Week 3 - Media as Inquiry

Ever since The Enlightenment, there has been a huge emphasis placed on inquiry, or the search for truth.  The Enlightenment brought free thinking, new ideas, scientific discovery, invention, innovation, and even religious curiosity and freedom of faith. New forms of media were invented and innovated, from the printing press to moving pictures, which have led to the incredible boon of media sources we enjoy today.  Inquiry is still one of the main sources of creativity in media today.  In our reading/viewing, we read about how to build a cathedral, and saw how crayons are made.  The crayon creation was especially interesting to me, as it was a very hands on way of seeing how things are done.  Being able to watch something be made rather than being told how to make it is a very unique form of learning.  While the book was full of pictures, it was harder to follow and you had to imagine the process much more.  The crayons were more straightforward, taking you through the complete process and explaining things as you saw them happen.  Obviously there is a place for both of these.  A book about crayon creation might be pretty interesting, but wouldn't be able to capture the full experience, and a film about cathedral building might not be able to show clearly how they are made as the subject matter is so antiquated.

In class we watched multiple examples of visual learning.  The two documentaries we watched, one on seahorses and one on lemmings, had very different ways of portraying the information.  The lemmings documentary tried to keep things interesting by providing a narrative flow to the information, while the seahorse documentary seemed to focus more on a logical flow of information, not so much on a story or process.  But both had problems.  Both seemed to present the information with a bit of a slant, allowing the opinion of the narrator to influence the information provided.  There was also a distinct humanizing of the subjects in both documentaries that caused certain opinionated descriptions to sound like logical fact.  There was also a problem in that the lemmings story had information that was completely fabricated (Lemmings commit mass suicide).  This can cause obvious problems, particularly if it is the only source of knowledge the viewer partakes of.  We need multiple sources of information and media in order to get the full picture.

In class we also watched "Chang" a silent documentary about a family living in the jungles of Siam, that likewise portrayed a certain humanization of the creatures involved.  It was narrative driven and often contrived.  While very different from modern documentaries, there were very informational pieces such as seeing how the family solved problems, the influence of community in these people's lives.  Also different from modern documentary, it didn't presume to be the source of all knowledge.  It was obvious when it deviated from the truth, and thus wasn't as misleading as the lemmings documentary was.   

So while media based on inquiry and knowledge can be beneficial and useful, it can also be detrimental and destructive if used incorrectly.