Tag Archives: media

Introducing the Media Literacy Smartphone

12 Feb

Media Literacy Remote ControlBy Jonathan Friesem

GUEST BLOGGER

Ever since the Media Education Lab moved from Temple University to the University of Rhode Island, I was looking for a chance to update the classic media literacy “remote control,” first developed by Renee Hobbs in 1993.

While the remote control presents a metaphor for the active and structured approach to the analysis of media and popular culture, the remote control is gradually being replaced by the smartphone. So when I was preparing to present our work at conferences and meetings in China and Israel, I re-designed the remote control design, changing it to a smartphone look while keeping the key questions and core concepts the same. Now the new media literacy smartphone is available for purchase in inexpensive classroom sets for educators


 Jonathan Friesem demonstrates the new MEL app for media literacyIn early January, I was invited to present the core concepts of media literacy in front of a leading group of communication researchers, media practitioners, and journalists in Israel. The Media Regulation Forum at the Israel Democracy Institute meets twice a month to talk about the role and limitations of the Israeli media regulator, the Israeli authority for television and radio. As the manager of the Media Education Lab, I was asked to present the argument that media literacy education can be more effective than regulation.

Introducing the MEL App

Introducing the Media Literacy AppI decided to introduce the new Media Education Lab App at the forum. Using the MEL App engages people in dialogue and information-sharing, showcasing to already-media literate people how media literacy can be learned through exploration of critical questions. My idea: to consider the relationship between media literacy education and media regulation, my audience needs to directly experience the pedagogical foundations of media literacy education in practice.

I chose a media text from a North Carolina television news station that featured a report about a controversial PSA against texting while driving. The two-minute news report featured a young reporter describing the graphic PSA and then interviewing three students outside their school talking about the positive effects of this PSA. Knowing that a media text with local issues could lead the conversation away from the actual activity of deconstructing a media message, I intentionally chose to use a media text which would be not so familiar to my audience.

We watched the video and then started to go through each one of the features of the MEL App. We started with the Reality Check: Does this news report represent reality? On one hand, it is a report about a real PSA. On the other hand, this report was so manipulative that it was clear to participants how much of the footage of the report was staged.

The next topic was Private Gain or Public Gain. We got into a discussion about whether the gain from the report against texting is beneficial for the viewers or for the TV network itself. This discussion led to the next feature of the App: What’s Left Out. Participants identified the calculated framing, the selection of white teens as interviewees and the reporter’s decision to talk about the problematic visuals of the PSA without showing these images to the news viewers. The latter point addressed participants’ concern that the report was not really about the effects of the PSA but rather a dramatic promotional opportunity for the network, as the anchor commented: “It is incredibly graphic so we choose not to run all the images, but you can see the entire video if you’d like to at WXII12.com.”

Then we continued to explore the topic of Values Check. Besides the obvious fact that texting is dangerous while driving, we identified two values: first, the the concept of materialism in relation to technologies like the smartphone, and the second, the decreasing value of parenting. The students who were interviewed were saying how this PSA was much more effective than their parents’ guidelines. Then we tackled the topic: Read Between the Lines. What was the actual message of this report? Is it a commercial hidden as their top local news story? Was it a message about the failure of the educational system to educate about safety? Or was it a message about white privileged teens who do not listen to their parents and get into accidents?

Structured Critical Analysis

As the discussion around the table got steamed up, we moved to the next app: Stereotype Alert. We asked ourselves why the reporter chose the three white teenagers who were filmed from high angle. Analyzing their clothing, gestures and accessories (such as the smartphones they used to watch the PSA) made it clear that there is a subtext about the culture of privileged teens. How could those three adolescents (who for some reason were not in class at that moment) be persuaded in four minutes to stop texting?

The answer for that question is the next app: Solutions too Easy. The two and a half minute report explains the problem of texting while driving and offers the quick solution: parent should go to the network’s website and show their teens the four-minute-long PSA. Using the last app – Record/Save for Later – I asked the participants if this report is important to them and if there is any value to store and show it later. There were mixed reviews and feelings about this report.

To conclude the activity we went to the bottom part of the MEL App to see the different media genres content that can be analyzed. It is important to understand that this activity can be done not only with TV messages but also with newspapers, movies, tablets, radio, comics, books, music, video games, and even social networks. On the other side of the MEL App we reviewed quickly the five critical questions that reframe critical analysis using the concepts of authorship, purpose, contructedness, point of view, interpretation and omission.

Of course, the distinguished group of scholars, the executives, and the journalists knew full well how to analyze this report without the instructional scaffolding that the remote control provides. However, this activity showcased to them that media literacy education can be done in a fun and engaging way using a structured learning process.

