to helping others increase their levels. First, we examine how you can help others—especially children—interpersonally, then we look at more ambitious tasks of helping others by working with larger aggregates such as public education and society.
Interpersonal Techniques
Interpersonal techniques are the relatively informal things people use in their everyday lives to help others with their media literacy. Researchers have studied the techniques people use (mainly in family settings) and have found that techniques vary in their effectiveness (for review of this literature, see Nathanson, 2001a, 2001b, 2002). There seem to be three keys to helping others become more media literate. The first key is to be positive and constructive. If you want to be successful in helping others, you must show them that you have their best interests in mind and that you are not forcing your help on them for some ulterior motive, such as exercising power over them.
A second key is to be balanced. You should exhibit an attitude about the media that balances criticism with appreciation. There are some people who drive around town with a bumper sticker that says, “Kill Your TV.” It is hard to take those people seriously because they do not seem to realize the enormous positive influence that television has exercised on our culture. Trying to make people more media literate by only criticizing the media is like trying to make people healthy by only forcing bad-tasting medicine on them. Media exposures can be fun, so help people have more fun and increase the ways they can appreciate media messages. Then help people be more analytical about media messages so they can identify the elements that warrant criticism. When parents have only a negative, critical attitude about the media, rules become restrictive and are regarded as arbitrary by children. Many children fail to understand why certain kinds of content are bad for them when that content is fun and fulfills their immediate needs. These children are likely to subvert their parents’ restrictions by continuing with exposures they find enjoyable.
A third key is to involve people’s cognitive processes and help them get better at thinking for themselves. For example, if you want children to learn that certain content is harmful to them, you need to avoid simply telling them that. Instead, you need to help them analyze the content and see for themselves the silliness, the manipulation, or the harm.
Helping others become more media literate will become especially important to you when you become a parent and want to protect your children from negative risks of exposure. Realize that you cannot do everything, so pick your battles. Rather than try to deal with all forms of media content, I suggest you focus on two—food advertising and internet use.
One type of message is the advertisement for food. There is a great deal of advertising of unhealthy foods to children in the United States (Page & Brewster, 2007) and other countries (Roberts & Pettigrew, 2007) that uses very sophisticated appeals that exaggerate health claims and imply that the advertised foods have the ability to enhance popularity, performance, and mood. These ads can have a detrimental influence on children who are not media literate enough to analyze their claims and find many of them to be silly or false. Studies have found that along with genetics and reduced rates of physical activity, the flood of advertising for high-calorie, low-nutrition foods leads to unhealthy eating and weight gain. In 2005, after criticism of the U.S. food industry for advertising’s role in childhood obesity, national advertisers announced new policies to reduce children’s exposure to ads for unhealthy foods. However, a content analysis was conducted on television food advertisements aired just before and one year after these announcements and found very few changes in food advertising seen by children (Warren et al., 2007). And it is not likely that this type of advertising will become more responsible or will be reduced, especially because there is such a huge market for these foods. So, the cycle will continue with more unhealthy foods being advertised, leading to more consumption of unhealthy foods, which leads food companies to produce more of this type of product to satisfy the growing market. The best hope you have to break this unhealthy cycle is to teach your children to take responsibility for their own actions and not to blame others, such as the government for lack of regulation, food providers for providing what the market demands, or advertisers. When you blame others, the best that you can hope for is that those other people will change their practices. When you take responsibility for your own actions, you can move toward a healthier lifestyle immediately. When we realize that the percentage of overweight and obese children in the United States has more than tripled over the past 30 years (Warren et al., 2007), we can see that we need children to view themselves less as victims of outside forces and more as people in control of their own lives.
Another type of special concern for parents should be internet messages. The internet provides easy access for children to encounter all kinds of messages that are potentially harmful to them; I will focus your attention on three types in particular. One type of harmful message contains material such as sexual matter and hate speech. Children’s cognitive, emotional, and moral reasoning abilities are not developed well enough for them to process these messages in a way that protects them from harm. A second type of potentially harmful message includes communications from strangers who are trying to develop inappropriate relationships. The third type of message from which your children need protection is from advertisers and others who solicit private information from your child.
