Roundtable Discussion: "Media Literacy" in the Time of Alternative Facts

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Dialogue Format

Abstract

In the wake of the 2016 American presidential election, “media literacy” has moved quickly from an academic assessment catchphrase to what many see as a more generalized state of emergency. The recent Stanford study on civic online reasoning suggests that even those in the so-called internet generation have great difficulty evaluating information sources.

Using an interrogation of the concept of “media literacy” as a starting point, this roundtable will explore how and if the premises of media pedagogy and the assumptions of media disciplinarity will continue to function in the context of a now highly visible (if hardly new) “division.” This division has been situated by many as a literacy gap between those that can accurately assess the status of mediated information and those that cannot. But any literacy gap must be understood within the context of reinvigorated culture wars in which data accuracy as the basis for knowledge is under attack, and information assessment is positioned as antithetical to the authenticity of “real American” cultural experiences and daily life. Danah Boyd, founder of the digital research group Data and Society, has pointed to the ways that the project of media literacy itself has “backfired” because of its inability to consider broader cultural concerns in evaluating information sources.

With the centrality of social media and the viral spread of fabricated information from right wing and white nationalist websites in the lead-up to the election—and the speed with which Trump and his stable of propagandists co-opted the charge of “fake news” to discredit and ignore factual information in favor of overt propaganda—media education across disciplines has become simultaneously rife with a sense of urgency and extremely destabilized.

Discussants will thus consider whether literacy is still (or ever was) a useful epistemological model for media engagement increasingly defined by affect, spectacle, and identification, as well as these questions:

How might pedagogical goals shift in this environment if media literacy remains the defined “learning outcome”?

To what degree can different disciplinary approaches to media pedagogy (Film Studies, American Studies, Communications, Social Documentation, Cultural Studies) engage with each other to reflect on desired learning outcomes? Or do such assessment projects themselves contribute to the vast fields of information that have seemingly become “illegible”?

This interdisciplinary panel intends to raise these and related questions but also to strategize, organize, and facilitate pedagogical activism in media studies.

Additional Keywords: Literacy, Culture Wars, Epistemology, Information, Disciplinarity, Activism, Assessment

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Eva Hageman, New York University

Panelists

• Eva Hageman, New York University

• B Ruby Rich, University of California, Santa Cruz

• Wendy Sung, University of California, Riverside

• Karen Tongson, University of Southern California

• Catherine Zimmer, Pace University