I was asked to come and talk about media literacy as part of the debate on whether the legislators should protect the viewers by regulating the media industry or investing in media literacy education to empower viewers’ critical thinking. It seemed that the activity and the presentation of the MEL App gave participants an experience that demonstrated the efficiency of media literacy education over media legislation, which in the digital age, cannot be entirely regulated.

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Defining Digital Literacy

14 Jun

What is digital literacy? The term has been rising in visibility since 2009 but it has been used quite differently by a variety of stakeholders including policy makers, educators, and business and technology professionals. Next week, at the American Library Association’s annual conference, I’ll be moderating a discussion about four distinct but interrelated definitions and and uses of this important term. Sharing ideas with me will be Judy Kleinberg of the Knight Foundation, Roseanne Cordell, a librarian at Indiana University South Bend, and Laurel Felt, a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism.

Depending on what group of people you talk to, the term ‘digital literacy’ might suggest one or more of these meanings. Which of these definitions are most (and least) useful to your work? For school, academic or public librarians, which of these terms is most relevant? For those in K-12 education, which do you focus on? And for technology educators, where do you focus? Funders and policymakers, which ones are most likely to resonate with decision makers in local, state and national government?

Computer Skills and Access Issues. Having broadband access and knowing how to use the Internet enable full participation in society. For some, basic keyboard and mouse skills are essential skills while others may benefit from a greater understanding of file management and browsers. For example, websites like DigitalLiteracy.gov emphasize the value of using the Internet to find a job, create a resume and for career exploration.

Issues of Authorship. People are creating and sharing more than ever. The concept of digital literacy reflects the growing importance of user-generated content and the changing role of authorship in a digital age. Digital literacy programs like YouMedia empower people with easy access to powerful tools of expression and communication using social media, images, language, music, sound, and interactivity.

Issues of Representation.  How do you decide what to believe? Librarians who value information literacy note the important skill of being able to evaluate the credibility of information sources. Credibility assessment websites like Politifact and FactCheck.org offer an examination of the relationship between the symbol and the thing symbolized. Determining what’s more accurate or less accurate (or what a “quality” source is) is a judgment about issues of representation.

Online social responsibility. How do people learn to integrate ethics in both their online and offline lives? Many people have real concerns about how people behave in online social relationships. The immediacy and instantaneousness of digital media may promote cyberbullying, sexting, disrespect for copyright, privacy violations and inappropriate information sharing. Groups like Common Sense Media provide guidance for helping young people develop the knowledge they need to make appropriate choices about how to manage their digital life.

If you’re coming to the American Library Association’s Annual Conference in Anaheim, California, please join us to discuss the concept of digital literacy in what is sure to be a dynamic, lively and provocative discussion. If you can’t attend the event, please follow and contribute to the conversation through Twitter with our hashtag, #digilit12.

Saturday, June 23
4:00-5:30
Anaheim Convention Center
Room 206B

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Art, Journalism and Propaganda

24 Mar

Mike Daisy’s emotionally powerful monologue about the conditions of life in China for workers at the giant industrial plant where Apple products are manufactured has generated a lot of controversy for National Public Radio, This American Life and New York’s Public Theater, where he launched his project. But who has considered the role of the reader/viewer/listener in all this?

Mike Daisey emphasized that his show “is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection between our gorgeous devices and the brutal circumstances from which they emerge.” It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and fiction to tell its story. But when NPR’s Ira Glass discovered the inaccuracies and fabrications in the work, he issued a powerful retraction.

Journalists have been having a field day with Mike Daisey, equating him with Rush Limbaugh and FOX News. Some see him as an inept propagandist, telling fantastic and highly distorted tales that map onto people’s existing worldviews about the human cost of high-tech capitalism.

The New York Times has exercised its thought leadership on this issue with a predictable and solidly heavy hand. David Carr’s piece makes a flat assertion that it’s never OK to lie in pursuit of the truth. Similarly, Charles Isherwood claims that “nonfiction should mean just that: facts and nothing but the facts,” arguing that “theater that aims to shape public opinion by exposing the world’s inequities has no less an obligation than journalism to construct its larger truths only from an accumulation of smaller ones.”

Other journalists offer a more nuanced perspective. In “The Price of Deceit,” Rachel Manteuffel of the Washington Post acknowledges her identity as a journalist-storyteller. She reveals her own strategic use of rhetorical devices in shaping readers’ interpretation of Daisey’s personality and character. For example, when she describes his tendency to spit a little bit during a monologue performance, she uses detail selectively to promote a specific emotional response from the reader. She comforts readers by noting that the information she chooses to emphasize (selective and emotionally loaded as it is) is accurate.