Therefore, parents need to be careful in monitoring what sites their children visit. Parents need to tell their children to never give out any identifying information, such as an address, phone number, school name, and so forth and never allow a child to arrange a face-to-face meeting with someone they meet online. Parents who find information that may be illegal (such as child pornography or hate speech) should report it to authorities. Parents should build skepticism in their children because people on the internet may not be who they claim to be; people can make up a persona in terms of gender, age, background, and so on. Parents should set time rules of access; too much contact can lead to addiction. And finally, surfing the internet can be a fun activity for all family members to do together.
Parents, however, must be careful in how they guide their children. Findings from research studies suggest that children and adolescents often resist parental interference with their internet experiences. In a national sample of 456 parents of children 10–16 years of age, Byrne and Lee (2011) found that children preferred that their parents empower them to protect themselves rather than restrict their internet use. But other research shows that younger children appreciate parental involvement. In an experiment, parents who created a Facebook page and friended their child were found to decrease conflict in their relationship. Also, even when the parent and child had a more conflicted relationship prior to the parent joining Facebook, the parent’s presence on Facebook also enhanced the child’s feeling of closeness with the parent (Kanter et al., 2012).
Interventions
In contrast to the interpersonal techniques, which are typically informally used in a person’s everyday life, interventions are formal, carefully designed sessions that are intended to achieve particular media literacy goals. Media literacy interventions are designed by researchers and educators who select a target group, identify a particular risk that group may be experiencing from exposure to media messages, and then deliver some sort of treatment that includes media materials, mini-lectures, discussions of issues, and practicing some skill. Those treatments are typically designed to give members of the target group some information, insight, motivation, or skill that will help them overcome some negative media effect or to inoculate them against experiencing a negative effect in the future (Potter & Byrne, 2009).
The design of a good media literacy intervention is a most challenging task, given the wide range of media effects (all of which can be either positive or negative for the individual) and the hundreds of factors about individuals and media messages that have been found to contribute to those effects (see Chapters 3 and 4). Over the years, media literacy scholars have tested various interventions and published their results in scholarly journals. Recently Jeong, Cho, and Hwang (2012) conducted a meta-analysis of over 50 of those interventions and found that in general, media literacy interventions had positive effects on outcomes including media knowledge, criticism, perceived realism, influence, behavioral beliefs, attitudes, self-efficacy, and behavior. They also reported that interventions with more sessions were more effective, but those with more components were less effective. This means that designers of interventions need to simplify their treatments by focusing on one type of message or factor and then repeat their treatment several times.
When interventions are designed with the right key influence, they can be successful. For example, Slater and Rouner (2002) focused on the influence of role modeling in entertainment programming. They found that when people do not have role models in shows, they are less involved in those shows and this makes them more susceptible to the influence of such messages. Thus, if these people were highly involved and were likely to argue against the messages, their low involvement would defuse the counterarguments. Therefore, a key to designing a successful intervention is to get people involved in the show by identifying with positive role models.
Also, Rozendaal and colleagues (2011) argue that interventions to help children become less susceptible to advertising effects often do not work well because they are focused on simply providing conceptual knowledge of advertising. They point out that because much advertising is affect targeted and that children primarily process advertising under conditions of low elaboration, knowledge about advertising is not an adequate defense. They recommend that interventions aimed at increasing the advertising literacy among children focus on the actual use of conceptual advertising knowledge and attitudinal advertising literacy, which includes low-effort, attitudinal mechanisms that can function as a defense under conditions of low elaboration.
There are examples in the research literature where educators have designed interventions to increase the media literacy of the study’s participants (usually children) and when they analyze their results, they find that the level of media literacy has declined rather than improved. This is known as a boomerang effect. An example of this effect was found by Byrne (2009), who ran an experiment on children in the fourth and fifth grades in an attempt to test how well her intervention could help children avoid behaving aggressively after being exposed to violence in the media. She had two interventions and a control group. One intervention consisted of an instructional lesson about not behaving aggressively. A second intervention was the same as the first but also included a cognitive activity. Children who experienced only the instructional lesson actually increased their willingness to use aggressive behavior and this effect lasted over time—thus, this treatment boomeranged. But the treatment with the lesson and the cognitive activity resulted in a reduction of willingness to use aggression, so it was successful. The lesson here is that people who are sincerely motivated to help others increase their media literacy may end up doing more harm than good.
