Literacy, Media, and Morality: Making the Case for an Aesthetic Turn

Abstract

Media scholar Roger Silverstone (2007) opens his provocative meditation on the role of media in a global world by recounting a story that we find powerfully emblematic. It is emblematic of his book, which theorizes the potential of media to constitute a moral public space, and of our chapter, which proposes aesthetics, or one’s sense of what is beautiful or right,1 as an organizing principle for future Literacy Studies. Silverstone recounts a brief interview that was broadcast on BBC Radio in the midst of the US war in Afghanistan not long after 9/11 and the World Trade Center attack. This interview featured an Afghani blacksmith, who had his own take on why so many bombs were falling on his village. It was because, his translated voice proposed, ‘Al Qaeda had killed many Americans and their donkeys and had destroyed some of their castles’ (p. 1). What interested Silverstone about the blacksmith’s account was that, for a brief moment, it reversed the ‘customary polarities of interpretation’ (p. 4) ‘in which we in the West do the defining, and in which you are, and I am not, the other’ (p. 3). Silverstone believes that the quintessential characteristic of media in our global and digital world is its potential to link strangers to each other, across geographic, social, and historical space. Indeed, he argued that the images of strangers, mediated by television, computers, cell phones, radio, and the like, largely constitute our understanding of the world.