Whose Media Literacy?
Or, Why You Should Join Us for The Propagandists’ Playbook Book Club this Month!
Civics of Tech Announcements
Next Tech Talk on Feb 4th: Join us for our monthly tech talk on Tuesday, February 4th from 8:00-9:00 PM EST (GMT-5). Join an informal conversation about events, issues, articles, problems, and whatever else is on your mind. Use this link to register.
Book Club on Feb 18th: Allie Thrall will be leading a discussion of The Propagandists' Playbook. Register to attend on the events page.
Additional Spring Book Clubs: You can also register for these upcoming book clubs on our events page.
On March 13th, Jacob Pleasants and Dan Krutka will be leading a discussion of Nicholas Carr’s new book, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. This book club is a new addition!
On April 10th, Dan Krutka will be leading a discussion of Building the Innovation School, written by our very own CoT Board Member Phil Nichols.
Need More Books? Check out our most recent book reviews, including:
The Extinction of Experience (Rosen, September 2024)
AI Snake Oil (Narayanan & Kapoor, September 2024)
The Skill Code (Beane, June 2024)
Be sure to join us on Bluesky @civicsoftech.bsky.social and join/follow our Civics of Technology starter pack.
By Phil Nichols and Allie Thrall
If you want to strike up a conversation with someone, you could do worse than asking them about their thoughts on “media literacy.” It’s a topic that people rarely respond to with ambivalence. Everyone seems to have opinions about what it means, who has it (or needs it), and why it matters.
Some have read worrying op-eds about young people’s media habits, or seen loved ones absorbed into cable news echo chambers. For them, “media literacy” may appear as a resource for protecting people from the harmful effects of communication technologies. Others have heard predictions from business leaders about the technical competencies that tomorrow’s workplaces will require, or participated in social movements that leverage networked media to organize for change. For them, “media literacy” may signal the skills that allow people to navigate, or create, transformations in an increasingly technologized world.
Varied as these perspectives may be, all of these people are right. This is because “media literacy” isn’t a singular or stable skillset; rather, it is a flexible construct that people use to confront diverse social and political challenges in a changing communication environment. Over the 30 years that the term has circulated in popular discourse, media literacy has been positioned as everything from a defense against mass media messaging to a catalyst for creative cultural production, from an antidote to misinformation to a guardrail for responsible technology use. These different meanings, in turn, have been seized on by global organizations, national governments, educational institutions, and advocacy groups to advance competing agendas for policy, pedagogy, and practice. What has resulted is a broad and enduring public interest in “media literacy” but little consensus about what the term is for — much less what attaining it, individually or collectively, actually looks like.
This ambiguity has prompted some to question if the concept of “media literacy” has outlived its usefulness. In a widely circulated 2018 SXSWEdu keynote, media theorist danah boyd argued that practices commonly associated with the term have proven ineffective in our current information landscape. Adopting a critical stance toward news media, for instance, may allow some people to vet sources or identify bias, but it has also emboldened others to dismiss credible information in favor of “doing their own research.” From this perspective, media literacy may amplify, rather than ameliorate, problems like misinformation. Accordingly, boyd suggests, if the concept’s core competencies are fluid enough to support such contradictory ends, then perhaps we’d be better off retiring it. Indeed, many educators have already moved away from “media literacy,” choosing instead to coin or adopt new “literacies” as a focus for research, teaching, and learning (e.g., digital literacy, data literacy, algorithmic literacy, AI literacy, and so on).
There is a tension, then, between the abiding public interest in “media literacy” and the growing uncertainty that it can deliver all that we ask of it. This raises the thorny question of how educators should respond to this impasse. In our own work, we have argued (see here, here, and here) that, rather than abandoning, or doubling-down on, “media literacy” as we know it, another way of addressing this question could be to revisit some of the presuppositions embedded in the concept of “media literacy” itself — specifically, how the idiom of “literacy” delimits the shape of our media pedagogies.
