The convergence of information, media, and technology has created the predominant ecosystem of our time. Since 2018, more than half of the world’s population (over 4 billion people) are using the Internet. From cradle to grave, we are interconnected through a globally-networked media and consumer society.
Media and information communication technologies can entertain, educate, and empower or distract, mislead, and manipulate. They are a profound and often misperceived source of cultural pedagogy that educate and socialize us about how to behave and what to think, feel, believe, fear, and desire. These complex systems of communication, representation, production, distribution, and consumption are forms of pedagogy that teach us about ourselves and the world around us. This is also an ecosystem that is constantly tracking and selling our movements, communications, and personal data. Therefore, learning how to question, analyze, and maneuver in this cultural environment are essential requirements for critical thinking and participatory democracy.
Radio, television, film, cell phones, popular music, the Internet, social networking, and other forms and products of media culture provide materials out of which we forge our sense of selfhood; our notions of gender; our conceptions of class, of ethnicity and race, of nationality, and of sexuality. Media culture shapes our views of the world into categories of “us” and “them,” influencing our deepest values: what we consider good or bad, positive or negative, moral or evil. Media narratives provide the symbols, myths, and resources through which we constitute a common culture and through the appropriation of which we insert ourselves into this culture. Media spectacles demonstrate and legitimize who has power and who is powerless, who is allowed to exercise force and violence, and who suffers the consequences of it.
We have written this book to promote critical media literacy as a theoretical framework and practical pedagogy in order to enhance individual sovereignty vis-à-vis media culture, empowering people to critically read, write, and create a better world. Indeed, the realities of 21st century life, and the technological and information revolutions which characterize it, demand that all citizens become media literate. In fact, many universities are expanding and opening up their cinema/television courses to the university at large due to rising demands for these kinds of analytical and practical skills, which are hardly restricted any more to those looking for careers in the entertainment industry. In particular, the pedagogy of critical media literacy should be an essential part of all education. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Too many educational institutions ignore or undervalue the significance of critical media literacy as a crucial dimension of the knowledge, skills, and awareness necessary for 21st century literacy.
This book is designed for undergraduate and graduate students, K-12 teachers and university professors, as well as a general audience who is interested in critical media studies. It provides an introductory framework for understanding and decoding all forms of media culture from a critical perspective. Rather than separating different types of media into generic categories, this text introduces readers to critical theories and practices which are applicable to all forms of media and emphasizes the underlying similarities and unique qualities of each.
As technology continues to evolve, new potential emerges for positive and negative uses. Recent developments of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality are creating the ability for more people to manipulate digital information, leading to impressive computer-generated imagery (CGI) in blockbuster movies, and also to the growth of fake news, doctored images, and misleading videos that go viral around the world in milliseconds.
While new information communication technologies (ICTs) have created potent opportunities for sharing and connecting people across the planet, they have also concentrated access and control of information, and have produced digital divides and information inequalities. Today’s primary storytellers are enormous transnational corporations merging and expanding globally to almost every corner of the planet, and locally to every nook and cranny they can reach. Only a handful of corporations own the majority of the world’s media, creating a small group of wealthy oligarchs and plutocrats with tremendous power to decide who and what will be represented and what lessons will be taught by the largest cultural industry the world has ever known (McChesney & Nichols, 2016).
When a small number of corporations have the power to create and disseminate enormous amounts of information, the diversity of ideas shrinks as the potential for abuse increases. Media consolidation is especially problematic when the majority of the audience perceives the messages and media through which they travel as neutral and transparent. Taking media culture for granted promotes a relationship with media in which messages are rarely questioned or challenged, especially when they are considered entertainment.
At the same time, social media are providing new possibilities for individuals and groups to find each other and build grassroots coalitions. The Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and the #MeToo movement are powerful examples of the potential social media offer for connecting, organizing, and challenging systems of oppression. Yet, the social networking that brings like-minded people together is also being used to foment anger, hatred, and physical violence. These days, all types of groups, from the Islamic State to American street gangs, are using social media to find followers and spread their own agendas and beliefs, thereby turning social media into weapons of warfare (Singer & Brooking, 2018).
Awareness and engagement through critical inquiry, therefore, becomes an essential requirement for literacy and education in the 21st century. As a response to changes in technology, media, and society, education and citizenship today require the development of critical media literacy (CML) to empower students and citizens to critically read media messages and produce media themselves in order to be active participants in a democratic society. This necessitates awareness of how media function in everyday life and developing critical literacies to decode crucial meanings, messages, and effects. Much of the daily public pedagogy that mass media (which includes social media) teach about race, gender, class, sexuality, consumption, fear, morals, and the like, reflect corporate profit motives and hegemonic ideologies at the expense of social concerns necessary for a healthy democracy and a sustainable planet.
Since traditional education often does little to help students recognize and counteract these influences, we need a more robust type of literacy that expands critical consciousness to encompass new ICTs, media, and popular culture and deepens pedagogical practices to more complex levels in order to question the relationships between information and power. Critical awareness is akin to what Paulo Freire (2010) calls conscientização, a revolutionary critical consciousness that involves perception as well as action against oppression. Critical awareness in CML involves identifying, analyzing, and challenging media that promote representations or narratives involving racism, sexism, classism, homophobia and other forms of discrimination that further marginalize targeted social groups.
