There is a place where today's cultural diversity erupts and becomes conflict: that place is the school. But the school hides its conflict with audiovisual culture reducing it to its moral effects, to a discourse of lamentations about media – especially TV, walkman, video games – that steal free time from young people, manipulate their naivety and idealism, inoculate superficiality and conformism making them reluctant to any serious task, they devalue the book and demanding reading. Translated into these terms, the conflict would speak only of the school's struggle against the pseudo-culture of entertainment and that new illiteracy that cover up the proliferation of images and music-noise.
This denunciation is, however, too reductive and conceals that the challenge of the audiovisual world to the school is posed at more specific and decisive levels: that of the culture of information and that of new forms of socialization. This is the fundamental challenge to the school's claim to be the only legitimate space for the organization and transmission of knowledge. As an archive and as a program, the computer and television disrupt that claim. And the daily experience of the teacher testifies to that distorting presence in school life of logics, knowledge and stories that are beyond his control. On the other hand, audiovisual media today constitute a powerful area of socialization, that is, of elaboration and transmission of values and patterns of behavior, taste patterns and lifestyles. And there too the challenge is specific, because it comes to dismantle old and resistant forms of authority and intermediation that configured until not long ago the statute and social power of the school.
That is why neither young people today accept an education organized exclusively on legal culture nor the school completely dispenses with audiovisual media. But what kind of uses does the media school make? Modernizing and instrumental. Modernizing means that for most schools the presence of the video recorder and the computer is part of the gestures more directed outward than inward, towards the prestige of modernity that certain technologies themselves grant and their ability to liven up the school routine.
Hence, ultimately the presence in the school of audiovisual media, and the computer lately, is exhausted in an instrumental use: which is the one that abstracting the media from its communicative peculiarities and its cultural density uses them not as knowledge strategies but only as "aids", outside the pedagogical process or in purely formal exercises, such as when learning to use the computer not to use it as an intellectual tool but so that the student can demonstrate that he learned to use it.
What this modernizing/instrumental use tries to conjure up is precisely the challenge that the media entail for the educational system, the abyss that its disarticulation of school life opens between the culture from which teachers teach and that from which students perceive, feel, think and speak. A split that must be addressed as soon as possible since the habits of relationship with the media and information and communication technologies could not be changed without affecting the status of education in society and without the school taking charge of what audiovisual media are and mean culturally.
Editor's note:
For the editorial team of TV&Video Latin America magazine it is very pleasant to present Jesús Martín-Barbero, a deep connoisseur of the phenomenon of communication in Latin America and who from the third edition will be sharing with our readers his valuable analysis. Jesús Martín-Barbero is a Spaniard who has lived in Colombia for more than 30 years, with a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Leuven (Belgium), postgraduate studies in semiotics and anthropology at the School of Higher Studies in Paris and associate researcher at the Faculty of Information Sciences of the Complutense University of Madrid. He has served, among others, as director of the Department of Communication Sciences at the Universidad del Valle, president of the ALAIC – Latin American Association of Communication Researchers – and guest professor in postgraduate programs of prestigious Latin American and European universities. He is also a member of the Advisory Committee of FELAFACS – Latin American Federation of Faculties of Social Communication – and collaborates as an advisor to numerous journals such as Sociedad de Argentina and TRAVESIA-Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies in London. His publications include: Mass communication: discourse and power; From the media to mediations; Television and melodrama; and Communication, Culture and Hegemony.
