Hello readers!
In the last two weeks, my ASTU class revolved around various topics such as global citizens, genre, citation, narrative, memories etc. We also read Farhad Shahzad’s article on “The Role of Interpretative Communities in Remembering and Learning” which is about her research on student’s memories and learning strategies with relation to their social relationships, political orientations, cultural meanings, worldviews and historical experiences. It shows the importance of interpretative communities which according to her includes families, friends, politicians, organizations or nation states in the process of collective remembering. It also talks about how memories are given meaning by human agents, interpreted by communities and mediated by the technologies of memory like media, newspapers, internet etc. In Farhad Shahzad’s article various technologies of memories have been mentioned amongst which ‘media’ as technology of memory is the most important and talked about.
“Dealing with the biases of media, it has become hard to inform my own paradigm”. This statement is taken from a narrative written by a first year university student mentioned in Shazad’s article. While reading Shazad’s article this statement really struck me because one common thing I observed in my Global Citizen classes, which is one of the stream in CAP is the word ‘biased media’. It has not only been discussed in my ASTU class but also in Political Science and Sociology class. We have heard and seen media being biased and false at times but it still remains to be the most popular source of technologies of memory. Keeping in my mind the popularity of media as a source of information and knowledge, I believe that media nowadays is somewhere misleading and manipulating memories. Our interpretative communities are themselves influenced by it because many of the times they themselves depend on media as a source of information. Media has made people less critical. The stories on the TV news channels which is then printed in newspapers and magazines is considered to be the truth without really analysing and understanding the matter. Media has in some way monopolized people’s individual thinking and perspectives. The media passes their opinions and perspectives to us (interpretative communities) and we pass media’s perspective thinking of it to be our own to others and this goes on. If that is the case, can we say that the interpretative communities depends on media for interpretation of memories?
We also had a discussion on connect about ‘What is a Global Citizen?’ and one common opinion of the students in this discussion was the point that global citizens are the people who are ‘aware’ about the happenings and issues of the world. I was one of the student with this opinion but after my two weeks in ‘Global Citizens’ stream of CAP and especially after reading Shazad’s article in my ASTU class that had narratives from university students about their difficulty to actually figure out the real situations, problems, circumstances and their own paradigm because of biased media left me with several questions in my mind- As a global citizen we need to be ‘aware’ with the happenings around the world, but the question is are we really ‘aware’ or are we made to think we are? Is the so called ‘reliable’ information actually ‘reliable ’enough? And can we really be ‘Global Citizens’ if all we have is false news and biased opinions.
I wonder………
-Priya Adhikari