Media Education and the Limits of "Literacy": Ecological Orientations to Performative Platforms

• In Event: Critical Literacies With, Within, and Against Digital Platforms

Abstract

Recently, talk of “fake news” has renewed attention to media literacy in education. Though the term is contested, media literacy is most commonly understood as the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create messages across media contexts (Aufderheide, 1993; Livingstone, 2004). Articulations of media literacy’s promise for the present stress two dimensions of this popular usage: (1) it offers consumption-oriented strategies for analyzing texts, identifying biases and ideologies, and vetting truth claims (Breakstone et al., 2018); and (2) it offers production-oriented practices for creating messages that refute misinformation, challenge dominant narratives, and reflect marginalized perspectives (Hoechsmann & Poyntz, 2012). In this paper, we consider how such approaches to media education, while often generative, overlook important dimensions of connective media environments by emphasizing the agentive actions of humans over other other distributed agencies that animate them (e.g. hardware, interfaces, algorithms, platform architectures, etc.).
The first part of our paper is historical, re-reading the established historiography of “media literacy” through the lens of competing traditions in the history of media education (e.g. media ecology; British Cultural Studies). We argue that the contingent process by which “literacy” emerged, by the early 1990s, as the guiding idiom for media pedagogy has tethered curricular attention to the representational politics of media: how messages are created, interpreted, critiqued, and circulated. In this way, the idiom of “literacy” inherits important limitations for addressing those facets of media systems that are peripheral to textualization or irreducible to representations. This includes the material, aesthetic, algorithmic and economic activities that drive today’s connective media platforms and that overdetermine observable public crises, like “fake news.”
The second part of our paper addresses this shortcoming through a theoretical engagement with emerging literatures in Science and Technology Studies and media studies that are presently reviving and reworking the earlier idiom of “ecology” that once enjoyed small, but significant, usage in media pedagogy. We argue that this orientation offers an avenue for attending to the performativity of media platforms in ways that “literacy” approaches have strained to, and we demonstrate this through examination of one model from this tradition, Benjamin Bratton’s “The Stack” (2015). We conclude by outlining some possibilities offered by a stance of civic media ecology -- a phrase that, at once, acknowledges the crucial contributions of existing civic and media education research (e.g. Mihailidis, 2018; Mirra & Garcia, 2020), while also gesturing to the wider range of resources that might be brought to bear in teaching, learning, and action in our emerging media environment. Importantly, we stress that such a stance does not obviate the representational concerns or strategies of “media literacy,” but rather, relocates them within a wider repertoire of tactics for understanding and intervening in platform ecosystems.

Authors

• T. Philip Nichols, Baylor University

• Robert Jean LeBlanc, University of Lethbridge