WEEK 9: Cinema and television

Television and cinema has become a form of entertainment nowadays. Due to the improvement of technologies which increase drastically in our modern and digital era, some of television shows or movies are providing us with knowledges and updates. As a consumer to television product we should aware of what we are watching and the message hidden within the story, it may comes to social issues and even political. In order to understand these, we also need to understand the cultural literacy of a movie that we watch.

As mentioned by Shirato and Yell, "cultural literacy can be defined as both a knowledge of meaning system and an ability to negotiate those system with different cultural contexts. It is virtually impossible to describe and analyse what is happening in any communication context or practice without using the concept of cultural literacy. In other words cultural literacy means the ability to understand and appreciate the similarities and differences in the customs, values and beliefs of one's culture the culture of others.

The movie trailers above is called 'Crows zero 2'. It is a movie of groups of high school gangsters showing their inside and outside school way of living. In this movie, the students tend to go for power rather than education where the school committee rules are no longer exist within the society. All the main character such as Serizawa and Genji have their own representation of way of life - for example Serizawa is someone who described to be an influential person in their culture. While Serizawa is a son of one of the influential Mafia in Japan who just got transfered to the high school. Action and fights has become the major attraction to the student in the school which lead to something so called 'big fights' in the end of the movie.

From here i can say that the culture being represented in this movie seems to be contradicting with our ethical students rule. As a student in high school, we should not be more attracted to something other than education especially when involving crimes such as fights. By representing these characters in the movie will indirectly affect the viewers perspective especially for the younger generations. It is more affective to heavy viewers as they tend to copy in reality from what they see from the representation in television. 

Although Brunei culture and society could not easily avoid from this situation to happen but by producing this film, the producer should aware of the culture literacy which may created from this movie. The culture might also affect the politics in certain countries such as Brunei. According to my experience, i have heard that fight rate in Brunei by high school students either from the same school or not has increase after the release of this movie. A matter of fact, the cultural literacy sometimes ignore or ethical rules tend to be broken for the sake of profit. As mentioned in Turow.J:

 "Another part of the strategy is to get the subsidiaries to work with one another to find new ways from the creation, distribution, and exhibition of materials" (Turow, 2008)

As a conclusion to this, i realized that it is important for media students and media organization to take cultural literacy into their consideration before interpreting of what they watch and what they produced due to it may affect politics although it depends on the individual as stated by Lipitz:

"..Culture exist as a form of politics, as a means of reshaping the individual and collective practice for specified interests, as long as individual perceive their interest as unfulfilled, culture retains an oppositional potential" (Lipitz, 1990: 16)

REFERENCES

• Hartley, J. (1999), Uses of Television, London: Routledge
• Schirato, T. & Yell.S (2000), Communication and Culture: An introduction. London: Sage Publications
• Turrow, J. (2008), Media today: An introduction to Mass communication. New York: Routledge