A media culture has emerged in which images, sounds, and spectacles help produce

the fabric of everyday life, dominating leisure time, shaping political views and
social behavior, and providing the materials out of which people forge their very
identities. Radio, television, film, and the other products of the culture industries
provide the models of what it means to be male or female, successful or a failure,
powerful or powerless. Media culture also provides the materials out of which
many people construct their sense of class, of ethnicity and race, of nationality, of
sexuality, of us and them. Media culture helps shape the prevalent view of the
world and deepest values: it defines what is considered good or bad, positive or
negative, moral or evil. Media stories and images provide the symbols, myths, and
resources which help constitute a common culture for the majority of individuals
in many parts of the world today. Media culture provides the materials to create
identities whereby individuals insert themselves into contemporary techno-capitalist
socieities and which is producing a new form of global culture.
Media culture consists of systems of radio and the reproduction of
The Frankfurt Schools total rejection of mass culture seems inappropriate, as
media culture is here to stay and, if anything, its products are becoming increasingly
popular and powerful. Yet mindless celebration of media culture, without cultivation
of methods to promote critical media literacy, is equally pernicious. Thus, it is
important to pursue a project of developing a critical media pedagogy and to teach
ourselves and others how to critically decode media messages and to trace their
complex range of effects. It is important to be able to perceive the various ideological
voices and codes in the artifacts of our common culture and to distinguish between
hegemonic ideologies and those images, discourses, and texts that subvert the
dominant ideologies.
It is also important to learn to discriminate between the best and worst of media
culture and to cultivate oppositional subcultures and alternatives to media culture.
You are what you see and hear every bit as much as what you eat, and it is therefore
important to impress upon individuals the need to avoid media culture junk food
and to choose healthier and more nourishing products. This requires learning
discrimination and cultivating tastes for the better products of media culture, as
well as alternative forms of culture ranging from poetry, literature, painting, to
alternative music, film, and television.
McLuhan to the contrary, todays media-saturated younger generations are not
naturally media-critical or truly media-literate. Thus, developing critical media
literacy requires developing explicit strategies of cultural pedagogy and many
dominant schools of contemporary theorysuch as the Frankfurt School,
336 Conclusion
cultural studies, and most postmodern theoryhave failed to develop a critical
media pedagogy.1
It is up to us and to the next generation to
determine the future of our media and technological society and it is to be hoped
that they will use cultural studies as a weapon of social critique, enlightenment,
and change, rather than just as another source of cultural capital.