Activist Project: The Media Carta
For this assignment, your group engages in some kind of activist intervention. Organize a flash-mob. Sponsor a set activist activities related to the study of media. Look to media activist projects that you could bring to the university campus. The point of this assignment is to demonstrate active civic engagement in the political discourse that is occurring on our campus this semester. In so doing, we demonstrate our active involvement in a democratic community. Your object is not to raise money for an organization – but to raise awareness about an issue important to media students at Guelph-Humber. In this task you must try to determine an appropriate means for creating awareness about your chosen issue.
Click "Read More" to learn more about how we engaged Guelph-Humber students with the Media Carta.
Download one of our posters and help spread the word about the Media Carta (click to download).
Activist Project Commentary
We selected the Media Carta and Adbusters for our activism project. Adbusters is an organization comprised of many artists, activists, writers, and self-proclaimed pranksters, gathered together to move forward. Together, they collaborate on a bi-monthly magazine to discuss social implications, activism and media. The Media Carta, specifically is a petition designed to ‘reclaim our mental environment.’ To recreate and define how we view, see, and embrace media while filtering through and avoiding the toxic dumping ground that is manipulative ads, distorted news, untold violence, spin and hype. It promotes being more aware of what you are reading and consuming when it comes to social media.
For this project, we split up the work in three different ways. We had two members do research, two created a visual presentation, and two created a written portion. During the beginning of the project, we also ambitiously designed posters promoting the Media Carta and encouraging our fellow UGH students to participate and sign the petition. We also planned to set up a booth on the first floor lobby to spread information about the Media Carta to students who were not a part of our mass communications class. However, we ran into several problems with this presentation. We discovered that posters and any content to be displayed in the school needs to be approved, and that process itself takes a very long time. Therefore, we were unable to fully promote the project beyond the blog itself. Additionally, we created a Facebook group and displayed posters to promote the Media Carta to our classmates. We also sent out a mass e-mail with informative links and content.
The Media Carta and Adbusters is an important organization because it helps to promote awareness surrounding the media, advertisements, and the products that we seen every single day. By helping to filter and demonstrate what ads are fabricated, what is true, and what is false in the media marketing industry, it helps us to be more aware of what media is good for us and what media isn’t. We are able to critically analyze and decipher what we want to be a part of when it comes to social media and communication and what’s not for us.
The Media Carta while promoting thoughtful consideration of ads, marketing, and social media, also makes it seem as if there are nothing but negative aspects in the media. While a lot of modern day media is ‘polluted’, there are many positive aspects. Though it does not make it clear, the Media Carta is actually a manipulative tool used to promote (or manipulate) one to reject most of social media in favor of ‘the truth’. However, it uses the same methods that regular marketing does; by showing only one perspective of the situation while showing the other in a poor light. If anything, the Media Carta shows that it, too, should be as analyzed and evaluated before committing to it’s ideas and values.