Mass Media Orbits

Jacques Ranciere suggests that emancipated human beings are each in their own orbits around 'truth'.  Put another way, all people come to understand knowledge in different ways and on their own unique terms.  People in their own orbits assume their own equality to everyone else and they assume everyone else's equality to them.  There is no 'right' way to arrive at knowing.  It is a beautiful picture, to be sure, but at first it felt very individualistic to me and I wondered where the orbit metaphor allowed for genuine human connection when it came to learning.  If every student orbits around truth/knowledge/reality in a different way, how can school children ever work together to discover something?  Can schools foster a genuine sense of community in learning, or must every child be allowed to proceed with his or her learning completely independently?  I struggled with these questions.  However, after thinking more about Ranciere's ethics and the reality of daily human behavior, I'm not sure that the orbit every person inhabits cannot ever intersect with or merge with another person's orbit.  Obviously, people make connections with each other.  And some of the deepest human connections are often made over a shared sense of knowing.  There is something very powerful in the kinship of understanding or seeing something in the same way as another.  In these moments, our unique orbits intersect.  I think of those magic tricks where independent metal hoops somehow become connected and then disconnected in the blink of an eye.  These connections needn't take away from each person's unique orbit, either.  The orbit metaphor must go hand in hand with Ranciere's ethic of equality.  As long as I acknowledge that your orbit it as valid and beautiful as mine, then we can feel confident that when/if our orbits intersect, it is not due to some form of stultification, or someone forcing 'truth' upon us.  My question then, became: how can education provide opportunities for students to emancipate themselves and enter their own orbits around knowledge?  What are the forces currently inhibiting such emancipation?   

[Incidentally, studying mass media requires a similar ethic of equality that Ranciere applies to people, except that rather than assuming all people are equal, mass media scholars assume all media is equal. This doesn't mean that all mass media are equal in quality or beauty, necessarily.  That is, in fact, not the point at all.  It simply means that all mass media can be critiqued and understood as reflecting something about society and reality.  All mass media texts are equally worthy of study.  For this reason, I think studying mass media provides more opportunities to live into the reality of Ranciere's ethics of equality in schools because there is currently no hierarchy of mass media knowledge, no curriculum that 'experts' have chosen, no content standards to adopt.  Any and all mass media texts can be studied in schools, allowing for maximum opportunity for student choice.] 

In pondering these questions, I started thinking about the ways that students orbit around mass media texts, and the ways in which mass media texts orbit around them.  There are obviously many constraints on equality in society that prevent students from seeing or valuing their unique orbits, not the least of which are mass media.  Mass media texts, influenced primarily by big business and the desire to make money, are not typically designed to encourage deep, unique thought.  In fact, one of my greatest challenges in teaching young people about mass media was their resistance to critique their favorite forms of entertainment.  At times it felt more like mass media was orbiting them and constraining them and defining them than the other way around.  This was the inspiration for the graphic below.  The students in the image are being orbited by a barrage of mass media texts, all attempting to define them and influence them to consume - all preventing them from entering their own unique orbits or discovering 'truth'.  However, as happens with many forms of entertainment that people enjoy, these students have found a connection - perhaps a television show that they both enjoy watching.  The orbits around them have suddenly merged.  The space has opened up for these students to break free from the media orbits that surround them, and enter their own orbit around a text that compels them.  

Undoubtedly these kinds of connections around mass media happen all the time and mostly outside of school.  But here is where I think education might play a particularly important role in the process of emancipation from the influences of mass media.  Schools provide a space in which young people can experiment with their own orbits around a similar object of study.  Because mass media is currently not a regulated discipline in education, students are much freer to come to their own unique interpretations and understandings around a common mass media text.  There simply are no 'right answers' in mass media education (at least for now).  What is possible, then, is depicted in the graphic below.  Students are on their own orbits around the mass media text they connected over earlier.  Not only are they forming community with each other by studying it, but they are also emancipating themselves from the constraints that a consumption-obsessed mass media might place on them.  They are free to follow their own orbits, and the teacher, having created space for them to do so, can also use mass media texts to open new doors of perception.