The Invisible Classroom: How Media, Algorithms, and Power Educate the Contemporary Mind

Reading Between the Feed:

Media, Power and the Making of a Truly Educated Person

This Blog task is assigned by Prof. & Dr. Dilip Barad as a part of Culture studies. Here is :Source Blog: "Cultural Studies: Media, Power and Truly Educated Person" (Teacher Blog, 22 March 2017)

Three Parts Discussed in the Blog:

1. Part One – Culture, Power and the Architecture of the Media Environment

2. Part Two – Representation, Literacy and the Educated Mind

3. Part Three – Testing Belief: Reflection, Verification and Conclusion

PART ONE

Culture, Power and the Architecture of the Media Environment

1. When Media Becomes the Environment

Long before the eyes have properly adjusted to the light of morning, a feed has usually already decided what the day will look like. Somewhere between the alarm and the first sip of tea, a notification announces a headline, a reel autoplays into view, a forwarded message arrives on WhatsApp carrying an unverified claim, and an advertisement disguises itself as the casual post of a friend. This is no longer a matter of consuming media occasionally, the way one might once have opened a newspaper or switched on the evening news. Media has become the environment through which contemporary life is experienced not a window that is looked through now and again, but the very air of the room one inhabits, saturating perception before conscious thought has had the chance to intervene.

A single ordinary day now moves through an extraordinarily dense sequence of platforms and surfaces: Instagram reels consumed between tasks, YouTube videos recommended almost telepathically, WhatsApp forwards that blur the line between rumour and fact, search-engine queries that quietly shape what counts as common knowledge, breaking-news alerts engineered for urgency, films and series streamed on Netflix or JioHotstar, memes that compress entire ideologies into a single image, advertisements calibrated to individual desire, AI-generated text and images whose origins are rarely disclosed, podcasts consumed during commutes, and online classes conducted over Zoom or Google Meet. None of these surfaces are neutral wallpaper. Each quietly organises what is noticed and what is ignored, what is treated as urgent and what is allowed to fade, whom one learns to trust and whom one learns to suspect, what is feared, what is desired, and perhaps most significantly how individuals come to understand themselves and the people around them. The 2017 source blog that anchors this study begins from a closely related premise, although the media landscape it describes still largely organised around broadcast television, print journalism and the earliest social platforms has since been transformed into something considerably more personalised, algorithmically mediated and participatory than anything imagined a decade ago.

 

2. What Is Cultural Studies, Really?

The source blog opens by conceding that Cultural Studies resists tidy definition, and this admission is not a weakness of the field but an accurate description of its history. The difficulty begins with the word culture itself, a term that has been stretched, over nearly two centuries, between two opposing poles of meaning.

From "High Culture" to Everyday Culture

Matthew Arnold, writing in the Victorian period, located culture in the finest thought and expression a civilisation was capable of producing: literature of the highest order, classical art, philosophy, and other forms of elite cultural achievement. Raymond Williams and the generation of cultural materialists who followed him pushed decisively in the opposite direction, insisting that culture is not a rarefied achievement reserved for the educated few but ordinary life as it is actually lived by everyone — the habits, rituals, entertainments and everyday practices of a whole society. Cultural Studies as a discipline inherits this second, considerably wider understanding of culture. It studies television, cinema, advertising, fashion, memes, popular music, social media, news reporting, gaming and the smallest habits of daily life with exactly the seriousness once reserved only for canonical literary texts.

An Interdisciplinary and Restless Field

This widening of scope is possible only because Cultural Studies borrows continuously from Marxism, feminism, poststructuralism, sociology, anthropology, media studies, political theory, gender studies and postcolonial studies. It is best understood not as a discipline with fixed and defensible borders but as a moving set of critical questions that can, in principle, be directed at almost any cultural artefact whatsoever.

🔍 CRITICAL QUESTION If culture is understood to be everywhere, can anything meaningfully remain outside the reach of Cultural Studies — and does this expansiveness strengthen the field or threaten to dissolve it?