Through this expansion of literacy and deepening of critical inquiry, CML aims to challenge popular assumptions that frame media as unproblematic windows to the world. An essential concept of media literacy is the social construction of knowledge and the ramifications of that understanding to disrupt misconceptions of information and education as neutral and bias-free. This critical pedagogical approach to literacy offers the dual possibility of building awareness of media domination through critical analysis and empowering individuals to create alternative media for counter-hegemonic expression. CML pedagogy provides students and teachers with an opportunity to embrace the changes in society and technology, not as threats to education, but as opportunities to rethink teaching and learning as political acts of consciousness-raising and empowerment.
Hence, as traditional educational systems promote oppressive practices that focus more on conformity and memorization than critical thinking and empowerment, we need a progressive educational response to challenge these harmful influences and provide a positive alternative to humanize and democratize education. The current obsession with standardization and accountability are prioritizing misleading notions of success and equality at the expense of students’ and society’s social and environmental needs. Democracy, social justice, and the fate of life on this planet require education that prepares everyone to work in solidarity to create a more humane, sustainable, and compassionate world. Teachers should guide students to challenge status quo practices and dominant ideologies that support racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, overconsumption, and all forms of oppression and exploitation.
While pressures to privatize and standardize education have been building, a dramatic technological revolution, centered on computers, information, communication, and multimedia technologies, has been changing everything from the ways people work, to the ways they communicate with each other and spend their leisure time. This ICT eruption is often interpreted as the beginnings of a knowledge or information society, and therefore ascribes education a central role in every aspect of life. It poses tremendous challenges to educators to rethink their basic tenets, to deploy the new technologies in creative and productive ways, and to restructure schooling to respond constructively and progressively to the technological and social changes that we are now experiencing. At the same time that this ICT shift is underway, important demographic, socio-political, and environmental changes are taking place in the United States and throughout the world. Immigration patterns have created the challenge of providing people from diverse cultures, classes, and backgrounds with the tools and competencies to enable them to succeed and participate in an ever more complex and multicultural world. Additionally, as the climate continues to warm, more people will be forced to leave their countries in search of the basic human needs no longer sustainable in their homelands.
Digital technology is opening opportunities for individual participation and alternative points of view, while at the same time, a few enormous media and technology corporations have become the dominant chroniclers, narrators, and gatekeepers of information, often repeating the same story, at the expense of countless different perspectives and creative ways of thinking. Many of these storytellers are actually story-sellers, more interested in peddling ideas and products, than informing, enlightening, inspiring, or encouraging critical thinking. While children are using more media, they are also being used more by media companies. These giant transnational media and technology corporations are capturing personal data and targeting youth as one of the most valuable markets to build brand loyalty and to sell to advertisers or anyone willing to pay.
Researchers found that 8–18 year-olds in the US spend well over ten hours a day interacting with various forms of media, such as music, computers, video games, television, film, and print (Rideout, Lauricella, & Wartella, 2011). Another investigation reports “45% of teens say they are online on a near-constant basis” and “[a]nother 44% say they go online several times a day, meaning roughly nine-in-ten teens go online at least multiple times per day” (Anderson & Jiang, 2018, p. 8). Much of this media use is attributed to easy access, since 95% of US teens surveyed report having their own smartphone or access to one (p. 2). This increase in access and use of cell phones, tablets, and digital media is leading some researchers to assert that the constantly increasing amount of information, the lightning speed and immediacy with which it arrives, the high levels of stimulation and multitasking that consume us as we read, are distracting us from being able to focus our attention enough to read deeply and think critically (Carr, 2014; Turkle, 2011, 2015; Wolf, 2018). Maryanne Wolf (2018) further suggests that digital culture has created a threat to empathy, diversity, and democracy through “continuous partial attention” that is rewiring our brain’s circuitry (p. 71).
Not only is the amount of time with media increasing, but the quality of that engagement is also changing, becoming more commercial and rarely critical. In 2016, researchers at Stanford University assessed 7,804 students across the US on their competence to analyze online media and report that, “young people’s ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: bleak” (p. 4). The researchers found that students are “easily duped” and unprepared to distinguish between news and advertising or to judge the reliability of a website. They assert, “Never have we had so much information at our fingertips. Whether this bounty will make us smarter and better informed or more ignorant and narrow-minded will depend on our awareness of this problem and our educational response to it” (Stanford History Education Group, 2016, p. 5). The vast amount of information we encounter every day, the ubiquity of social media and online connectivity, our dependence on cell phones and digital technology, the commercial structure of the information highway, and the convergence of information, communication, and entertainment are creating the need for pedagogy that will support students to critically negotiate this dynamic terrain. The new digital culture presents potential dangers when ICTs are used without analysis and reflection, and they also offer positive possibilities when they are used critically for educating, empowering, and engaging in social and environmental justice.
