Media Education as Critical Praxis: Cultivating "Affective" Skepticism

• In Event: 15.010 - Skeptical and Affective Literacies: Redefining Critical Media Pedagogies in a "Post-Truth" Era

Abstract

The "post-truth" crisis is characterized by radical changes in the media landscape, which pose specific challenges to media educators. What pedagogical approaches are needed to address and unpack the education of affects by political social media? This presentation argues that media education can no longer focus solely on cognitive skepticism, but requires strategies for cultivating critical self-reflexivity regarding affective investments in narratives related to polarizing issues of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia.

This paper begins by sketching the 'education of affects' accomplished by psychometric profiling and emotional microtargeting practices used in social media advertising and computational propaganda strategies (Borgesius et al 2016; Woolley & Guilbeault, 2017). As the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal shows, we are witnessing new modes of targeting and educating consumer "emotions" and affect (Shaw, 2017). Pairing “big data” capability with behavioral science insights into emotion and motivation, Cambridge Analytica and others have developed psy-op strategies designed to influence the emotions of the individual — for example, catalyzing fear, anger, or outrage in order to manipulate the individual's political decision or vote (Brady et al, 2017; Karpf, 2017). Computational propaganda uses algorithms, automation, and human curation to distribute disinformation over social media networks, intentionally sowing confusion and mistrust of media and democratic processes (Pew Research Center, 2017). Equally threatening to democracies, digital media propaganda, algorithms, and activism seek to inflame pre-existing emotional tensions surrounding racism, misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia (Author & Davis, 2018; Figea et al, 2017).

What forms of skepticism can media education cultivate, to help news consumers recognize how social media targets our emotions and affects? And how can the skepticism cultivated in media education, extend to understanding the complex reasons for emotional investments in particular beliefs, values, and ideologies?

This presentation examines recent directions in critical media literacy (Bennett and Livingstone, 2018; Bounegru et al 2018; Bulger and Davison 2018; Goering and Thomas, 2018) to evaluate the state of the field in relation to 'affective skepticism.' It builds on "pedagogy of discomfort" (Boler 1999) to outline new directions for media education that cultivates critical reflexivity regarding our unconscious bias and ideological investments. Finally, it outlines the resonance between Spinoza's conception of affect (1910) and second-wave feminist practices of "consciousness-raising” (Aitken 2018) to outline a public pedagogy (Sandlin et al., 2011) and media literacy that can resist the pastoral power of psychometric profiling.

Author

• Megan Boler, University of Toronto