No doubt about it: Artists and journalists are different kinds of truth-tellers and storytellers and always have been.

Here’s my problem with the whole affair: The critique of Mike Daisey offered up by journalists reflects a fundamental belief that meaning, authenticity and truth are solely located in the text. Based on this, it’s easy to play the blame game by setting up rigid hierarchies of truth. But Umberto Eco’s adventures in semiotics have helped us recognize that meaning is in people and contexts, not only in texts. One of the key concepts of media literacy is the idea that people interpret messages differently. It is at the interaction between reader, text and cultural context where meaning is actually created.

All works of human creativity – in both the genres of art and journalism– are ‘open’ and ‘unstable,’ susceptible to a wide range of interpretations. As readers/viewers/listeners, we are the critical agents in the meaning-making process.

David Shields explores these issues in his lyrical and highly engaging book, Reality Hunger. All the distinctions between the original and the plagiarized, the scripted and the unscripted, the fictional and the nonfictional are evaporating. Why? Humans need novelty and complexity to pay attention, and too often, standardized, familiar genres (like traditional journalism) can deaden our senses. The representation of reality needs constant renewal.

Through their work, authors seek to wake up audiences. Shields writes, “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. Art exists that we may recover the sensation of life.” Mark Nash describes artists as “double agents crossing back and forth between art and society.” And in doing this, documentary filmmakers have revealed a fundamental paradox that is true of all symbolic forms: to represent reality, you sometimes have to fake it.

In media literacy, we recognize this by emphasizing the exploration of the complex relationship between authors and audiences, messages and meanings, and representations and realities. The very soul of the rhetorical act is built on the magical relationship between authors (filmmakers, bloggers, visual artists, and journalists) who use symbols in imaginative ways to express meanings about lived experience and audiences (readers, viewers and listeners) who make interpretations.

Anthony Wing Kosner, in his fine Forbes blog post about the “almost true,” points this out: “Perhaps the almost true is potent precisely because the audience has to bridge the gap of truth and in so doing become complicit in its viral spreading. The almost true needs us in a way that the actual truth does not. This is an established principle of theatre, of art, that the audience completes the illusion—makes it more real than real.”

In a profound sense, we make our own reality by the interpretations we make of our immediate experience plus the vast array of media messages that surround us. It’s why I care more about addressing the receivers of propaganda more than berating the propagandists. As Alfredo Cramerotti explains, “To ground the idea of ‘reality’ in its reception rather than its representation is one way to retain the ability to build our own ‘truth claim’ for what is represented, instead of the material making such claims for itself.”

More than anything, I want viewers and listeners of Mike Daisey’s monologue to have the receptive, critical and interpretive skills to recognize the big ideas at the heart of a work and the competence, tenacity and drive to identify and interrogate the aesthetic and rhetorical techniques used to construct it. Ultimately, like Robert Scholes has put it, I want people to be both sympathetic and critical readers. All forms of creative expression in any medium are ultimately rooted in the essai, an attempt at understanding. Writers and readers are equally responsible here. Playing the blame game by setting up hierarchies of truth obscures this fundamental and very human process.

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MacArthur Foundation v New York Times

26 Nov

I’ve been surreptitiously enjoying the ongoing “spat” of sorts between the MacArthur Foundation and Matt Richtel and other New York Times writers and contributors. It’s been a feisty and useful debate that demonstrates the still-robust nature of the very productive tension between empowerment and protectionist impulses on the American media education scene.

Why is it this fall season I see so many real benefits associated with picking a fight? (Hmm..perhaps this is a topic for me and my therapist!) In my view, the empowerment-protectionist tension captures exactly the genuine paradoxes at work in the lives of many teachers and parents today. Who doesn’t have a significant “love-hate” relationship with digital media, mass media and popular culture?

After nearly $80 million of MacArthur hoopla has been spent on demonstrating the wonders of digital media and learning, the NYT writer Matt Richtel has been exploring some of the omissions, paradoxes and contradictions in the enterprise,  nearly always featuring some of the MacArthur scholars in response to various and sundry critiques. For example, I especially enjoyed the October 23rd story on the children of Google executives who attend a Waldorf school where technology is not used.  When Richtel then wrote about the amplification of teenage identities and the resulting potential negative impact on human attention, intellectual curiosity and emotional responsiveness, the folks at MacArthur’s Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning hammered out a critique.

Dismissing or Trivializing Educator Concerns

There are some annoying characteristics about how this generally healthy debate gets played out in the blogosphere, however. I’m especially frustrated by a certain dismissive attitude about educators’ questions about or resistance towards the use of digital technology in education. Teachers who resist e-books are sometimes treated like pariahs, for example. Several times, there’s the insinuation that older teachers simply have to die out, like the dinosaurs. Perhaps I’m just too sensitive, but it doesn’t feel quite right to make teachers feel guilty or ashamed of their anxieties or their lack of interest in using technology. In my view, teachers’ attitudes about media and technology are a highly significant place of inquiry – a place of conversation and dialogue, not a “problem” to be “solved.”