Public Education
Perhaps you are interested in trying to increase the level of media literacy for large groups of people. The institution of education is a good place to start thinking about addressing this task.
With digital media more present in the classroom, teaching media literacy at a young age becomes more crucial.
iStock.com/FatCamera
Current Situation
Critics have observed that the United States has lagged behind many other countries in developing media literacy courses and curricula in public schools for a long time (Brown, 1991, 1998, 2001; Considine, 1997; Davies, 1997; Kubey, 1997; Piette & Giroux, 1997; Sizer, 1995). They point to a long list of countries that are far ahead of the United States with media literacy curricula. These countries include Australia, Canada, Great Britain, South Africa, Scandinavia, Russia, and Israel, as well as many other countries in Europe, South America, and Asia (Brown, 1991; Piette & Giroux, 1997). For example, Australia has had mandated media education from kindergarten to 12th grade since the mid-1990s (Brown, 1998).
In the U.K. and some Latin American countries, empowerment of media consumers is paramount, often focusing on industry control through corporate and governmental hegemony. Media education there stresses representational and oppositional ideologies, power, and politics and ways to participate in mainstream media or to construct alternative media outlets (Brown, 1998, p. 45). This gap is getting smaller; many states have been enacting guidelines for media literacy (see https://medialiteracynow.org/your-state-legislation/ to get up-to-date information about which states in the U.S. have enacted legislation to include media literacy in the curriculum of public education).
Critics point out that the relative lack of attention to media education in the United States is a serious problem because the United States is the most media-saturated country in the world. More time and money are spent on media consumption in this country than any other country in the world, yet our educational system virtually ignores media education (Sizer, 1995). This is not to say that there are no media literacy efforts in America’s schools; however, their existence is rare and largely unsupported by the institution of education. For example, Brown (2001) characterizes the teaching of media literacy in this country as
isolated teachers [introducing] mass media topics into their classrooms, usually within the context of traditional content such as English or history social studies. . . . Schedules already crowded with curricular mandates had no time for yet another addition, so whatever media study could be introduced was typically integrated into already existing courses. (p. 683)
A few states have experimented with media literacy initiatives. More than a decade ago, Kubey (1998) reported that there had been “significant statewide initiatives” in New Mexico and North Carolina, with “noteworthy developments” in Wisconsin and Minnesota. And Hobbs (1998) reported that media literacy concepts were included in the curriculum frameworks in more than 15 states. This is growing as “ongoing efforts are in place in many U.S. school districts. Interest in media education is even growing among mainstream education organizations and health professionals, including the National Association of Secondary School Principals and the American Academy of Pediatrics” (Hobbs, 1998, p. 24). Initiatives are growing, but we need to monitor whether this talk about the importance of media literacy and its inclusion in mission statements translates into meaningful implementation. By 2020, Media Literacy Now said that 14 state legislatures had passed legislation to require or support the teaching of media literacy in their public schools. Ohio and Florida have established educational criteria to guide the curriculum of media literacy instruction.
Barriers
Why is there so little sustained effort at developing and implementing media literacy curricula in the United States while there are many good efforts in other countries? There appear to be many obstacles for further development of media literacy (for a more complete treatment, see Brown, 2001; Considine, 1997; Davies, 1997; Kubey, 1997).
Arguably, the most critical obstacle is the lack of centralized decision making concerning education in the United States. Brown (1998) points out that curriculum decisions are spread out over 15,000 school districts, each with its own school board and administrators. Kubey (1990) elaborates on this argument by pointing out that the United States is a huge country with a highly diversified population and no central governmental policy on media literacy to pull things together. Also, only 4% of educational expenditures in the United States come from the federal government (Kubey, 1998). Thus, in this country, the power for curriculum decisions lies at the state and especially local levels. Each of these decision-making bodies has its mix of personalities, needs, and political agendas.