The honest answer is that this expansiveness cuts both ways. It permits a meme, a television commercial, or a Bollywood trailer to be read with exactly the rigour once reserved for a Shakespearean sonnet, which is a genuinely liberating move for literary and cultural education. But it equally means that Cultural Studies can collapse into vague impressionism if a student or scholar fails to dig deeply enough to connect the artefact under discussion to the wider discourse surrounding it — a risk the source blog itself flags when it notes that students who cannot make this connective leap tend to fail the subject, not because the field lacks rigour but because its rigour is comparatively easy to fake on the surface.

🌐 CONTEMPORARY CONNECTION TikTok and Instagram Reels culture, influencer fandoms, meme economies, and algorithmic recommendation are among the most obvious contemporary objects of Cultural Studies analysis: popular, everyday, and thoroughly saturated with ideology — precisely the terrain that Williams's understanding of culture as ordinary life points toward.

 

3. Understanding Power

The source blog insists that Cultural Studies remains incomplete without a serious account of power, and that in the present era, media functions as the principal instrument through which power organises perception across an entire society. A short talk on the nature of power is offered as a starting framework for this discussion.

🎥 WATCH & REFLECT — How to Understand Power

• Creator/Speaker: Eric Liu (civic educator, TED)
• Central theme: Where power originates, how it circulates through institutions and relationships, and how ordinary citizens can learn to "read" and "write" it
• Why it appears in the source : It is used to establish a working, non-mystified definition of power before that definition is applied to media
• Brief summary: Liu argues that power is not a mysterious substance possessed only by presidents, corporations or celebrities; it operates through organisation, narrative and access to resources, and it can be studied like a form of literacy — something that can be decoded by attentive observation and, with practice, exercised deliberately rather than merely suffered passively.
• Key concept: Power as a learnable literacy rather than a fixed possession held by a privileged few
• Cultural Studies connection: Cultural Studies treats power as woven into the texture of everyday cultural practice rather than confined to formal politics or the machinery of the state
• Power connection: Power operates through agenda-setting, visibility, access to resources, economic control, specialised knowledge and cultural legitimacy, not through command alone
• Media connection: Media functions as one of the principal channels through which power becomes visible, remains invisible, or is quietly normalised in public consciousness
• What this offers a critical viewer: That asking who benefits from a cultural artefact's visibility is itself a disciplined way of reading power at work
• Contemporary relevance: Platform owners, algorithm designers and advertising networks now hold precisely the kind of agenda-setting power Liu describes, frequently without needing to issue any direct command to anyone
• Critical question after watching: When a topic trends across a platform, is it because the topic genuinely matters, or because it was engineered to be seen?

To read culture critically is, in this light, also to learn to read power. An Instagram filter that lightens skin tone by default, a television bulletin that leads with one crisis while quietly burying another of comparable importance, a search engine's autocomplete suggestion that nudges a query in one direction rather than another — each of these presents itself as a neutral technical feature, and yet each one quietly organises what becomes visible, what becomes credible, and what is treated as ordinary and unremarkable.

4. Political Identity and the Question of Irrationality

🎥 WATCH & REFLECT — Do Politics Make Us Irrational?

• Creator/Speaker: Jay Van Bavel (TED-Ed, directed by Patrick Smith)
• Central theme: Partisanship as a cognitive phenomenon capable of distorting how identical information is processed by different individuals
• Why it appears in the source blog: It is used to demonstrate that power operates on the mind as much as on institutions, through the mechanism of identity itself
• Brief summary: Van Bavel explains that identifying with social or political groups is a healthy and largely unavoidable part of human life, but that when group loyalty is allowed to override the evaluation of evidence, judgement itself becomes measurably compromised; practical strategies for recognising and resisting this pull are offered.
• Key concept: Partisanship — the tendency of group identity to override an impartial evaluation of evidence
• Cultural Studies connection: Identity formation sits at the core of Cultural Studies, and here identity is shown actively shaping cognition rather than simply following from it
• Power connection: Group loyalty can be deliberately mobilised by those who stand to benefit from polarised, tribal reactions to information
• Media connection: Social media architecture rewards and amplifies identity-confirming content far more reliably than it rewards identity-challenging content
• What this offers a critical viewer: That the genuine danger lies not in holding a political identity but in allowing that identity to substitute for the evaluation of evidence
• Contemporary relevance: Algorithmic feeds now sort audiences into ideologically comfortable clusters with a precision the broadcast-television era Barad's source blog was written in could not have achieved
• Critical question after watching: Is the information being evaluated on its merits, or is an identity being quietly defended?

