Lets become…
Are we globally aware? I am not convinced that having the technology automatically makes it so. As I sit here listening to the rain and thunder hammering down on the roof I am trying to unravel this question. These things I am listening too are in my reality, I can hear them, I can stand outside and feel the rain, I am witnessing them and their effect on my surroundings.My global awareness must come from other sources, from sources that will chose what they are reporting and how they will be doing this. Now I begin to struggle, probably my media degree, to decide what reality I am being shown. I am being made aware of global issues, however always through someone else's lens. As a media student we were taught to dissect the information and use various sources to construct a reality. However, I studied this in a time before the internet, when your sources were usually based on the media from a handful of sources.With the birth of the internet those sources have increased and we can access information from a variety places, with primary sources including videos and on the scene documentaries being uploaded to sites such as Youtube. Once you have watched the shooting of school children through mobile phone footage, death in the streets in Syria, protestors killed in a rally, a girls last words before suicide than maybe you start to believe you have global awareness. However, I am not sure this makes us more globally aware, it just gives the illusion of awareness.The Amnesty International action group at school, consisting of 14 -16 year olds, decided to do a piece on female rights and linked it to the heforshe campaign. They undertook an everyday sexism experiment, on their peers, and it was very interesting to be part of this very successful experiment. At the end they read through some of the plights of young women and among them they discussed the 200 girls from Nigeria that were kidnapped 1 year ago...it made me take a huge intake of breath - that long ago and who is campaigning for them? Are they being discussed in the news and on social media? No is the quick answer they have been displaced by the next “big thing” passed by as old news and no longer interesting. Is this global awareness or just global sensationalism? We move quickly from one “drama” to another in the same way we flick through television channels. Don’t let me be misunderstood, it is amazing that we have access to this information, I just would just like to see the “information rich” do more with it, or is the problem that we have too much information and don’t know what to do with it?Then we have “global awareness” that is just plain wrong. I come from the UK and have family who live in the West Midlands (near Birmingham). I nearly choked on my toast when I heard the complete untruths that Fox news wrote about this area. Completely factually incorrect and although they finally issued a withdrawal it made me once again question what information we are being given, information that many people still take as absolute truth.This isn’t global awareness, in fact if anything this is the total opposite, this is reducing our awareness.For me the teaching of media skills to deconstruct information is therefore essential. Bias, sensationalism and incorrect information in the news is not a new phenomenon, however, global access to this information is relatively new. We need to decide what we want “global awareness” to look like and teach our children (and adults) how to read this information and seek further information from other sources. We need to discus stories that are no longer in the news, just because they are not “big news” does not mean they are no longer an issue.I feel that over saturation can lead to lethargy and I would like to see a call to arms...lets be more than passive global consumers lets actually become aware, lets demand better information, lets become inquisitive and sensitive to others and maybe we could construct a better more tolerant world![youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5i6pFPyhYw#t=11[/youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5i6pFPyhYw#t=11(2010) 20 Things I learned about browsers and the Web. Retrieved from https://www.20thingsilearned.com/en-US/homeErickson. C (Dec 2012)This is My Brain on YouTube. Retrieved from https://mashable.com/2012/12/07/youtube-brain/