What if the Messages Disappeared?

My grade 7's have begun a media literacy inquiry. I began today by asking what is media.  It is a term we hear frequently but do learners actually know what it means?  At the start they had a very narrow understanding of the word. They came up with newspapers, the press and social media such as facebook.  One of them thought of Windows Media Player, and decided it must include something visual.  We continued to explore what the word might mean and eventually came to the conclusion that anything with a message is media.

This led into a discussion prompted by the first key concept for media literacy from The Association for Media Literacy.

1.    All media are constructions.
Media present carefully crafted constructions that reflect many decisions and result from many determining factors. Much of our view of reality is based on media messages that have been pre-constructed and have attitudes, interpretations and conclusions already built in. The media, to a great extent, present us with versions of reality. When analysing a media text consider the following questions:  How is this message constructed? How well does it represent reality? 

To develop concrete understanding of what a constructed message might be, we watched  Food Ad Tricks which shows how hamburgers are constructed for television ads. 

I then put the following on chart paper and asked in what ways this might be true.  "Most of our view of reality is based on media messages that have been constructed by others.  We see the world the way we do because of the messages we've been exposed to."  As they began thinking about this some interesting ideas and questions arose.  Two in particular stood out.

1.  One student remembered that 90% of media production in the world is controlled by 7 corporations. "If the way we view the world is constructed by media then those 7 would have a disturbing amount of influence."

2. Another student wondered this, "What would I be like if the messages were different?" to which another student added, "... or if they disappeared completely?"  This question was held in awe by the class as they tried to imagine what that would be like.  

One student noted this, "If the messages just disappeared girls would be more self-confident. We wouldn't have to worry so much."

The students are now thinking about "The Constructed Teen".  What messages influence teens and how are teens"constructed" by those messages?