Whether you are a school teacher or principal, teacher educator or researcher, or scholar interested in working with schools, children and young people – The Critical Media Literacy Guide explains practical tools for making sense of media, culture and politics, and everyday life. In an era of dizzying ideological indoctrination and propaganda, in a world of everyday battles for new digital and traditional media corporate survival, profit and hegemony, of increasing political and cultural conflict – all played out in a normative communicative context of disinformation, misrepresentation and outright lies – the case for a critical media literacy should go without saying. Yet calls for old and new normative ideals of truth and honesty, civility and ethical integrity, coherence and relevance in speech, print and digital communications often fall upon deaf ears, written off as Luddite anachronisms, empty clichés that hang suspended in a 24/7 environment where each claim and exchange is treated as ephemeral, transient and dated before the next tweet, message or video.
This is a moment where longstanding economic, geopolitical and intercultural settlements have come undone, where the digitalization of information, exchange and social relations have created an accelerated and micrometric media environment where no truth or untruth, claim or counterclaim goes unreported, unsurveilled, unresold and endlessly recycled – appearing and disappearing and appearing yet again in a digital archive that is at once everywhere and nowhere – while corporate and state power operate at scope and scale that we struggle to see, understand and comprehend. It is a world where the views of conspiracy theorists, internet influencers, weirdo pundits and bloggers sit alongside those of scientists, politicians, journalists, scholars, your next-door neighbors and everyone else. In this universe, meta-digital work undertaken by trolls, hackers, critics are lumped and melded together into a continuously renewed semiotic slurry that is opaque, unpredictable, and ubiquitous.
Meanwhile print schooling and curricula carry on in slumber, insulated from the ubiquitous texts and messages that have come to dominate everyday life. Kids are told to leave their phones elsewhere and carry on filling out worksheets; public policy debates focus on the latest phonics war and whether to arm teachers; print and digital edubusinesses vie for markets and clients, while teachers in economically stretched communities reach into their own pockets to supply their students with the basic requisites of print pedagogy: pencils, pens, stationary, books and, yes, crayons – while middle class parents reinvent parenting as continuous digital curation, surveillance and management of screen time, aspiring to the occasional meal, outing or conversation without device-in-hand.
In this world – to not teach an approach to critical literacy, a learned, informed and curious skepticism of a multimediated, multimodel information and textual environment – would be to walk away from any possibility of democratic education: the responsibility to teach each generation the tenets, values and stances that might enable us to live ethically, gainfully, and sustainably with diversity and difference and in shared purpose, fair and equitable exchange, and just community. This will require a rediscovery of quiet and sustained reflection, comparative and triangulated analyses of information, close and detailed reading and viewing, respect for difference, diversity and disagreement of ideas and ways of life, rich foundational and disciplinary knowledge, intergenerational wisdom and informed self-understanding – all easily written off as retrograde, old hat, too conservative, too radical, or, simply, too hard in a system that has put its time and money into standardised testing of basic skills.
Australian communications scholar and musician Phil Graham (in press/2019) recently commented:
We undoubtedly know far more about how children learn to count than we do about how they learn to hate. We know far more about how a child acquires literacy than we do about how they acquire their sense of morality. That is more than likely a hangover from the scientific extremism of the early 20th century.
The approach to critical media literacy proposed by Douglas Kellner and Jeff Share addresses both these issues: This book is about teaching and learning how to decode, comprehend, critically engage with and produce the texts of everyday life, and it is about learning how to live ethically and sustainably in media culture, civil society and a planetary environment under threat. As they point out, the agenda for a critical media literacy is not new – and we need to quit treating it as some kind of radical innovation in traditional industrial/print schooling. For the debate confronting moral panic of new media arose first with the advent of radio and film in the early 20th century, then hit its stride with the emergence of TV in the postwar era (Luke, 1990) – while the systematic use of mass media for ideological propaganda, nationalism and military mobilisation, no stranger to print moguls from Pulitzer and Hearst to Murdoch, was first deployed by government in the WWI-era (Graham, 2017). So the use of mass media for purposes of large scale ideological mobilisation, the grafting of ideology and entertainment, and the use of the large scale media spectacle have and continue to play a key role in geopolitics and nationalism, the formation of identity and society, and, indeed, the rationalization of the strong state and authoritarianism.
What is different about this book are the unique foundational resources, perspectives and professional experience that are brought to the task by Douglas Kellner and Jeff Share. This is neither third party, dis-interested ‘gold standard’ science nor work by armchair academics. The authors are Los Angeles-based educators and activists who have committed decades of their lives and work to political and cultural struggle. They bring unique depth and experience to the task. Douglas Kellner is amongst the major social philosophers of this generation. He has never played it safe in the cloistered hallways of academic philosophy. Having established himself as one of the key American theorists working in the Frankfurt School tradition in the last century, he made a deliberate and unusual shift to the field of educational philosophy and to working with teachers in the past two decades. The result is a remarkable series of philosophic and political interventions – ranging from forensic work on American electoral fraud, to critiques of expanded militarism, important work on gun violence and masculinity in schooling, and trenchant analyses of the return of the authoritarian personality in American politics. Throughout this powerful corpus of critical work is a focus on media and its pedagogical role in the reshaping of American life and culture. For Douglas Kellner’s Frankfurt school critique, critical media literacy is a positive thesis, a normative praxis for working with the next generation in ways that might regenerate and rebuild democratic society, ethical communications and social justice.
Jeff Share brings a remarkable life of work with and within media as a community activist and teacher with extensive experience across Mexico, Argentina and the Americas, and as an award-winning photojournalist, whose photographs have appeared in the LA Times, Time, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones and other major media outlets. His work has been recognized through the World Press Photo Oskar Barnack Award, Interpress Photo/World Peace Council Award, and the Olive Branch Award from the World Press Alliance for Nuclear Disarmament. He has prepared numerous photographic exhibitions for activist and international aid organisations. Jeff Share’s work and life have focused on social justice, peace and intercultural exchange. But it was his bilingual/bicultural primary school teaching with LA minority communities and over a decade training new teachers that really brought this rich and diverse experience to ground. So he approaches the task from a unique perspective – as activist, as journalist, as photographer, as parent and as teacher working across and between cultures and languages. Jeff Share has pushed the boundaries of teaching and activism to their critical thresholds – and this book continues that journey.
As you sit back and tuck into this book, bear in mind the interesting life histories and expertise behind the analysis. For Kellner and Share, this is no simple academic or theoretical chess game – it is their answer to the urgent questions about what is to be done in educational systems and communities which find democratic institutions, cultural and linguistic traditions, work and social relations, and their very futures under a cloud of uncertainty. It is about how we might use communications media – from face-to-face talk to visual and graphic arts, from the writing of stories and essays to mastery of new digital modes of communication – to make and remake lives, communities and civil society in the face of unprecedented economic, cultural and political and indeed, ecological conditions. It’s all on the line here.
Allan Luke
Brisbane, Australia
17 February 2019