The elite floor/ceiling
I am trying to start a state chapter of a national media education organization, ACME (Action Coalition for Media Education). I have been to conferences, traveled miles, talked people's ears off and really tried to listen too. The main goal of this organization is to improve democracy in our media by empowering individuals to create, advocating critical consumption, and looking at our media policies and actions we can take to change them. We will be a non-partisan 501c3.
I have the same problem in this realm as I feel I do here on Rockridge, and that is trying to tie sort of 'elitist' thinking (those of us who have the luxury or make the time to analyze language and psychological processes) to a lowest common denominator in the public (getting the frames accepted as mainstream). I want the great root solutions to go mainstream.
Has anyone else successfully created a conduit? An easy outlet is if you can find a famous mouthpiece like Thom Hartmann, but we need to multiply him and his style by about 400 to have a similar balance of 'conservative' vs. progressive ideology. And then there are the gazillion of viewpoints that don't neatly fit into any ideology category that we currently have, they are only pro or con issue by issue.
I guess what I'm saying is that one of the views of Progressives is to get more democratic and more representational, but the more that happens, the more power diffuses (which is very good in one respect). But then you are more likely to have the 'studied' and 'successfully' lab tested opinions (like Rockridge or media academia) that also get diffused as a movement gets more democratic and gathers interest and numbers. How can we solve that? Even at Rockridge, I don't think you are proposing that your way of thinking is 'the right way', whereas if you were a conservative think tank, you would be passing out daily drills and memorizations. Does your encouragement of open ended dialog help people really 'get' framing, or does it simply allow another venue of soul searching on our own?
Maybe the bottom line is that even though a progressive value is community, our society is not yet structured to nurture building community. We take or leave opinions and invest ourselves in very few trusted institutions. With the internet's gain in being a valuable resource, our fly by night knowledge gathering doesn't do much to foster community.
I would like to think I am very progressive and I gotta admit, I would much rather follow a leader that I've grown to respect than I would like to go out and meet my neighbors to discuss the media. I have been raised in a very 'pull yourself up by your own bootstrap' mentality that it is hard for me to shake the rugged individualistic tendencies.
