Futures of Learning

From 2001 to 2006, The University of Tokyo Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies has been the home to the Media Expression, Learning, and Literacy Project (MELL). This project is one of the largest projects in Japan dealing with media literacy.This past summer, we spoke to Hisamatsu Mizushima from Tokai University about the project.

Mizushima had left a career in advertising and a job at Infoseek Japan to start graduate school in Information Studies at Tokyo University. There he met Shin Mizukoshi, a sociologist and one of the founders of the MELL project. In addition to Mizukoshi, the early participants in the MELL project included educational researcher Yuhei Yamauchi, public television producer Katsumi Ichikawa, journalist Akiko Sugaya, and high school educator Naoya Hayashi. The project was led by these five, bur also included 80 members comprised of researchers, graduate students, media professionals, teachers, NPOs and community organizations across the country, as well as 4-500 supporters who subscribed to the MELL email list. The project was funded by The University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, the National Association of Commercial Broadcasters in Japan, Benesse Corporation, http://www.moba-ken.jp/english”>NTT DoCoMo Mobile Society Research Institute.

Mizushima describes the situation in Japan at the time that Mizukoshi began the MELL project in 2000. It was a period still dominated by traditional mass media such as mainstream newspapers and television stations. Mizukoshi used to describe this as an context where government policy has populated the hills and valleys of Japan completely with cypress. The native species in each region had been cut down to make way for forests of large cypress.  In the shadows of these huge trees, grasses struggle to grow, and small animals and insects have difficulty surviving. The ecology of Japanese media had become like these cypress forests, where cable television, community radio, and other smaller-scale community media forms could not survive in the shadow of mainstream mass media.

In the nineties, Mizushima was beginning to see this situation start to change. Digital media was spreading, and the mass media were under suspicion because of various cases of false reports and faked forms of media reporting. With the adoption of digital media, there was the potential for citizens to actively participate in media rather than simply consuming mass media. The MELL project was developed based on the idea of having people make their own media while simultaneously building new networks and organizations for media making.

Mizukoshi used the ecological term “media biotope” (link to Japanese page) to describe his effort to support participatory community media. A biotope is sphere optimized for certain organisms to inhabit. His idea was to create a fertile ground for a variety of different trees to grow, and to challenge the media environment that had become blanketed exclusively by cypress. Mizukoshi writes, “Just as it is critical for humans as organisms to have access to diverse ecologies, it is critical for humans as social beings to have access to diverse media ecologies.”

Here I’d like to introduce two of the diverse projects that were part of MELL.

“Understand TV by Making TV: Let’s Make a News Program!” is a project that links schools and local television through a class on television program production. The goal of the project is to shift the students’ identity from that of a media consumer to a media producer. High school students are placed in groups of four and do research, shooting, and editing for a 3-minute news program that is broadcast over local TV. Of course, the students have questions about what kinds of themes they should take up and how they should represent them. They also frequently encounter difficulties execiting their shoot, or have to change their plans after conducting research. The staff of the TV station step in to offer advice. Through this process of trial and error, the students learn that even in the case of news that aims to portray the facts, the information that gets represented on TV is a simplified version of what has happened. By breaking down the boundaries between broadcast stations and the school, this project helps develop both a critical and expressive eye towards the media.
Another MELL project is “Let’s Make a Magazine of New Living.” In contrast to the prior project, which focuses on high school students, this project supports mothers in designing a community-oriented email magazine oriented to issues in their everyday life. Although young mothers are generally put in the position of media consumers, they share a strong interest in child rearing. This project does not simply support the acquisition of the technical skills needed to create an email magazine. In addition, it creates a cultural foundation for pushing forward a project with their own effort. The resulting email magazine, a conversation space for young mothers in one Tokyo district, continued after the MELL project members left the effort. The MELL project members did not take the role of controlling the project, but rather helped incubate it in the initial start-up phase. The outcomes of the project are very much in the hands of the participating mothers.

The MELL project conceives of media literacy in a way that is quite different from media literacy programs that look purely at the reception of mass media. Instead, the project aims to develop critical literacy as well as expressive literacy that can open up new kinds of communicative action. It pays attention to previously ignored media biotopes that correspond to small social spaces. The project’s media literacy practice involves having members consider the history and specific media contexts of the localities they work in, and to proactively build a media biotope based on this environment. This approach goes beyond media literacy approaches the focus only on how to critically interpret media texts. By mobilizing digital media, the MELL project seeks to build independent and diverse media ecologies.

Mizushima describes how over a five-year period, project members planted the seeds of the MELL project in a diverse range of practices. Although the MELL project ended in 2006, the work continues in a new project, MELL Platz (Plaza) (link to Japanese page), that brings together former members of the project. Although each individual field project under the MELL umbrella may have been small in scope, the graduate students and other project members who become involved have become organizers in a wide range of local media biotopes. Mizushima sees this as the biggest achievement of the MELL project. As the members of the project have scattered to different parts of the country, they have built local networks in different regions, and spread the seeds of the project further. MELL Platz has become the community that links these different efforts. We can expect to see small but important changes to the Japanese media landscape emerging from these distributed local efforts.

You can read the “Tokyo Declaration” from MELL Project here