Libro

MEDIA LITERACY AND INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE
Strategies, Debates and Good Practices
The second example takes place in Newark, the largest city in New Jersey
(USA) that distances approximately 9 miles (15km) from Manhattan. According
to the F.B.I. rankings of Crime in the United States (2009), Newark was rated
the 23 rd most dangerous city in the country in terms of murder, rape, robbery,
aggravated assaults, burglary, and motor vehicle theft. As in the previous music
video, the singers appropriate the format of Empire State of Mind to present to
the world what happens just behind the corner of New York. The opening shots
are images of destruction, sufferance, pollution, prostitution, garbage dumps,
poverty and unemployment. The singer raps,
I used to live in Brooklyn, working at a tech firm,
But then I lost the job, thanks to the recession,
Now I can’t pay for rent here, I can’t pay for rent anywhere,
They evict me everywhere.
Words of despair and fear, not being able to choose where to live because of no
fixed salary, the dream of finding a new job and escaping from Newark
constitute the storyline of this video. The singer presents the dangers of living in
that city and the reasons why one would want to get out from there. He raps,
8 million reasons to get up out this trash heap,
Funny is the money that gets people trapped here,
Worst part of it is that Jay- Z, Alicia Keys will never write a song about the
peeps living in Newark.
Since Jay- Z and Alicia Keys, or the corporations that have the monopoly over
the culture industries will never write songs about the ‘peeps’ living out of New
York, this video is in its nature denunciatory and a form of cultural citizenship.
Both videos are the expression of what Henry Jenkins calls participatory culture;
one “with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement,
strong support for creating and sharing creations with others, and one that shifts
the focus of literacy from individual expression to community involvement”
(2006; p.7). In these two examples common people re-appropriate the format of
Empire State of Mind to tell to the world their own story about the cities they live
in. We move away from what Lawrence Lessig calls a “read- only” culture and
engage instead in a “reading- writing continuum” that is intercultural in its
nature. The read- only culture is limiting because it does not allow people to
respond. On the other hand, a reading- writing continuum embodies the
essence of communications, its relationship to community, communion and
dialogic sharing of experiences with others. We can say that intercultural
dialogue takes place between members of the participatory culture. In order to
“spoof” –appropriate, remix, re- use, disrupt and subvert dominant discourses
embedded in pop culture and produce alternative or oppositional meanings, one
must be aware of and share the codes that build up those discourses. Media
literacy plays a crucial role in this process both in the phases of deconstruction
(interrogation of knowledge) and production (creation of a culture of one’s own).
Media literacy is about gaining the competencies on how to access, read,
analyze and interpret the discourses that constitute and position us as subjects,
and producing new meanings that shape our cultures and societies. As Sarup
maintains (1993), “we cannot separate individuals and their literacy practices
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