When Information Becomes Identity

Social media compresses a familiar psychological pattern into an accelerated feedback loop. Information arrives; it is absorbed into a pre-existing identity; an algorithm registers which identity-confirming content keeps a viewer engaged for longer; and that same algorithm reinforces the identity further by recommending more of the same. Repeated across months and years, this loop hardens into what researchers describe as an echo chamber, in which two viewers can watch the identical political clip and emerge with entirely opposite readings of it, each one convinced that the other has been misled.

🔍 CRITICAL QUESTION Is the information being evaluated on its own terms, or is a pre-existing identity being quietly defended against it? This question recurs throughout the remainder of this study.

 

5. Chomsky and the Architecture of Mass Media

🎥 WATCH & REFLECT — Manufacturing Consent

• Creator/Speaker: Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman (exposition of the propaganda model)
• Central theme: How structural and economic conditions internal to mass-media institutions shape what becomes visible and credible to the public
• Why it appears in the source : It is presented as the central theoretical instrument for reading how power uses media to manufacture the appearance of democratic consent
• Brief summary: Chomsky and Herman argue that mass media systematically filters news through five distinct institutional pressures, producing coverage that tends to favour elite and corporate interests even in the complete absence of any single, deliberate act of censorship.
• Key concept: The propaganda model — five structural filters that shape the output of mass media
• Cultural Studies connection: It reads media institutions the way Cultural Studies reads any other cultural artefact: as a site where economic structure and ideology are inseparable from one another
• Power connection: Power here operates structurally, through patterns of ownership and financial dependency, rather than through overt command
• Media connection: It offers a detailed account of how corporate mass media selects, frames and circulates the news it produces
• What this offers a critical viewer: That manipulation need not be conspiratorial in order to be systematic; institutional incentives alone are sufficient to bend coverage over time
• Contemporary relevance: Sponsored content, influencer marketing and platform monetisation function as the twenty-first-century descendants of the same five filters
• Critical question after watching: If attention itself is the currency of the digital age, who ultimately profits from what captures it?

The Herman–Chomsky propaganda model names five filters through which raw events are processed into finished news, and each filter asks a distinct question of the institutions that produce media:

Filter	What It Asks
1. Media Ownership	Who owns the media organisation, and what interests does that ownership structure protect?
2. Advertising	How does dependence on advertising revenue shape which stories are told, and in what manner?
3. Media Elite / Sourcing	Who is treated as an authoritative, quotable source of information and who is routinely excluded from that role?
4. Flak	How does organised criticism or sustained pressure discipline journalists and media outlets over time?
5. The Common Enemy	How does the presence of an identifiable enemy help organise public attention and manufacture consensus?

 

💡 KEY CONCEPT The propaganda model should not be over-read as proof that every media organisation deliberately manipulates its audience. Its genuine value lies in its structural framing: it offers a way of asking how institutional and economic conditions — not necessarily individual bad faith — shape what becomes visible, credible and important within mass media.

🌐 CONTEMPORARY CONNECTION Branded journalism, influencer marketing, sponsored content, algorithmically boosted clickbait and viral outrage headlines are contemporary variants of the same five filters, now operating inside a platform economy rather than a purely broadcast one.

 

6. From Manufacturing Consent to Manufacturing Attention

The source blog was written in 2017, a moment when "mass media" still largely referred to broadcast television, newspapers and the earliest generation of social platforms. Nearly a decade later, the propaganda model requires a significant update, because today's users are not merely audiences receiving finished messages they are also producers of content in their own right. Material is shared, remixed, commented upon, liked, subscribed to, and occasionally transformed into a career through influencer status. Yet even within this participatory environment, visibility remains organised, invisibly, by algorithms that decide what is seen and what disappears.

