On the preconditions of an image in the public environment

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 Over the last couple weeks I've been to several day-long trainings over Zoom.  These can be deadly boring and un-engaging.  Participants don't want to be there.  The subject matter is likely tangentially related only to the participants' lives... basically, it's the set up for any high school classroom. When things go well, I try to remember the idea as a good one to share.  

Case studies go well, typically.  So does looking critically at examples of advertisement.  ("What do you see?"  followed by "What do you make of it?")  

So, when I came across this teaching activity while reading "The Art of Noticing" by Rob Walker, I wanted to keep track of it as an engaging teaching idea.  The chapter is titled "Look Like a Historian." The key is not just picking an "image" to look at together, but the question the teacher asks.

A few years ago, Matthew Frye Jacobson noticed something simultaneously startling and mundane while walking around Midtown Manhattan.  A massive jumbotron-style screen offered a looped image: a young woman, bouncing soft-pornishly on a trampoline and flashing an improbable smile.  Titillating or offensive, she was difficult to miss.  

What Jacobson, a historian and the chair of American Studies at Yale University, really noticed was how easily we take the likes of Bouncing Jumbotron Woman for granted.  He asked his students to consider a photograph of this spectacle.  At a glance, they could of course tell that the scene was not from 1930s -- or even 1970s -- America.  They also knew, after a moment of reflection, that there are nations and cultures in the world right now where this scenario couldn't exist.  

Jacobson posed a question: What are the preconditions, the things that have to be in place, for this visual to be a casually accepted part of a public environment? The classroom explored the evolution of technology; shifting personal politics and cultural mores; feminism and anti-feminism; varied social norms around sex, advertising...  

"There was nothing that I could have told them," Jacobson said, "that would have been as powerful a lesson."