Central to such a reevaluation is an insight drawn from the interdisciplinary field of Literacy Studies: namely, that “literacy” is best understood not as something people have or lack (i.e., a discrete skill or competency) but as something people do (i.e., a social practice). When someone aspires to “literacy” — or prescribes it for others — they aren’t talking about a fixed ability with intrinsic value, but a practice that is imbued with meaning by its cultural surroundings. This is why the goalposts for what it means to be “literate” can shift dramatically across times, places, and communities. It is also why “literacy” has managed to be associated with wildly divergent ideological projects: from colonial expansion (e.g., “civilizing” non-literate people) and political disenfranchisement (e.g., instituting literacy tests for voters) to fermenting democratic deliberation (e.g., circulating diverse ideas to mass audiences). Literacy is rife with contradictions because it isn’t a singular thing. We should not be surprised, then, that “media literacy” inherits some of the same contradictions from its namesake.
This view raises the unsettling idea that “media literacy” isn’t something that good people have and bad people lack; it is ambiguously value-laden. Fact checkers and climate change denialists both rely on “media literacy,” even though the social practices involved in each are strikingly different. And, compellingly, both fact checkers and climate change denialists may leverage the discourse of “media literacy” to sanction and authorize the distinct practices that lead to their preferred ideological stances. In this way, the anodyne label of “media literacy” can paper over the competing political agendas that its varied practices help to uphold. For educators, this suggests that, rather than moving away from “media literacy,” there is need for even more attention to it— or more precisely, to the ways its heterogeneous meanings and uses are put to work by different actors, in different social settings, for different purposes. Only by understanding such dynamics can we hope to develop pedagogies that align media practices with the particular values we care about.
This is one of the tremendous gifts that Francesca Tripodi’s book offers. In The Propagandists’ Playbook, Tripodi documents both the media production and media consumption practices of the far-right conservative communities that she studied. On the one hand, her methodological practice of media immersion into the conservative media ecology of her participants gave her insights into the ways that conservative media production utilizes keywords to streamline the spread of evermore radical, white supremacist, and conspiratorial stances to mainstream audiences, while also strategically aligning their messages to the algorithmic logic of search engines. She is therefore able to trace the pathways that a conservative dog whistle can circulate through the media ecosystem: from its origins in fringe conspiratorial websites, to massively popular conservative influencers on YouTube, to Fox News – all while anchoring its messages to core conservative beliefs, and providing for narrative creation that appears substantial and substantiated. On the other hand, her ethnographic fieldwork among these conservative groups allowed her to observe the myriad practices that this media’s audiences employ to make meaning out of the messages they receive. One such practice she describes as scriptural inference, or the process of engaging in close reading of texts that her conservative participants deemed to be sacred, like the Bible or the Constitution. This practice situates individual readers as able to access “unfiltered” truths from texts themselves, rather than rely on interpretations from experts. Serving as a bedrock practice for conservative “media literacy”, the ethos of scriptural inference implores conservatives to “do their own research”, or seek out sources to interpret on their own, a process which can be easily manipulated by media producers, who can utilize keywords to delimit the sources available to be found. Tripodi’s work then complicates our common conceptions about media literacy. Far from lacking media literacy, as media literacy educators or political opponents might assume, it is a particular set of culturally, ideologically, and technologically situated media literacy practices employed by both producers and consumers of conservative media that help to catalyze far-right extremism.
This raises more questions than answers — questions that are essential to understanding our contemporary moment and to clarifying the purposes of media literacy education. What further studies need to be done to better grasp the culturally situated and algorithmically mediated practices of media literacy? What does it mean for media literacy education if we take seriously the politics of its varied practices? If the term “media literacy” means different things to different people, then how do we reconcile these meanings? Whose media literacy will take precedence?
One way that we can further explore these questions is through conversations — like the one we’ll be having this month during our The Propagandists’ Playbook book club. Register here to join us on Tuesday, February 18th at 8pm EDT. Grab a copy of the book and bring your questions, experiences, and hopes — we look forward to hearing from you!