The Terrain of Struggle: Re-Understanding Social Media Education

• In Event: Teaching and Engaging With Students' Emotions as They Navigate Social Media

Abstract

Objectives
Media literacy efforts largely focus on cognitive strategies for analyzing media content, but this symposium considers other pressures on young people’s social media experiences. When students learn about media forms, they do not focus on analyzing the content of specific books, television programs, or social media posts, but instead step back, and try to consider how those media forms structure, make possible, or nudge human experiences. In the case of social media, educators should help students shift their attention from the messages of social media posts to the interface, infrastructure, and structures that hide behind these messages. Moreover, students can combine this analysis of technological power intersects with logics of oppression.

Theoretical Framework
In his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan famously argued that “the medium is the message.” He believed that the dominant mediums of any era create new environments with their own cultures that result in profound social and political change. However, even though McLuhan “ushered in the field of study of media as media, his texts are peppered with frequent misogynistic, racist, and nonsensical commentary” (Sharma, 2022, p. 3). In their 2022 book Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan, Sarah Sharma seeks a “feminist retrieval” of McLuhan’s media theory that attends to intersectional issues of power with a recognition that “the terrain of struggle in question is technologically produced” (p. 7).

Modes of Inquiry
In this session, I will draw on “a feminist media is the message” theoretical lens to reconsider, reconceptualize, and re-envision how media education might attend to media forms and inequality. I offer critical analysis of three primary attempts to foreground media forms in schools: (1) McLuhan and colleague’s (1977) high school media education textbook called The City as Classroom; (2) Neil Postman’s (1995) articulations of “technology education”; and (3) more recent arguments for figure/ground analysis in schools (Forsler & Ciccone, 2021; Mason, 2018). I conclude by showing how such efforts can help students better understand social media platforms as media forms.

Warrants and Significance
While these three efforts at media education offer powerful educational opportunities for students to examine how technology exerts structural power on society, they each could be enhanced in distinct ways by intersecting media ecology and critical theory. McLuhan (and Postman) are regularly credited with predicting the problems of digital technology and social media (Sharma & Singh, 2022), but their analysis of older technologies mirrors the ways that gender, race, sexuality, and other identity markers are ignored by Silicon Valley today (e.g., Benjamin, 2019; Noble, 2018; Tufekci, 2017; Vaidhyanathan, 2018). While Forsler and Ciccone’s (2021) middle school lessons attended to global inequalities, there are many points in the curriculum where gender, race, sexuality, and other forms of oppression could have intersected with figure/ground activities to examine social media infrastructures. This session offers an approach to re-understanding social media that focuses less on content and more on the intersections of form, identity, and power.

Author

• Daniel G. Krutka, University of North Texas
  Presenting Author