...: Double Award Campaign: Promoting Healthy Lifestyles

Tuesday, 20 September 2011

Double Award Campaign: Promoting Healthy Lifestyles

Brief
Poor health caused by lifestyle choices is an international problem, particularly in richer countries like the UK. One Step 21 is a group dedicated to combating this trend by helping us all to take one step towards improving our lives in the 21st century. The group believes that we can all have a healthier lifestyle if we each take simple informed actions to improve our general well-being. One Step 21 is developing a new campaign to help us to identify the simple steps we could take every day at home, at school and at work, to improve the quality of our lives and of those around us.
As a student aware of the impact the media can have on its audience, One Step 21 would like you to contribute to their campaign in your local area or nationally. This might focus on the health and lifestyle issues facing people in your own region, area or community.
You will need to investigate the current issues surrounding health and lifestyles, and how these can be improved. You will also need to research the specific ways in which this could affect people in your local region, area or community. As part of your research, you will need to use some of your findings to identify and justify your choice of target audience. You will then need to develop your own ideas for promoting healthy lifestyles via the local or national media.
You will need to plan and produce an integrated campaign using two of the following media forms:
• Print and Electronic Publishing, including newspapers, comics, magazines
• Moving Image, including television, film and video
• Radio, including commercial, network, public broadcasting, community etc.
• Web-based Technologies / New Media, including websites, podcasts and gaming
Your teacher has been asked to act as an agent for One Step 21 and is fully committed to this initiative. Your teacher will set you a strict deadline which you must observe.

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Why Media Studies IS an academic subject.

Every now and then, Media Studies gets what is ironically called “a bad press”.

Even after a general election in which the media played a pivotal role (television debates, the 24-hour news feeding off the corpse of Gordon Brown after his accidental on-mic comment, the on-screen worm during the debates etc.), even after all that, Media Studies gets described as a “Mickey Mouse subject”.

It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so serious. We live in a mediated world, a reality constructed around us and constantly filtered through the media. Although you might experience some of reality directly (in an unmediated way), your response to that reality is inevitably informed by your exposure to the modern media. When you see yourself in the mirror, do you not judge yourself by the standards of beauty and style laid down by the fashion and beauty industries?

When someone is innocently taking pictures of kids playing in the park, are we suspicious that they’re up to no good? In our relationships with each other, do we take people at face value, or do we make judgements based on the way we think they should be? When we desire consumer goods, why is that exactly? Why do we want things? How does that happen?

We get soundbite politics – because of the media. We get personality politics – because of the media. We learn to act the way we do – because of the media. We learn to talk the way we do – because of the media. We get turned on, we get excited, we get angry, we laugh and we cry – because of the media. We became convinced that Gordon Brown wasn’t up to the job – because of the media. We panic about vaccines, medicines, food, drink, sunshine – because of the media.

To understand how things happen, why they happen, and why they keep happening is, for me, a fit subject of study.

None of this is to mention the skills you develop in Media Studies – skills in writing, editing, analysis, research, design, publishing, video and audio editing/mixing, project management, people skills etc. – which are incredibly useful and incredibly transferrable. One of the things you often hear from the media who give Media Studies a bad press is that, “Anyway, there are no jobs, there are too many people coming through and they won’t get jobs in the media.”

Well. Either it’s a Mickey Mouse subject, or it’s “too hard”, a demanding and impossible industry to get into. Which is it? It’s like saying you shouldn’t study Physics because you won’t get a job at CERN; or that you shouldn’t study law because you won’t get to be a “top barrister”. If you study English and you don’t do so at Oxford or Cambridge, what are your chances of getting a “top job”?

The transferrable skills you learn in Media Studies will equip you for working life, whatever you end up doing. And most of you will end up doing several jobs.

So. Next time someone scoffs at Media Studies, ask them this: when did you last go a day without being exposed to the media, in print and on screen? When did you last have an opinion of your own making?

Next time someone calls it a Mickey Mouse subject, ask them this: who owns the Mouse? What other companies do they own? What was the turnover of this company last year? Which member of the board of this company is also a member of the board of another huge company? How does one business relate to the other? How influential are they? Who are their competitors? How does this competition benefit or harm consumers? What ideology does the company who owns the mouse try to impose upon the world? Why do they do this?

Mickey Mouse subject?

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Tuesday, 20 September 2011