Not paying attention to the special circumstances in each school’s culture has been credited in large part for the failure of media literacy efforts that were tried in the 1970s (Anderson, 1983). Hobbs (1998) extended this point by saying, “Media literacy initiatives have been most successful in school communities where teachers, parents and students have a shared, common vision about their love–hate relationship with media culture” (p. 23). Brown (1998) said, “If media literacy studies are to survive and grow, administrators in school systems and at individual schools must endorse and support them. They should not be left wholly dependent on the initiative and energy of isolated teachers” (p. 52). Brown called for a more holistic and continuing approach.
To succeed, a curricular program of media literacy must be developed through collaboration among teachers, administrators, specialists, and parents, who together must build it into the systematic education process. Media study should not be a mere appendage of a random elective course, nor should media technology be used merely as a tool or aid to teach other subjects. That means developing studies geared to the participants’ successive levels of cognitive development based on educational and behavioral research findings. It also means continuing and integrating studies into successive grade levels through the school years. (p. 52)
All of the many suggestions for improving public education come with a high cost. Implementing a media literacy curriculum in public education requires considerable expense in training teachers and developing new instructional materials. Teachers need significant training, and this will require reduced teaching loads. Hobbs (1998) explained,
The most successful efforts to include media literacy in schools have taken 2 or more years of staff development to build a clearly defined understanding of the concept as it relates to classroom practice among a substantial number of teachers and school leaders within a school district. (pp. 23–24)
Once trained, the teachers need to be supported continually by the institution rather than left on their own. Hobbs (1998) explains that a study of teacher performance in Great Britain yielded depressing results. Among the teachers who completed training in media literacy education, about 40% ended up doing nothing, 25% did something moderately well, 10% did something creatively exceptional, and the remaining 25% did something that was embarrassing, dangerous, or a waste of time.
Unless resources are provided, there are significant barriers to implementation. For example, one study reported that although most high school teachers believe the study of media is important, 40% did not teach it at all because of constraints on time and curriculum space (cited in Brown, 2001). The same pattern was found in Maryland with language arts teachers; once again, the teachers regarded media literacy as important to teach, but the lack of training, materials, and time prevented many from teaching it (Koziol, 1989). Brown (2001) observed that few teachers receive training to deal with the challenge of teaching media literacy either in their college degree programs or in workshops for teacher certification. Most teachers, however, do feel that they are qualified to teach media literacy, even though only about one-third had any training.
Curriculum designers often look to media literacy scholars for guidance. However, there is a lack of agreement among scholars about what media literacy is and what its goals should be (see Chapter 2). Two of the more persistent definitional issues when it comes to curriculum design are tone and texts. Regarding tone, Brown (1991) complained that “many media workshops and curricula are protectionist and defensive. They seek to inoculate consumers against blandishments of images and messages of media entertainment, news, and advertising” (p. 45). As for texts, Hobbs (1998) observed that although media texts have always been essential in education, rarely are those texts “considered beyond their function as conveyers of information” (p. 25). They need to be the objects of inquiry (Kress, 1992). Students need to analyze the people and corporations who produce and disseminate those texts and understand their motives. Also, the texts themselves need to be analyzed for what they leave out, how they are structured, and their basis for claims both from an aesthetic and moral perspective.
This diversity of opinion gets magnified as we move out to consumer activists, teachers, and school administrators. There is also a wide variety of opinion concerning the composition of a media literacy curriculum, what should be taught, how it should be taught, and how the effect of the teaching should be assessed. The good thing about this diversity is that it provides a wide range of ideas for instruction and a variety of curriculum models to the many different school systems in the United States. If most of the school systems were entrepreneurial and willing to search out the techniques that would fit the special culture in their district, then this variety would pay big dividends. But most school districts are very conservative about change. The teachers and administrators already feel they are asked to cover too many topics, so they cannot add another one without a great deal of debate.
The diversity of ideas among scholars appears more as an academic debate than as a convincing argument to shift resources. For scholars to present a convincing argument, they must present a perspective that integrates the best thinking into a clear set of principles that can guide their decision making in three key issues: curriculum design, teaching, and assessment.
What Can You Do?
When you become a parent, you can insist that your school district provide some sort of media education. You might have to begin small by volunteering in your child’s classroom. Develop some mini-instructional units based on your own knowledge about media literacy. Typically, children will really like these sessions because such sessions involve them in something they use every day. If your mini-units work well, students will talk about them, and other students will create a demand for similar instruction. By beginning small, you can grow a demand locally in your child’s school.
