Rethinking the Roles of Media Ecosystems in Informed Citizenship for Contemporary Civic Engagement

• In Event: Political Adolescents in the Present: Their Ideas, Discourses, and Contexts of Engagement

Abstract

With the rising challenges of social networking in the digital information age, much attention has been granted to young citizens’ abilities to discern worthy sources of news (McGrew, Ortega, Breakstone, & Wineburg, 2017). Traditional models of informed citizenship focus on cognitive skills for decoding and analyzing the veracity of news sources but ignore the role of context or the influences of political views and commitments on media engagement. These models also do not press students to critically examine the media’s dynamic influence on politics, which represents a shortcoming of current civic education curricula (Levine & Kawashima-Ginsberg, 2017; Stoddard, 2014).

As Kahne and Bowyer (2017) indicate, motivated reasoning often trumps prioritization of factual knowledge and multi-viewpoint understandings; thus, young people may not employ the kinds of cognitive skills for examining news that are aligned with those priorities. One shortfall of heuristics or cognitive models for evaluating news sources is that students can enact skills perfectly in class, but not when engaging with sources shared by a trusted friend, or within their social networks, that align with their pre-existing views. While “fake news” is not a new phenomenon, misinformation and epistemic closure have been exacerbated by social stratification and the rapid growth of channels for engaging with it, leading to a rise in affective polarization (Bishop, 2008; Settle, 2018).

In this paper, the concept of informed citizenship is re-imagined, from skills and heuristics to an understanding of media ecosystems and a recognition of the growing influence of our interactions with media on civic engagement. This framework builds from work in critical media literacy and epistemic cognition – a field that is underexplored in civic education, with content and concepts not typically represented in state civics standards. Epistemic cognition involves the use of disciplinary tools to understand the nature of knowledge and how it is warranted. Applied to civics, informed and active citizens would learn about structures of contemporary political engagement, with emphases on the dynamic ways in which social and political influence and power are garnered within today’s media ecosystems. This framework foregrounds young peoples’ reflective abilities in considering what motivates their information-seeking behaviors and their beliefs about the nature of sources and the contexts of source use – what Chinn, Buckland, and Samarapungavan (2011) call epistemic aims.

Epistemic cognition for informed citizenship, as constructed here, includes elements of critical media literacy (CML), with disciplinary tools and concepts adapted from political communications. CML includes both analytical skills and reflective practices, relative to issues of power, authority, and intent in media (Funk, Kellner & Share, 2015; Hoechsmann & Poyntz, 2012). Merging CML and political communication tools and practices with epistemic cognition theory opens new opportunities to critique, discuss, and reflect on political media engagement – to recognize the influence of media on how we conceptualize what it means to know and do politics and, thus, to engage with each other politically.

Author

• Jeremy D. Stoddard, University of Wisconsin - Madison