Articles and Resources for Media Awareness and Critique
It is increasingly common to find that bookshop bestseller lists are full of history books deliberately aimed at the popular market. Often, but not always, written by academic historians, these accounts seek to offer insights into the otherwise hidden worlds of the significant, revolutionary or just plain quirky moments in the past.
Part Two of The Cape Town Commitment (CTC) summarizes the themes of Cape Town 2010, the Third Lausanne Congress. The first section of Part Two – ‘Bearing witness to the truth of Christ in a pluralistic, globalized world’ – includes a significant sub-section on the threefold media challenge and identifies major needs in Media Awareness, Media Presence and Media Ministries.
With the advent of downloads, music sharing, and the ease of creating one’s own playlists, some are predicting the imminent demise of the album. The days of Prog Rock and the ‘concept album’ are long gone. Nevertheless, musicians and bands still seem to be content to release albums, even if they no longer have the constraints of time and length forced on them by the old LP format. So while albums are still sold, it is still worthwhile engaging with them as crafted entities (unless they are simply ‘greatest hits’ anthologies). My purpose in writing these 12 questions is to help people to develop what we might call ‘joined-up listening’: taking an album’s form, music, lyrics and construction as an integrated whole (where possible).
Here are some questions to help Christians explore the implications of social media.
By Krish Kandiah
These question are based on ‘Twenty Questions to Consider When Watching a Film’ by Tony Watkins. They are intended to help you think more clearly about these small but significant corners of our media time. Keep in mind that television commercials are vital for keeping the media wheel turning – and our credit cards burning! Commercials are media influence at its best – or worst. Taking the time to analyze a commercial can better equip you to appreciate, understand, and respond more critically to commercials.
These questions are based on those in Tony Watkins’s book ‘Focus: The Art and Soul of Cinema’ (Damaris, 2007). They are intended to help you organise your thinking as you watch a soap opera, television series and such. As well as helping you in your own thinking about series like this, these questions also provide a useful framework for group discussions.