The healthy tension between the NYT and the MacArthur Foundation mirrors an instructional practice that I have used with both educators and college students for several years (something I have written about in my new book, Digital and Media Literacy: Connecting Culture and Classroom). Called “Our Love/Hate Relationship with the Media: A Four Corners Activity,” the lesson never fails to generate meaningful dialogue about the many paradoxes associated with our complex and multifaceted engagement with print, visual, sound and digital media. Through a structured dialogue activity, participants inevitably reveal their capacity to articulate both their many “loves” concerning media and technology along with sensitive and often poignant reflection about those aspects of life with media and technology that they “hate.” The lesson works because it enables participants to deepen their awareness of just how many different aspects of contemporary life and cultural values are inflected by media and technology. Such dialogue naturally builds an appreciation for the many valuable perspectives across the whole continuum of attitudes and beliefs and it results in a clearer understanding of the practical need for digital and media literacy education in both higher education and in K-12 schools.

A Timeless Concern: The Impact of Media on Human Development

In critiquing the idea of neuroplasticity and the potential impact of digital media on attention, the MacArthur post actually quoted a silly Tweet from Siva Vaidhyanathan, stating “there are no wires in the human brain.” And so when Chrisopher Chabris demolished MacArthur’s own Cathy Davidson in reviewing her new book about the brain, attention, learning and technology, one line was particularly resonant:

Like many authors who embrace new ideas rather than build on what has come before, Davidson sets out to destroy the old beliefs, as if burning down a forest in order to plant new crops.

Perhaps that’s what’s most frustrating to me about the overall tone of the MacArthur digital media and learning project. Framed as “something completely different,” digital learning may lose touch with its deep roots in inquiry learning, creating ed tech champions but alienating the larger mass of classroom teachers who don’t get all doe-eyed and gushy over apps, cell phones and gaming in schools. That’s why it was so refreshing to see a nicely balanced, sensitive and nuanced piece from the New America Foundation’s Lisa Guernsey about the best approach to address digital and media literacy in the elementary grades. In my experience, I’ve found that elementary educators perceive many subtle ways in which media and technology displace other forms of expression and communication in problematic and limiting ways. Their concerns about media, popular culture and technology are worth respecting. But because they also fully embrace the opportunity to educate the whole human being, elementary educators can often make use of popular culture, media and technology in creative ways that support the development of students’ imagination, creativity, collaboration and communication skills.

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Amy Jussel is Amazing

29 Jul

Just fresh from a conversation with the amazing Amy Jussel, my head is spinning with ideas. The feeling reminds me of my graduate student days when I’d reel from the thrill rush of being around smart people who are good at exploring and rapidly juxtaposing ideas to examine the connections between them. Amy is the founder of Shaping Youth, one of the best blogs out there about the media and marketing’s influence on kids.

As I explain in my new book, Digital and Media Literacy: Connecting Culture and Classroom, Amy offers us a moral compass by celebrating media that honors children and respects families while simultaneously offering her powerful critique of all manner of problematic media content, marketing gamesmanship and those PR spin games that take advantage of children or exploit young people. She has written about the sexploitation of children to sell swimsuits, Rhianna’s revenge fantasy videos, and Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood’s campaign against sponsored curriculum materials created by the American Coal Foundation.

Amy asked me to give a blow-by-blow commentary on the highlights of the NAMLE conference, and of course, I enjoyed re-reading the program again to talk about the many amazing topics and programs that were featured at the conference. One of the best features of the conference is the confluence of classroom teachers, educational practitioners, scholars, media professionals and young people – the conference features people who are implementing and putting ideas into action, not just pontificating. Because she embodies this ideal as an activist herself, I’m going to try to make sure that Amy Jussel comes to the 2013 National Media Literacy Education Conference in Los Angeles to share her special brand of advocacy and independent voice on behalf of children and young people.

Talking with her on the phone, I can’t help but think about how inspiring she would be on the college circuit, offering her insight on marketing and kids and media and technology to undergraduates in a Jean-Kilbourne-like program. But she says she’s a writer/producer more than a performer. When you read the blog, it’s evident that she’s a natural researcher, too. Amy doesn’t do ANYTHING in a one-over lightly fashion, which is why she has such a vast audience and influence as a blogger. Her posts are rich with information and ideas and connections and her clever writing, compelling prose and amazing hyperlinks all make for great online reading!

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