Intermedia confrontation and informal media education in Iran: A case study of the TV documentary Taqato' (Crossroad) in the context of the phenomenon known as the Green Movement

Sarfaraz, Hossein

doi:10.22035/jous.2024.5056.1041

Intermedia confrontation and informal media education in Iran: A case study of the TV documentary Taqato' (Crossroad) in the context of the phenomenon known as the Green Movement

Document Type : Original Research Paper

Author

Hossein Sarfaraz

Asistant Professor of Communication, Department of Communication Studies, Faculty of Communication Science, Allameh Tabataba'i University, Tehran, Iran

10.22035/jous.2024.5056.1041

Abstract

"Media Education" in common formal models is a product of the educational system; however, the focus of this paper is on informal models of media education, which implicitly emerge with more complex connotations compared to formal and explicit models. The issue of informal media education has become more significant due to the phenomenon of digitization in education, and the prominence of alternative teaching-learning methods intensifies it. As a result, finding educational implications outside the formal contexts of the classroom, school, faculty, university, and other official educational institutions is of great importance. The path to finding these implications is self-reflective and comes through the context of media culture, which is both constructed by the media and encompasses them. Every medium has a specific function in constructing media culture and assigning meaning to it. From the perspective of this paper, media culture is the result of a media struggle over legitimizing meanings, and media literacy will be the critical dimension embedded in the layers of this media culture—layers marked by the integration of two theoretical models of cultural analysis. In other words, educational culture in the space of the digitization of education is inherently a media culture. On one hand, a model of media literacy is presented within media culture, the most important feature of which is the ability to reflect the dynamics within media culture. One of the key features of this model is its focus on the educational aspects of all elements involved in the media culture circuit as a field of central and peripheral forces. These elements include representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation. On the other hand, by applying a semiotic reading of the Taqato' (Crossroad) TV documentary, the paper examines the application of the proposed model in exploring the educational implications of intermedia confrontation, specifically between television as a central medium and social media as a peripheral medium in the context of the phenomenon known as the Green Movement and the events following the 2009 presidential election in Iran.

Keywords

Media Education

Pedagogy

Television

Green Movement

Social Media

Media Literacy

Subjects

University, Communications and Cyber Space

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