Societal Techniques
With societal techniques, the focus is on exerting pressure on a particular part of the industry, the government, or some institution to increase public awareness about a problem or to bring about some particular change. To do this successfully, you will first need a strategy supported by a great deal of commitment. Your strategy will require many years of effort to effect a change. Also, it requires money. Often, people will start a political action committee (PAC) or a consulting firm that will then apply for grants to support its work.
Contacts are also extremely important. By linking up with other powerful people and groups, you could become part of something that could potentially have enough power to get the attention of the large media companies. Look at the list of citizen action groups in Appendix C on this book’s Edge site (find Media Literacy, 10th edition on http://wwwsagepub.com and use the SAGE Edge link). Contact those that are of most interest to you and ask them to send you information.
Changing media industry practices or content is very difficult. Remember that the industries have grown and developed in response to demands from the public. If an industry or a vehicle does not respond well to the demand, it loses money. Successful chief operating officers (CEOs) have confidence that their decisions will result in greater profits. Don’t expect change when you ask them to ignore their experience and to change their practices when they might risk losing millions of dollars by making the changes you suggest. This is why the public concern about television violence has resulted in so little change over the past 50 years. In explaining this nonaction, Stuart Fishoff (1988), a psychologist who writes for television and movies, said,
Let’s suppose the results, the conclusions were incontrovertible—TV and film modeling of aggression and other anti-social values has significant effects on the viewing audience. Would it really make any difference to the gate keepers of media fare in Hollywood and New York? I submit the answer is not on your life! (p. 3)
He cites an important principle in psychology for his conclusion,
The more far-reaching and costly the consequences of accepting a message, the more facts needed before an audience will be persuaded as to the accuracy of the message—and the more energy will be expended in denigrating both the message and the messenger in order to maintain existing belief. (p. 3)
Therefore, the media industries have been very slow in acknowledging the value of any of the research on negative media effects while using the research on positive effects to show that they are acting responsibly. This attitude has outraged many media critics and stimulated many average citizens to want to do something to remedy the problem.
Another example of a societal technique is the concern over protecting very young children from the effects of television advertising. In the early 1970s, some consumer groups were formed to protect children from what was being seen as abuses by broadcasters. Prominent among these groups was Action for Children’s Television, which found examples of children’s programs that contained as many as 16 minutes of ads per hour—far above the industry’s self-imposed limit of 9.5 minutes. The products advertised were largely nonnutritious snacks and deceptively presented toys. Many products were being pitched by characters from the programs, thus making the distinction between the show and the ad indecipherable, especially for young children.
This pressure influenced the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to hold hearings throughout the 1970s. The FTC considered banning certain types of ads. But in the end, the FTC concluded that although there was evidence that television advertising created risks for children, no practical effective remedies were open to federal policymaking. The primary problem was determining who is a child; that is, at what age is a person no longer a child? Also, there was the fear that regulating advertising on children’s television might cause broadcasters to stop programming for children.
Another example of a societal strategy took place in the fall of 1995, when some well-known political figures began a campaign to clean up talk shows on television. Headed by former Education Secretary William Bennett, Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), and Senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), the campaign did not seek regulation of television content. Instead, it sought to influence public opinion and to shame certain television producers by characterizing the content of daytime talk shows as “lethal.” These critics acknowledged that some of the 20 nationally syndicated talk shows dealt with serious issues of domestic abuse, drug abuse, and racism in a constructive way that enlightens viewers. But they pointed out that some shows had a circus atmosphere that included shouting matches, fistfights, foul language, and audience members yelling out unqualified advice. As an example of sleaze, they cited examples from the Sally Jesse Raphael show, which featured girls who were sexually active at the age of 10, and The Jerry Springer Show, who hosted an episode about a 17-year-old who had four children with her 71-year-old husband, whom she called “Dad” (Hancock, 1995).
There are many other examples of people and groups who have tried to influence public awareness of problems with media content and to bring about change in the media industries. These efforts have been more successful in raising public consciousness about these problems than they have been in bringing about changes in programming. This leaves us with the following question: Should we continue to try? The answer, of course, is yes.
