The Next Step in Media Criticism

When this department began in 1956, most teachers had not yet recovered from the shock of TV's becoming the dominant medium in American civilization. The first task in helping the English profession take advantage of the new medium at its best and not be taken advantage of by its worst was mostly informational: information about important programs, information about negative tendencies. That phase of our confrontation of the problem seems to me over. Week to week details are at a teacher's fingertips through the excellent "Look and Listen" feature of Scholastic magazines. That publisher's "Teleguides" on most promising productions and Studies in the Mass Media's TV issues (such as Hardy Finch's forthcoming November issue on the December 9 CBS-TV telecasting of the BBC version of Hedda Gabler) pretty well cover the field.

And the valuable monograph by Neil Postman of New York University, Television and the Teaching of English (1961), a joint venture cosponsored by the Television Information Office and the NCTE Commercial Television Committee while chaired by Louis Forsdale of Columbia Teachers College, attests to the importance of our profession's working on long-range goals with a communication industry. Scholastic's William D. Boutwell has edited a compilation, Using Mass Media (1962), which brings together a wide range of opinion and suggestion with a how-to emphasis.

Another NCTE committee on Motion Pictures and the Teaching of English under the able leadership of Dr. Marion Sheridan has been supervising the writing of a volume on film to parallel the Postman TV book. It should appear in the Fall of 1963. My reading of early drafts of this mature essay on the place of film in the English curriculum suggests that we are entering a new phase in media criticism. The emphasis is shifting from defending the new media and presenting audiovisualistic lesson plans for teachers just beginning to use new media to a more philosophical and far-sighted perspective.

This, it seems to me, is all to the good. I have been uneasy for some time about the ad hoc one-shot approach to media study. Now that we have won the battle for the modern media, we must integrate the study of these new languages with the older ones. This integration can be accomplished chiefly by forcing the new emphasis on linguistics to include the study of the latest media as languages. This will be good for linguistics, and it will also absolve media study of the last traces of parochialism.

Precisely because linguistics is cresting as a curricular wave, it is essential at this moment to look at its assumptions carefully. There are two that concern me most. I cite from The Science of Linguistics, prepared by the Linguistics Study Group of the Philadelphia Public Schools, 1961, for purposes of brevity and because of a belief that what finally filters down to the classroom teacher is a basic consideration. Consider these two tenets of linguistics:

Language is primarily and essentially speech-a human communication system made up of sounds articulated in the throat, mouth, and nasal passages. A completely successful study of language can only be carried on by a study of speech; the written language must be dealt with as a secondary development of the spoken one, and must continually be compared with the actual form of the spoken language, if it is to be clearly understood or analyzed. (p. 3) Change in language is evidence of life. It apparently cannot be stopped by an educational or other force. (p. 4)

To begin with the latter, it seems to me to embody what might be called the "vitalistic" fallacy. This, to use Philip Rahv's distinction, appeals to the Redskins of American literary culture as much as it alienates the Palefaces. It smacks, however, of the same fascination with Newness that infects our economy of obsolescence.

It is silly to fight change if such battles are foredoomed to failure. But are they? Printing stopped the flux of change in spelling, as well we know trying to teach long bygone pronunciations and a host of other irregularities strange to today's student. But in a larger sense the same emerging global technology underlying printing is making a worldwide community of meaning possible for the first time in history. Dialect is a function of isolation. Conflicting and changing meanings derive from dissimilar experiences. As regional communities begin to share more and more a transnational experience, we can expect a convergence of meaning in some areas of language.

It may even be that a conscious pursuit of commonness may accelerate the establishment of a world culture. A kind of Basic English as a lingua franca for a world society is highly necessary at this point in time. Just because languages have drifted with bewildering speed in pre-industrial eras does not mean they must forever. If the schools cannot stop all change, indeed should not want to if they could, there is still no reason why they cannot try to narrow the gaps of diverse meaning. Drift may well have been the salient characteristic of pre-industrial civilizations; mastery could become possible with the new leisure and resources we now have for creating a mature national speech community with the vision and desire to help create a transnational one.

Thus, while I'm perfectly willing to grant that change is often necessary and important, I see no reason why our professional policy should not include opposition to changes that unnecessarily complicate an already highly confusing linguistic milieu. I don't see why we can't, for example, massively resist the kind of confusion inherent in fusing the meanings of imply and infer. Basically, then, there's nothing in linguistics as a rationale which impels us to shrug helplessly before any and all change. If one argues that language has always changed in the past, we can reply that the very knowledge of how language has drifted in the isolated speech communities of the past gives us unprecedented resources for resisting changes that erode the foundations of a world culture.

The fetish of unstoppable change is partly due to another fallacy of the linguistics revolution: the notion that language is "primarily and essentially" speech and that writing is a "secondary development." Primary in the sense of time, surely. Essential in the sense that without the "uttering" of inner consciousness that speech is, none of the higher levels of consciousness would be possible, O.K.

But writing as secondary is full of opportunities for misinterpretation. In the same pamphlet referred to earlier, for example, it is observed that "the discipline of writing . . is a far more difficult one than that of speech, and requires a sharpening of the thought processes and a greater concentration of effort." (p. 7) This would imply, then, that speech is primary only in the sense of coming before. I suspect that there lurks beneath this apotheosis of speech the primitivistic romanticism of the anthropologist who, astonished by the difficulty of fully describing the complexities of an aboriginal tribe, admonishes us professionally never to use illiterate for what his profession chooses to call preliterate.

Well, I suppose this admonition is salutary if it reminds us of some of the larger ambiguities of Progress in our times, but when all is said and done it is literacy which has made both linguistics and anthropology possible. And I see nothing gained by excessive admonition of pre-literate complexity. What we need to do rather than harp on the pre-literate glories of speech is to expand the concept of literacy to include all the communications media that impinge on the consciousness of modern man.

We need to see man's linguistic predicament in a much more historical way. Surely it started with speech. But civilization became possible as writing accelerated the larger communities of cities. And printing undergirded the scientific revolution we are now trying to humanize. Photography and film, radio, and television have introduced immense new linguistic problems both for those who create and those who appreciate, produce, and consume such acts of language. To get fixated on the speechwriting dichotomy at this point is to miss the significance of our multi-media language environment.

The next step in media criticism is to integrate our concern with the later languages of still and moving image, sound and sight broadcasting with the older forms of speech, writing, and printing. A truly sophisticated language curriculum will study intensively the many ways meaning is transferred from the interior of one consciousness to the interiors of other ones. We must show our students how different media can communicate the same idea; we must show them how related literary genres take on different dimensions as they pass from one medium to another. In the heady sense of victory which now rewards the linguists after their hard fought battle for recognition, there is danger that the primary purpose of training in literacy may be lost in the proud exposure of a new scientific discipline.

That primary purpose I believe is to enable all of our students to see and to say as much as needs to be seen and said through all the media that at once complicate our modem world and make it at least partially meaningful. What we need, then, as the next stage in media criticism is a rhetoric that combines traditional wisdom, the new linguistics, and what we are still frantically trying to learn about the latest languages in man's communication repertoire. This synthesis is a frightfully demanding job. I shall be content this year if I can sketch the outlines of what I take to be the major dimensions of the problem of a truly contemporary rhetoric.

Source: The English Journal, Vol. 52, No. 6 (Sep., 1963), pp. 468-470
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English