In an increasingly mediated world, a world organized around cell phone use, instant messaging, the Internet, and digital image production, the ability to utilize communication media, and to engage in one’s own media making, has become a crucial life skill. Yet, media studies involves a lot more than learning how to analyze a film text, design a web site, or shoot and edit a video, as important as those skills may be.
In contemporary culture, mediated experiences provide our primary interface with the physical and social world “out there”. Books, magazines and newspapers, television and radio, film, video and the Internet, connect us to people, places, and ideas that we would never encounter in face-to-face interactions. So, studying the media must also mean studying the ways in which media engage the world and represent it to us, the ways in which different forms of media can be used to learn, communicate, persuade and manipulate. And this requires engaging the world that we hope to represent.
That is why Professor John Schott urged his 2007 Nonfiction Video Production class to pursue a project that would put them in touch with real-world community issues and events; a project that would not only offer them an opportunity to develop and refine technical skills of video making, but lead them to grapple with the complicated process of representing, in sounds and images, issues that matter to the community they inhabit.
[Visit Our Ethanol Debate or watch a movie from the project.]
What issues were important to the people of Northfield in early 2007? Advanced BioEnergy, a limited liability company based in Nebraska, was moving to buy land in Bridgewater Township, a few miles southwest of Northfield, to build a corn-based ethanol plant. Revis Stephenson, CEO of Advanced BioEnergy, announced, “The Northfield location is a good fit for our overall growth strategy.” The company hoped to utilize the I-35 corridor for truck traffic, as well as the existing rail line through Northfield used by Union Pacific, DM&E, and Progressive Rail, to process 36 million bushels of corn or more annually, or about 43% of the area’s corn production. The plant was expected to cost $160 million, and, if approved, would begin construction by fall of 2007.
This was a community development over which residents had many competing interests and opinions. Building a large bio-fuel plant on the outskirts of Northfield raised all sorts of economic, environmental, agricultural, transportation, and land use issues. What if the Nonfiction Video class set about exploring this tangle of community issues and citizen concerns in a series of mini-documentaries and interviews? It was an exciting prospect, but a real challenge for a ten-week class. Fortunately, additional CAMS activity in Scoville Hall provided a potential solution.
A CAMS class on Environmental Issues and Media Representation was meeting just down the hall from Nonfiction Video. A collaboration was proposed. The members of the Environmental Issues class jumped at the chance to pool their expertise with members of the Non-fiction Video class. Members of the Deconstructing Journalism class wanted in too and the Northfield Ethanol Debate project was launched.
The results of that collaboration can be seen at the web site Our Ethanol Debate, constructed by CAMS students to host a multi-media forum of research articles, commentaries, interviews, charts, photographs and video on a range of issues surrounding the production and use of ethanol fuel as an alternative to petroleum, and the impact that building an ethanol plant may have on the local environment and community. Everyone in the community was invited to use the site as an informational resource, with links to other community web sites and news sources, and to differing perspectives on the production and use of ethanol as an economic, political and environmental issue.
Our Ethanol Debate provided CAMS students with practical research, writing and media production experience. But even more importantly, it introduced them to the complicated process of mediating a public debate. The experience drove home the realization that the media doesn’t passively reflect reality, but inescapably frames, channels and defines issues and events through the ways in which they are represented. At Carleton it is this marriage of theory and practice that characterizes media studies.
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• BioEnergy Annouces Proposed Ethanol Plant Near Northfield, Minnesota. Advanced BioEnergy, LLC. [Link]
• Information in this paragraph compiled by Nora Mahlberg, (2007). Background on Advanced BioEnergy. “Our Ethanol Debate” [Link]
