Aubrey Northam's Questions 3/20

1. Understandably so, I find the issues that Hacker and Pierson discussed about American education to be particularly upsetting. As the rich get increasingly richer and the poor remain more or less stagnant, policy makers for the past few decades have been hinting at the same solution: taking greater advantage of higher education in an increasingly academic-specialized workforce. However, accessing higher education seems to be a cyclical problem contributing to America’s economic disparity (assuming that it is indeed a factor). As tuition costs have been climbing, displacing the average college graduate with an exorbitant amount of debt, combined with the projection that on average this generation will not be richer than their parents, how is higher education supposed to foster economic balance, even for the shrinking few who make it that far?

2. Williams and Delli Carpini cover the controversy of climate change in this chapter, in terms of the media’s role of covering a political issue. One of the points being made is that the boundary is blurred between news coverage and entertainment coverage of this issue—even though environmental data doesn’t typically arise as a captivating subject for either medium. But as the subject becomes more politicized, media outlets are faced with financial pressure from corporate advertising and support that effects the content of their coverage. As a huge pitfall then, how can we ever expect media outlets to be the righteous gatekeepers of unbiased knowledge on these issues when financial sponsors get the last word, the first word, and every word in between?

3. In Digital Media 201, we watched Siva appear on a program where he debated the sacredness of the classroom with Anya Kamenetz, author of “DIY U”. He defended the sanctity and effectiveness of traditional instructor-based learning, as well as the institutions that offer such higher learning, even as they grow more prestigious and expensive. Regardless of supposed economic consequences that Hacker and Pierson discuss, Siva affirms that the investment in these institutions is worth preserving. The opposite argument, made by Kamenetz, suggests that now more than ever there needs to be an alternative to our traditional higher education system. Since not everyone can get past the “ivy-covered walls”, it’s time to break them down, and what better way to do that than with the limitless communicative potential of new media. Regardless of how this trend in less-than-attainable higher education came to be, should media have a responsibility in changing it? And what does the current system have to lose or gain?

DMU Timestamp: March 15, 2012 22:35