Four structural shifts matter above all others. Algorithmic visibility now determines what appears within a feed long before any human editor could intervene. The engagement economy rewards emotionally provocative content because outrage, fear and delight all hold attention on a screen longer than calm, measured explanation ever could. Personalisation means that two individuals scrolling through the same application can inhabit almost entirely different informational worlds without either one realising it. Generative artificial intelligence now produces text, images and video convincing enough that the boundary between authentic and manufactured content is no longer self-evident, while deepfakes and synthetic media unsettle the older assumption that seeing something is equivalent to believing it.

🔍 CRITICAL QUESTION If an algorithm learns what keeps a viewer watching, does it eventually learn what that viewer is willing to believe?

 

7. Foucault and Chomsky on Human Nature and Power

🎥 WATCH & REFLECT — Debate on Human Nature and Power (1971)

• Creator/Speaker: Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky, recorded for Dutch television
• Central theme: Whether human nature is fixed and universal, or whether it is produced by history, discourse and institutions
• Why it appears in the source blog: It is recommended as the deepest theoretical resource for thinking about power once the media-focused examples have been absorbed
• Brief summary: Recorded at the height of the Vietnam War, the debate sets Chomsky's belief in an innate, rational human nature capable of grounding a stable concept of justice against Foucault's insistence that even categories of knowledge and justice are themselves products of shifting historical power relations rather than timeless truths.
• Key concept: The tension between a universal human nature and a historically produced, institutionally shaped subjectivity
• Cultural Studies connection: Cultural Studies draws on both intellectual traditions — the emancipatory hope carried by rational critique, and the deeper suspicion that even critique itself is shaped by discourse
• Power connection: For Foucault, power is not something possessed by an individual or institution but something exercised continuously and diffusely, including within the very institutions that produce knowledge
• Media connection: Media may be read either as an obstacle blocking rational inquiry, in the Chomskyan sense, or as a discourse that actively produces subjects and truths, in the Foucauldian sense
• What this offers a critical viewer: That disagreeing fundamentally about the nature of power does not weaken the value of studying it; if anything, the disagreement sharpens the questions worth asking
• Contemporary relevance: Surveillance capitalism and algorithmic profiling raise precisely the Foucauldian question of power operating through data-driven institutions rather than through any visible, individual command
• Critical question after watching: Is independent thought genuinely free, or is even that thought shaped by structures too pervasive to notice easily?

Chomsky	Foucault
Human nature	Historical and social formation
Justice as a rational standard	Justice as an effect of shifting power relations
Rational inquiry	Discourses and institutions
Possibility of emancipation	Critique of the power relations embedded within emancipation itself

🌐 CONTEMPORARY CONNECTION Surveillance capitalism, algorithmic profiling, institutional data collection, workplace monitoring software and AI-driven recommendation systems are all contemporary instances of Foucauldian power operating through infrastructure rather than through direct command.

PART TWO

Representation, Literacy and the Educated Mind

8. Media, Representation and Marginalised Identities

Media does not simply represent a reality that already exists independently of it; media actively participates in constructing the meanings that circulate around gender, caste, class, race, religion, sexuality, disability, nationality, migration and regional identity. A crucial analytical distinction follows directly from this observation, and it is one that a critical viewer must learn to hold onto carefully.

💡 KEY CONCEPT Visibility is not the same as representation. A community can achieve high visibility within media and still be represented through stereotype, tokenism, othering, or a form of selective visibility that flattens its actual internal diversity into a single convenient image.

Against this pattern of imposed visibility, marginalised communities have increasingly turned to social media, independent journalism, podcasts, documentary filmmaking, digital storytelling, hashtag campaigns and community archives to build genuine self-representation that bypasses the traditional gatekeepers of mainstream media entirely. This shift does not eliminate the underlying power asymmetry, but it does introduce new points of resistance into a system that was previously far more closed.

🔍 CRITICAL QUESTION Who holds the right to tell whose story, and on what terms is that right granted, withheld or contested?

9. What Does It Mean to Be a "Truly Educated Person"?

🎥 WATCH & REFLECT — What Does It Mean to Be Truly Educated?

