MEDIA MIX: DIGITAL DIVIDE, PART II
students know the future is digital. why are colleges so far behind?
2007-07-27
Eric Easter

Back in the dusty pioneer days of the web, circa 1995, I taught a class at my alma mater’s School of Communications (an HBCU) focused on Internet entrepreneurship. The students were all over it, coming up with great ideas for Internet radio and community-centered applications long before those things gained popularity.

The class lasted all of one semester, partly because of funding, but mostly because it was a bit too early from the school’s point of view. The web was in its infancy and seen as a trend, not something worthy of scholarly consideration.

In the dozen years since, I’ve sifted through hundreds of student resumes and what’s all too clear is that students are way ahead of their universities in embracing digital media, but they are doing it in their own time and without training. The colleges, however, are still treating the digital world as if it’s a passing fancy, not the future of media that it has clearly become.

Many universities have funded the tools of the medium, offering campus wide wi-fi, Facebook accounts, state of the art computer labs, and even free iPods and music downloads to the freshman class. But just as many have yet to include serious instruction in digital media at the curriculum level.

There are a couple of reasons why.
 
Many universities still live and die on the “publish or perish theory of scholarship. Trouble is, the internet game changes so quickly that by the time you publish, your findings are largely irrelevant. As a result, instructors teaching digital media rely on decidedly non-scholarly sources for context – magazines, websites and the like. College deans somehow have a real hard time accepting pages copied from Wired as appropriate text in a scholarly environment.

Second, the prevailing wisdom at Communications schools is that no matter what the medium, the essence of journalism is the writing, and that once you learn the basics of journalism the medium is irrelevant.

And these are the same schools where McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” theory is taught as religion.

Writing is fundamental - if you want to be a journalist. And yes, as with any art, you should know the basics before you stretch.  But ask students at communications schools today what their career goals are and the answer is rarely “journalist” anymore. Infused with the entrepreneurial spirit of hip hop, many students (especially black students) want to be record executives, sports promoters, event producers and CEOs of the media and internet firms whose products they consume.

If there is still a critical digital divide among minorities, it’s in ownership of digital media, not the adoption of high speed internet and Xboxes.  If the goals of modern students is to own, their goals should be encouraged and the skills need to be taught formally, not learned watching Diddy’s Making the Band 4.

The perception that adopting a more digital curriculum will require an outsized investment in gadgets and resources is wrong. Preparation for the digital future is not about technology and computers. It’s about a broader understanding of the connectedness and impact of media on people and culture. It’s knowing their power and potential, not just how to work the controls.

What’s needed is a move from the standard teaching of print media as the foundation of communications and more to an interdisciplinary method of media instruction that includes as part of the core curriculum other skills that are now critically intertwined with media. That means along with standard journalism course fare, adding mandatory courses in design, marketing, global affairs, business law, a foreign language, music production, film editing and equal course time spent in television, radio, public relations, film and yes, print.

That’s because the web, while its own medium, is at its core an amalgamation of every other form of media. People working in digital are not as much writers as they are producers, deftly deciding which medium (or combination of media) provides the most effective way of telling the story.

In the digital future, the kids who will be on top won’t be those who have focused their learning on one skill, it will be the kids who learn a little bit of everything and who understand how it all fits into this strange new world.

(Eric Easter is Chief of Digital Strategy for Johnson Publishing Company. He writes on media, tech and politics for ebonyjet.com.)