I teach Digital Media Movie Making, Broadcasting, and Computer Animation in an urban magnet school that contains around 400 students. Our school has a number of teachers that are social activists. Issues facing the New Haven Connecticut community are frequent subjects for our classes. Our students are encouraged to use their voice to change the world for the better. The camera, communication, and storytelling techniques that they learn in my class increase the volume of their voice, that is, the probability that their media will be seen by a large audience. If this were to happen, it could transform their lives in a very positive or very negative way.
Our students are voracious consumers and purveyors of digital media. Nearly all the students have a smartphone and nearly all publish frequently on Snapchat and/or Instagram. Further, there are a few that publish frequently on their You-Tube channel. Some of the students express hopes of going viral and getting the hits and then getting the following that will make them rich. Students record and share nearly every event that happens in the school: every fight, argument, others clowning around, dancing or singing. It seems to be an instinctive reaction, that when students see something interesting about to happen, they pull out their phones and start filming. It is conceivable that one day one of my students could film something that captures the attention of people across the country.
Media can go viral simply because it triggers powerful emotions. Sometimes these emotions can constitute a ‘call for action’: that is, a feeling generated by the movie that makes others want to do something, whether or not the filmmaker intended to motivate people to act. In fact it is my mission as a teacher of Digital Movie Making and Broadcasting to help my students learn to make videos that are interesting enough to be shared by people beyond the student’s social network. This unit will help students to think through the ethical concerns and potential long-term consequences of sharing or not sharing their videos. It is the state mandated ethics portion of their curriculum. We will examine why the democratization of media power out of the hands of big corporations into the hands of the common man necessitates that individuals assume some responsibility for the intended and unintended consequences of their calls to action.
In the past, journalists had strong incentives to uphold ethical standards; their livelihood and professional reputation were on the line with each report. With the common man as journalist the threat of losing one's job or professional shame no longer looms large as potential consequences for unethical uses of media. We will ponder the question: what does accountability look like for the unaffiliated reporter? What would make common people police themselves so that they feel the need to post and share only balanced and responsible media projects? In the culminating lesson of the unit, students will develop their own ethical code to guide their future work but even more importantly, students will determine why upholding their own ethical principles matters to them.
Leading up to and preparing for this culminating lesson, we will examine the ethical concerns of some of the most important media-driven events in history. We will start out with an analysis of the film Birth of a Nation and the violence and terror that it spurred in the early 20th century. We will examine its emotion-evoking cinematography that led to the rebirth and upswell of public support for an organization that had been deemed by the US government to be a terrorist group, the Klu Klux Klan.
The students will then undertake their own case studies of more recent media inspired events.