In our constantly evolving society, media and technology continue to assert evermore influence in shaping culture, disseminating ideas, and determining public discourse. The synergy between entertainment and politics is profound and can be seen in examples such as Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign winning the top prizes at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Awards. When political campaigns win advertising awards, democracy has taken a backseat to the media spectacle (Kellner, 2003). These changes are contributing to the need for everyone to develop the skills and disposition to question and respond to the information they are hearing, seeing, reading, creating, sharing, and using.
Another issue for educators to embrace is the rise of fake news (purposefully fictitious media posts) and the cooptation of the term “fake news” by Trump and conservatives. Hence, a label that was once useful to identify false information, has now become a tool of propaganda and disinformation. Early in his presidency, Donald Trump declared a “war on the media” in his daily twitter feed and media appearances, using the concept of “fake news” to discredit media reports critical of him (Kellner, 2017). Trump and his staff dismiss reporting they don’t approve of as “fake news” and attack the mainstream press, referring to them as “the true Enemy of the People” (Trump’s tweet, October 29, 2018). Along with his attacks on mainstream news media, Trump’s level of “purposefully injecting false information into the national discourse” has prompted the Washington Post Fact Checker to introduce a new category called the Bottomless Pinocchio, which overtakes the previously lowest rating of four Pinocchios, given for a claim that is proven false. Glenn Kessler (2018) explains that the Bottomless Pinocchio, “will be awarded to politicians who repeat a false claim so many times that they are, in effect, engaging in campaigns of disinformation.”
The use of the term “fake news” for political gain, along with the increase in false information spread through social media by online bots, click farms, troll factories, and sockpuppets has encouraged many people to recognize the need to develop critical reading skills of media and contemporary discourses, debates, and controversies. However, some have suggested that we simply need better cognitive skills and critical awareness to determine truth from lies. If only it were that simple. The development of new technology is also contributing to the potential to manipulate facts, remix media, and create “deep fake” videos that look convincingly real (Chesney & Citron, 2018). Making sense of media and our information society is far more complicated than a reductionist idea of simply finding the truth. Rather than judging information in binary terms, as either true or false, students should learn to seek context, search for multiple sources, different perspectives, and various types of evidence, to triangulate findings and bias in order to best evaluate and make sense of the information.
Yet, in this toxic political environment, we must avoid relativistic suggestions that everything is equal and we are in a post-truth era because real events occur that affect people and all life on the planet. Joe Kincheloe (2007) reminds us that “all knowledge is an interpretation” (p. 113) and therefore, interpreting the meaning of a message is a complex process that requires skills to probe empirical evidence, evaluate subjective biases, analyze the medium and construction of the text, and explore the multiple meanings and social contexts of media texts. Simply labeling a text as “real” or “fake” is overly simplistic and does little to help understand our media culture and become an adept and critical user and/or producer of information in the public discourse.
Journalists Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel (2011) assert that changes in technology and journalism have shifted our relationship with news, from a “trust me” era of the mainstream media being given the authority to tell us what we need to know, to the current “show me” era that places the onus of judging the news more on us as the audience. Kovach and Rosenstiel (2011) write, “That reflects the power shift in the digital age from the journalist as gatekeeper to the consumer or citizen as his or her own editor. With that shift the consumer has now acquired a greater responsibility to adopt and perfect a skeptical way of knowing” (p. 33). While we can question if it was a good idea to have given so much power to journalists in the first place, perhaps the new challenges of the digital age will provoke us to become more responsible and skeptical citizens and users, discussants, and producers of news and information.
Now, more than ever, teachers should encourage students to be reading, viewing, listening to, interacting with, and creating a multitude of texts, from books and articles, to digital podcasts and multimedia productions. This is an opportunity for educators to guide their students to think critically with and about the information technology and media that surround them. Hence, changes in media, technology, and society require critical media literacy that can support teachers and students to question and create with and about all forms of communication that can empower or oppress, entertain or distract, inform or mislead, and buy or sell everything from lifestyles to politicians.
Critical media literacy is a pedagogical approach that deepens literacy skills across all subject areas and empowers students to use multiple forms of media and technology to read and write the word and the world (Freire & Macedo, 1987). In this brave new world of exploding media and computer technologies, we need to rethink education, literacy, and our roles as educators. While media literacy courses have been taught and appreciated in select parts of the world, in the US, advocates of critical media literacy have been a marginalized, yet growing group. It is obvious to us that new ICTs require new literacies and that schools today must confront the challenges of providing appropriate forms of education and teach the literacies that enable students and citizens to thrive in the 21st century.
In this book, we argue that educators need to cultivate critical media literacy to meet the challenge of restructuring education for a digitally-networked multicultural society and global culture. In a period of dramatic technological, social, and environmental change, education needs to help produce a variety of new types of literacies to make current pedagogy relevant to the demands of the contemporary era. As new ICTs are altering every aspect of our society and culture, we need to comprehend and make use of them to understand and transform our world. In particular, by introducing critical media literacy to empower individuals and groups traditionally excluded, education can be reconstructed to make it more responsive to the challenges of a democratic and multicultural society.