• Creator/Speaker: Noam Chomsky
• Central theme: Education understood as the cultivation of independent inquiry rather than the accumulation of content
• Why it appears in the source: It closes the original source blog, tying the critical habits of Cultural Studies to a wider vision of what education itself is for
• Brief summary: Chomsky argues that being truly educated has little to do with how much content has been covered and everything to do with the capacity to discover, to formulate serious questions, to question standard doctrine where that questioning is appropriate, and to find one's own intellectual path without depending on external control.
• Key concept: Education as intellectual autonomy and constructive, independent inquiry
• Cultural Studies connection: Cultural Studies trains exactly this habit by encouraging the questioning of one discipline's assumptions using another discipline's findings
• Power connection: An uncritical dependence on authority is precisely what allows entrenched power to go unquestioned across a society
• Media connection: A critically media-literate mind applies the same questioning habit to a news feed that Chomsky asks a student to apply to a curriculum
• What this offers a critical viewer: That intellectual freedom functions as a discipline to be practised deliberately, not as a personality trait that some individuals simply happen to possess
• Contemporary relevance: In an information environment increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence and algorithmic curation, the capacity to formulate one's own questions matters more, not less, than it once did
• Critical question after watching: Is education properly measured by what can be recalled on demand, or by what a person knows how to question?

1.   Asks questions — not merely "what is the answer" but "why is this considered the answer."

2.   Investigates independently, declining to rely on a single source of information.

3.   Thinks creatively, capable of producing genuinely new interpretations rather than repeating inherited ones.

4.   Questions standard doctrine — not rejecting every accepted assumption reflexively, but examining such assumptions where examination is warranted.

5.   Possesses intellectual autonomy, able to think without simply surrendering judgement to an external authority.

 

10. From Literacy to Critical Media Literacy

The five resources gathered in the source blog, considered together, trace a ladder of competence that is worth naming explicitly and climbing one rung at a time. Literacy, in its most basic sense, is the ability to read and write. Information literacy extends this into the ability to locate and evaluate information once it has been found. Media literacy goes a step further still, denoting the ability to understand how a media message has been constructed in the first place — who assembled it, through what choices, and for what audience. Critical media literacy completes the ladder by examining the power, ideology, representation, ownership, algorithm and interest sitting quietly behind that constructed message.

💡 KEY CONCEPT Information + Verification + Context + Critical Thinking = Media Literacy Media Literacy + Awareness of Power = Critical Media Literacy

 

11. The Truly Educated Person in the Present Decade

6.   Questions information rather than accepting it immediately as true.

7.   Verifies sources and checks the evidence and provenance behind a claim.

8.   Recognises that algorithms curate a feed rather than simply presenting it in neutral order.

9.   Detects emotional manipulation such as outrage-bait, sensationalism and manufactured urgency.

10. Understands representation, asking whose voice is present in a text and whose has been left out.

11.       Tolerates complexity, accepting that certain issues genuinely resist binary answers.

12.       Changes position when warranted, treating revision as intellectual growth rather than defeat.

13.       Distinguishes knowledge from opinion, recognising that a viral claim does not automatically constitute evidence.

14.       Questions personal bias, turning critical thinking inward as rigorously as it is turned outward.

15.       Remains intellectually autonomous, using education to depend less, over time, on unquestioned authority.

PART THREE

Testing Belief — Reflection, Verification and Conclusion

12. A Media Diary

A useful exercise in critical media literacy is the deliberately honest media diary, in which a contemporary postgraduate student traces the shape of an ordinary day through its media habits rather than its formal timetable. Such a day typically begins with a scroll through overnight notifications before full wakefulness has set in, moves through several hours of YouTube played quietly in the background of study sessions, and closes with whatever an Instagram algorithm has decided the viewer is in the mood for that particular evening. Headlines are frequently absorbed without the accompanying article ever being opened. Claims are, on occasion, accepted a little too quickly simply because a great many other people appear to be sharing them, and unverified material is sometimes shared onward before its accuracy has actually been checked. Advertising quietly shapes purchases that do not, in the moment, feel like the result of persuasion at all, and films or streaming series supply ready-made templates for what romance, beauty or professional success are supposed to resemble, templates that are absorbed long before they are consciously examined.