Let’s see how imaginative you are. Try Exercise 15.2. Be idealistic and dream about how you could make a huge difference. Of course, when we try to enact change in the real world, we need to scale back our expectations. Societal change of this type moves at glacial speed—it takes decades to see change. But remember that a glacier is exerting constant pressure, and change is happening constantly—but we can’t see it happening because it is happening very slowly. The same is true with societal campaigns. But if we are committed and are able to exert constant pressure, we will eventually be able to effect changes.
SUMMARY
Media literacy is a set of perspectives. To develop these perspectives, you need to increase your awareness and control. The exercises in this chapter are designed to help you make an assessment (and continue this practice over time) of your awareness about your own knowledge structures, how your mind works, and your ability to apply knowledge of the key elements in the effects process.
Media literacy is most clearly diagnosed when we compare people’s patterns of thoughts and feelings to the positions on the learning ladders. Keep these ladders in mind during your exposures.
Once you develop your own strategy for increasing media literacy, you may want to help others do the same. Think about all the day-to-day informal things you can do to help the people around you understand the media better. As you get more involved in this task, think about developing formal interventions and doing things to influence public education as well as society.
This book is now ending. What kind of an effect have you let it have on you? Did you read it critically by analyzing the information and arguments? Did you compare and contrast the points made here with your existing knowledge structures? Did you evaluate my arguments and positions, agreeing with some and disagreeing with others? Did you synthesize the information you found most useful into your own perspective on media literacy and your own set of techniques to achieve that perspective? If you answered yes to these questions, then you have reacted well cognitively to the book. The key to a high-quality cognitive reaction is not whether you agree with me and accept all the information I present. Instead, the key is that your mind was continually active as you read the book.
Did you have some strong emotional reactions while reading the book? For example, did you get upset with some of the information or arguments? Do you feel challenged and motivated to become more media literate? If you answered yes to these questions, then you have reacted well emotionally to the book. The key to a high-quality emotional reaction is not whether you have positive feelings about me or about the book. Instead, the key is that you were able to let your emotions become engaged by hating parts of the book and loving others.
Did you take moral positions throughout the book? For example, did you develop a sense of what is right (and what is wrong) with our culture because of the media? Did you make a strong commitment to yourself to do certain things to help yourself and others? If you answered yes to these questions, then you have reacted well morally to the book. The key to a high-quality moral reaction is not whether you agree with my positions. Instead, the key is that you are able to perceive a sense of right and wrong about certain conditions and take a stand for yourself.
Finally, were you aware of aesthetic reactions to the book? Were there times when you appreciated the way I structured a chapter or the way I illuminated an important point? Did you find certain examples useful and creative? Did you feel that certain sections could have been written better? If you were able to answer these questions, then you were sensitive to the aesthetic features of the book. I, of course, hope that your aesthetic reactions were favorable. But whether favorable or not, the more aesthetic reactions you had and the more aesthetic awareness you exercised, the better your media literacy development.
Most importantly, I hope you can see that you have achieved a significant degree of media literacy. By reading through this book, you have likely developed some valuable new knowledge structures and have improved the level of your generic skills. As you continue developing these knowledge structures and skills, remember to be aware of what you are doing and stay in control of your progress. And make it fun!
Keeping Up to Date
There is a good deal of information about media literacy that is made available by various groups on their websites. While some of this information is offered for sale in the form of books, reports, CDs, and DVDs for a nominal price, a lot of this material is available for free. I recommend the following websites for media literacy organizations:
· Center for Media Literacy (http://www.medialit.org)
· Center for Media and Child Health (http://cmch.tv/)
· Children Now (http://www.childrennow.org)
· Media Literacy Now (https://medialiteracynow.org/)
· National Association for Media Literacy Education (http://namle.net/)
Media Literacy Now has a website that shows what each state in the U.S. is doing to support media literacy education (https://medialiteracynow.org/your-state-legislation/).
EXERCISE 15.1
AWARENESS OF YOUR KNOWLEDGE STRUCTURES
Below is a list of chapters in this book. Each one presents a knowledge structure on its topic.
