ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the issue of what “literacy in the information age” means from some personal, as well as general, perspectives. Media studies is an extraordinarily invigorating and occasionally exhausting branch of intellectual inquiry to be in. A number of media commentators have pointed out the creative centrality of the producer in American television. Robert Watson, a British film educator, argues for “an aesthetic approach to the moving image” in education, and has no doubt that modern audio-visual media are art forms. In Boston, with a degree that focused on production, the competition for curriculum space and for faculty posts and resources was between academic and practical/vocational courses, including business administration. Media teachers have an ethical responsibility to disabuse trainee producers of contemptuous attitudes to their audiences. Aesthetic judgments raise the question of what is worth recommending to students that they should know about and see: the thorny problem of “the canon.”