Media Habit	Possible Influence	Critical Response
Reels	Shortened attention span; trend-chasing	Ask why this particular clip is being recommended at this particular moment
News notifications	Political and social framing	Compare the same story as reported across at least two independent sources
Advertisements	Manufactured consumer desire	Name the specific persuasive technique being deployed
Influencers	Aspirational lifestyle pressure	Separate paid sponsorship carefully from genuine, unpaid recommendation
AI-generated content	Uncertainty about authenticity	Verify the original source and full context before extending trust

 

13. The Myth of "Neutral" Media

Is any media message ever genuinely neutral? Selection, framing, editing, headline wording, camera angle, image choice, word choice, omission, placement and algorithmic recommendation all shape meaning long before any deliberate distortion enters the picture at all. The same underlying event can carry entirely different meanings depending on which photograph, headline, quotation or statistic has been chosen to represent it to an audience — and this remains true even of reporting conducted in complete good faith, because the act of selection is never, in itself, an innocent or transparent one.

 

14. A Critical Media Literacy Test

⚠️ MEDIA LITERACY CHECK Before belief, sharing or reaction — seven questions are worth asking of any media message: 1. Who created this? 2. Why was it created? 3. Who benefits from it? 4. What evidence supports it? 5. What has been left out? 6. How is emotion being used here? 7. Would this be believed if it supported an opposing viewpoint?

The seventh question is consistently the most difficult, and for that reason the most important, because it is the one that turns critical scrutiny back onto the reader's own convictions rather than leaving it directed only at the message in front of them.

 

15. Close Reading, Extended

For a student trained in the close reading of literary texts, the habits developed through that training turn out to be directly transferable to the discussion above. Close reading teaches attentiveness to what lies between the lines, to the identification of narrative strategy, to the ideology at work within a text, to what a text represents and what it deliberately silences, and to the smallest and most easily overlooked choices of language. Media literacy, viewed in this light, is less a wholly new skill than an extension of close reading — carried from the literary text into the cultural text. A news article, an advertisement, a meme, an Instagram reel or a political poster can each be read with the same interpretive attention typically reserved for a poem or a novel, because each is equally constructed, equally selective in what it shows and withholds, and equally invested in producing a particular effect upon whoever encounters it.

🧠 THINK BEYOND THE TEXT If close reading a canonical poem trains a reader to notice what a text leaves unsaid, that same attention, turned toward a trending reel or a sponsored post, becomes a quiet but genuine form of civic self-defence.

 

16. Conclusion — Education as Resistance

The source blog, composed in 2017 in the comparatively simple grammar of mass broadcast media and early social platforms, has aged into something considerably more urgent rather than less, because the five filters, the pull of partisanship, the Foucauldian suspicion of institutional power, and the Chomskyan demand for intellectual autonomy have all migrated into an algorithmic environment that moves faster, is more finely personalised, and is harder to observe clearly than television ever was.

The truly educated person, on this account, is not the individual who possesses the greatest quantity of information, but the individual who knows how to interrogate information — who can trace a continuous line from culture, to media, to power, to representation, to education, to what might be called critical consciousness, and who keeps that line active every time a feed happens to refresh.

"In a world where algorithms increasingly decide what is seen, perhaps the most important form of education is learning to decide what deserves attention."

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Youtube videos for better understanding:

References:

• "Cultural Studies: Media, Power and Truly Educated Person." Teacher Blog, 22 Mar. 2017, blog.dilipbarad.com/2017/03/cultural-studies-media-power-and-truly.html.
• Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. Smith, Elder & Co., 1869.
• Foucault, Michel, and Noam Chomsky. Human Nature: Justice versus Power. Dutch television debate, 1971. YouTube, uploaded by Open Culture, www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8.
• Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books, 1988.
• Liu, Eric. "How to Understand Power." TED-Ed, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_Eutci7ack.
• "Noam Chomsky on Being Truly Educated." YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYHQcXVp4F4.
• "An Animated Introduction to Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent." Open Culture, www.openculture.com/2017/03/an-animated-introduction-to-noam-chomskys-manufacturing-consent.html.
• Van Bavel, Jay. "Do Politics Make Us Irrational?" TED-Ed, directed by Patrick Smith, narrated by Addison Anderson, www.ted.com/talks/jay_van_bavel_do_politics_make_us_irrational.
• Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. Columbia University Press, 1958.

Thank you!!!