Friday 29 March 2024

A lesson on how to deal with bad publicity

This blog post first appeared on Malta Today

The Centre for Liberal Arts & Sciences has just given us all a lesson on how to turn bad publicity into a great promotion.

It all started when a few news portals picked up the story that among the subjects being offered for study in the upcoming academic year was a unit (please note the word) with the title:  “Interpreting Music Culture: Multimodality, MTV and the Eurovision”.  The problem is that, in the race for click bait, most of the headlines were all very wrong and very misleading. It was newsbook.com.mt which set the ball rolling but predictably, the story that was probably shared the most was that published by the alternative news and lifestyle website LoveinMalta which announced: “University Of Malta To Launch Course On The Eurovision Song Contest”.

Cue loud guffaws, sheer incredulity and a couple of thousand of “omg’s”. The reaction was pretty bad with people asking whether it was a joke and lambasting the university for such a “puerile” course.

Except, if anyone had bothered to read the description on the University of Malta website, they would have realized that this is not a course about the Eurovision per se but a unit (worth four credits) which explores music as pop culture. I frankly see nothing that shocking or ridiculous when pop culture is studied at an academic level; it has been happening for decades throughout the Europe (and the rest of the world) which we so love to emulate. In the US for example, one professor is offering a credit within his public policy course entitled ”Urban Public Policy Through the Lens of HBO’s The Wire,” . You read that right, the module uses the story lines of the TV drama and puts them into the context of real life. It draws in the students, makes them pay attention and most of all, it makes learning what could be a rather “boring” topic, much more interesting.

I don’t believe that academic life should be so artificially removed from real life that pop culture (which may be considered too lowbrow for some) is seen as something to be ridiculed. Academics have researched a wide variety of popular concepts, from the fairytale, to romance novels by Barbara Cartland and Danielle Steele, soap operas and telenovelas and even the reason for the popularity of such cults as Twilight and yes, even the badly written but bestselling torrid novel, Fifty Shades of Grey. At our own University, Prof Vicki Ann Cremona has for years researched the Nadur Carnival. The questions of such academics have always revolved around the “why”, which is surely the very essence of an enquiring mind. If the study of society and the cultures which surround us are a source of endless anthropological fascination, what is wrong with studying them? I find it a very narrow-minded viewpoint to only think of academia as something which should be something dry and stuffy and very, very serious.

But having said all this, the “damage” caused to the University had been done. You know how it is when something goes viral – it is extremely difficult to reel the negative impressions and resulting flak back in. However, those who run the Centre itself (or at least the administrator of their FB page) handled the whole thing with aplomb, by posting the following explanation on the Lovin Malta site:

“Sorry chaps, we’re giving you an ‘F’ here! :) We’re not launching any course on the ESC. We do offer a 4ECTS study-unit on ‘Interpreting Music Culture’, which applies the theory of communication and semiotics known as multimodality to music culture (incl., but not only, the ESC): This unit is available as part of the Programme in the Liberal Arts and Sciences (PLAS), which sees some 200 students joining a broad variety of study-units every semester. Most of our students are either graduates who register for their own personal and/or professional development, or people who didn’t have the opportunity to join the university when they were younger. The study-units on offer this semester include environment and marine issues, art and archaeology, the big bang theory and the universe, social research methods the Maltese legal system etc.”

And that is it in a nutshell, the beauty of social research, the beauty of study purely for the love of it, which does not look at going to University just as a pragmatic means of finding a “job”. Perhaps it is an idea which is foreign to some, but not everything one studies must necessarily lead to a specific field or career, but as the Centre explained can be done simply for one’s own personal development.

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