1. For each chapter in the book, try to recall the structure of the content.
1. Can you remember the key idea of that chapter? Can you remember major ideas or sections of the chapter?
2. Go back to the first page of that chapter and check your recall. If you remembered the key idea, give yourself 1 point, and give yourself another point for your recall of each major idea (the major points in the outline). Thus, your score should be somewhere between 0 and 5 for that chapter.
3. Enter your score in the left column, which is labeled Book.
4. Do the same procedure for each of the chapters listed below.
§ Book Ad Exp PART I: INTRODUCTION
§ _______ _______ Chapter 1 Why Increase Media Literacy?
§ _______ _______ Chapter 2 Media Literacy Approach
§ PART II: EFFECTS
§ _______ _______ Chapter 3 Broadening Our Perspective on Media Effects
§ _______ _______ Chapter 4 How Does the Media Effects Process Work?
§ PART III: INDUSTRY
§ _______ _______ Chapter 5 Development of the Mass Media Industries
§ _______ _______ Chapter 6 Economic Perspective
§ PART IV: AUDIENCE
§ _______ _______ Chapter 7 Audience: Industry Perspective
§ _______ _______ Chapter 8 Audience: Individual’s Perspective
§ PART V: CONTENT
§ _______ _______ Chapter 9 Entertainment
§ _______ _______ Chapter 10 Advertising
§ _______ _______ Chapter 11 News
§ _______ _______ Chapter 12 Competitive Experiences
§ _______ _______ Chapter 13 Social Networking Experiences
§ _______ _______ Chapter 14 Acquisition Experiences
§ PART VI: SPRINGBOARD
§ _______ _______ Chapter 15 Helping Yourself and Others to Increase Media Literacy
2. Next, think about the additional reading you undertook after studying each chapter.
1. For each book or article you read from the Further Reading list or from the reference list, give yourself 2 points.
2. For each additional book you have read relevant to the topic since studying the chapter, give yourself 1 point.
3. For each significant experience you have had concerning that topic since studying the chapter, give yourself 1 point. (A significant experience is an extended conversation you had with someone on the topic of the chapter, consciously trying to apply the principles in that chapter, etc.)
4. Record your point totals for each chapter in the column labeled AdExp (for Additional Experiences).
3. Look at the pattern of numbers across the chapters. What does this tell you about the state of your current knowledge structures?
1. Look down the Book column. If you have mostly 4s and 5s, you have a very strong set of knowledge structures. If you have mostly 3s, you have a good beginning set of knowledge structures. If you have some zeros, you need to go back and reorient yourself to the structure of information in those chapters.
§ Remember that having strong knowledge structures does not necessarily mean you have a great deal of knowledge on that topic, but it does mean that you are aware of the main ideas, and this will help you acquire additional knowledge much more efficiently.
2. Look down the AdExp column. If you have 3s or above, you are showing a strong commitment to extending your knowledge and elaborating your knowledge structures. Look where you have zeros and ask yourself why you were not willing or able to extend your knowledge.
3. Look at the total pattern of numbers. Were you stronger on certain chapters than others? It is understandable that you may have more interest in particular topics than others but remember that balance is important. Be proud of your accomplishments—now build on them to overcome your weaknesses.
EXERCISE 15.2
FANTASIZING ABOUT YOUR SOCIETAL STRATEGY
Let’s say that next year, you win $10 million in the lottery. After you pay your taxes, pay off all of your current debts, and splurge on all sorts of luxuries, you still have $3 million left over. So you decide to do something more worthwhile with your money and your life—you decide to set up a citizen action group that will help people become more media literate and change some of the things in society. Think about techniques as you address the following issues.
1. Goals: What would the goals be for your organization?
1. List some interpersonal goals you would want to achieve.
2. List some societal goals you would like to achieve.
2. Targets: To reach those goals set above, which groups would you target for change? (See Appendix C on this book’s Edge site. Find Media Literacy, 10th edition on http://wwwsagepub.com and use the SAGE Edge link.)
1. List those target groups.
2. For each group, what specifically would you want them to change?
3. Techniques: How would you stimulate that change?
1. What things would you do to get the people in your target groups to understand your point of view?
2. What things would you do to get the people in your target groups to change their behaviors?
4. Barriers: What do you think would be the key barriers that might prevent you from achieving your goals?