Writing Prompt: Mainstream Media Mutations
Author: Joseph S. Vuletich, Indiana University Bloomington, jvuleti@iu.edu
Course Motivation: I had several goals in mind when I designed this course. First, I wanted students to engage critically with news – both its content and form. Further, I wanted this engagement to happen in the media ecosystems they surround themselves with rather than some arbitrary, narrower sense of traditional media outlets. In other words, one of the primary goals of the class was for students to ask questions and formulate ideas about how the specific media platforms and genres of communication shape the ways they perceived news content. Second, I also wanted students to gain some preliminary practice composing with the media they encountered. Thus, I designed the course assignments to offer opportunities for multimodal composition so students could experiment with the affordances and constraints of a variety of media beyond word processing. Finally, I wanted students to practice reflective analysis and composition. Throughout the course, and especially in the final unit, students drew connections between their personal beliefs, motivations, and interests and larger cultural patterns in media circulation, modal preferences, and conceptions of truth, falsehood, and many genres in between.
Context of Use: This is the third major (summative) assessment in a thematic first year composition course. The course focuses on genres of “fake news,” with four units taking on satire/parody, hoax, mainstream media, and conspiracy, respectively. Ultimately, the course takes media literacy as seriously as it takes information literacy, asking students not merely to develop their acuity at differentiating trustworthy from problematic information, but also troubling this distinction by examining how media platforms and technologies shape our perceptions of truth and falsehood. Rounding out the third unit, this assignment asks students to consider where, how, and why “facts” shift and bias emerges as a single news story “mutates” across wildly different media platforms. By encouraging students to focus as much on the different affordances of the media platforms where their chosen news story appears as on the content of that story, it helps them think critically about how “the medium really is the message” (Klein). By prompting students to develop a claim about how the story “mutates” (Best) as it moves from one media outlet to another, it further invites them to reflect on “forwarding” (Harris) as an academic and a social process. Finally, by challenging them to present their research in the form of a webpage, this assignment provides them with an opportunity to invent with some of the same media affordances and constraints they analyze.
Instructor Reflection: My favorite part of this assignment is how it marries form and content, medium and message. It does this by drawing students’ attentions to the radical differences in a single news story when it travels from one media outlet or platform to another. Because students have the ability to choose stories that interest them (with instructor vetting), they can more readily see how specific media technologies shape the contours of the topics they care about. Having students submit a webtext with their research and analysis is also quite fun. Many students appreciate the opportunity to compose using a different media, and organizing their ideas around the logics of a webpage encourages them to experience firsthand how those differences shape their sensibilities as well. This assignment can be challenging, however, when it comes to defining a “single news story” for students. Not incorrectly, many think of an ongoing event as “a story” rather than conceiving of a single article, tweet, video, or soundbite and its travel or hypermediation across several platforms as “a story” for analysis. The point here is to provide a fairly limited text for analysis so that students’ observations focus as much or more on how the story shifts from one platform to another as they do on the content of the story itself. One of the ways to scaffold for this possible challenge is to ask students to focus on the difference hearing (e.g. radio or podcast) vs. reading (e.g. newspaper or newsfeed) vs. seeing (e.g. T.V. or YouTube) the story makes. Asking them to close their eyes while listening or to plug their ears while watching can help them make sharper observations about specific media affordances. In a similar vein, students can also benefit from experimenting with a multimedia version of the classic “telephone game” by translating a whisper into a drawing into gestures into written words and so forth. I have uploaded an example of this activity with more in-depth context and directions to the DRC Course Activities Collection.
