Integrating Media and Information Literacy

References

INTRODUCTION

This book is intended for media and information educators as a proposal for the future direction of their subject areas. It is aimed at those researching and studying media and information education (particularly at higher undergraduate and post graduate levels), those involved in planning media and information education and of course media and information educators themselves. It is intended to trigger debate and thought and offer a particular position on the future orientation of the field. Accordingly, it is not a text book for students learning media or information literacy, a ‘how to’ book for teachers or a compendium of techniques and activities for classroom practice; it is sadly lacking in all these areas and many excellent texts exist already.

Instead this text presents a rationale for a change in media and information education; for media education to recognise and respond to the changing environment and technologies and for information education to incorporate a greater degree of criticality. Of course much media education is highly flexible and adaptive; it explicitly covers new technology and has a history of engaging with new technologies as they arise. Similarly, information literacy education has evolved and incorporates a critical dimension. Both are vibrant, dynamic and evolving fields with substantial and critically reflective constituencies of researchers, teachers and practitioners. Through a range of academic flora including journals, websites, magazines, periodicals and conferences these communities debate and advance their fields and it is to this audience that this text is targeted.

Perhaps one cause for the vibrancy of the research culture is that the fields are constantly in ‘shift’; new facets are revealed and new angles that require attention are uncovered. Education and in particular media and information education is undergoing what Hargreaves, Lieberman and Fuller (2010) term a ‘great turn’; a period of rapid transition and change in educational practices. The emergence of digital technologies, the economic downturn with its resultant impact upon employment (and the reactions from governments to these changes) and large political changes which, at the time of writing, have yet to fully play out have meant that curricula are changed and teaching practices adjusted. During such times the requirements upon teachers to incorporate additional areas and aspects into teaching are great.

However, educators must always be mindful of non-strategic ‘mission creep’; the seemingly continuous yet unstructured expansion of what is supposed to be taught in restricted time tables in environments of finite resources. Accordingly, this text is not a description of a set of additional things that those either in media education or information education should do; we cannot simply keep expanding what we do in limited spaces within curricula. Instead it is argued here that rather than making small adaptations and continually adding new components to both fields, there is a strong case for a reconsideration of the disciplines; to combine them, reorient them and set a ‘strategic direction’ for where media and information literacy education should go in the next few years. This assertion takes place in the light of arguments made by a number of previous authors (Cheung,Wilson, Grizzle, Tuazon, & Akyempong, 2011; Moeller, Joseph, Lau, & Carbo, 2011) and in statements from various organisations (UNESCO, 2014).

1.2 APPROACH AND PERSPECTIVE

In Chapter Two, A History of Media Education and Literacy and Chapter Three, The History of Information Literacy, it will be noted that there are numerous different flavours of media and information literacy education. As Buckingham notes programmes of media and information literacy are developed for a variety of different reasons and often as a response to a perception of threat (2003). Indeed, it is possible to see a programme of media education as a barometer of the fears and preoccupations of a society at a given time (Leaning, 2009b). In addition to this ‘cultural materialist’ reading of education _ that we can read political imperatives in actions and texts _ we should note that the underlying rationale for media literacy straddles disciplinary boundaries and political and historical divides (Penman & Turnbull, 2007). Media literacy is initiated, planned and delivered for a variety of reasons by a large array of agencies and organisations with vastly different political, religious and ethical agenda (as we will see in chapter: the history of information literacy, the same is not quite true for information literacy education).

The manner of delivery is also diverse with a vast range of approaches and techniques used; indeed, there is a veritable cottage industry in texts, guides, teaching resources and lesson plans for media and information education teachers.

It may be useful therefore to identify some of the basic tenets and assertions and the political standpoint that informs this text. It is possible to group these into two broad areas. The first area is a commitment to the sociological approach founded in the theories of reflexive modernity, reflexivity and cosmopolitanism of Giddens (1990, 1991, 2007), Beck (Beck, 1992, 2005, 2006; Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002; Beck & Grande, 2007; Beck & Ritter, 1997) and Bauman (2005, 2008, 2012), the critical cosmopolitan sociology of Delanty (2006, 2009), the cosmopolitan philosophy of Appiah (2010) and the manifestation of this in the ‘utopian realist’ educational theories of Halpin (2002). Giddens, Beck and Bauman were leading figures in a (broadly European) sociological approach to understanding the experience of living within late modern societies. They sought to establish a sociological framework for understanding the complexity of the contemporary world while drawing upon and advancing the work of key European sociological thinkers. Of the three key traditions in classical European sociological theory _ the Functionalist theories of Durkheim, the critical class theories of Marx and the interpretivist theories of Weber who saw multiple dimensions to social stratification, it is the latter which is advanced the most in the work of Giddens and others. The approach developed by Giddens, Beck and Bauman is decidedly anti-post-modern  at least in the sense that the post-modern is a sensibility of a specific epoch following the period of modernity rather than a flavour or ‘dark-side’ of modernist culture (Waugh, 1992). Instead, Giddens argues that late modernity is best understood as a period of intense reflexivity in which the core foundations of identity come under intense scrutiny (1990, 1991, 2007). Furthermore, this process of scrutiny has facilitated an individualised and reflexive approach to self-identity _ we come to regard ourselves as projects to ‘work upon’ or improve. Late modernity becomes a period of fluidity, an age in which the self is individualised to a far greater degree than previously (Bauman, 2008, 2012) and it is in that space of choice that decisions about the future of society can be addressed and where we can deploy the cosmopolitan imagination (Delanty, 2006). For Beck (2006), the overarching problems to be addressed in this opportunity are those opposing the ‘cosmopolitan vision’  a non-Marxist, equality orientated, progressive vision for society in the 21st century. Cosmopolitanism is a philosophy or ideology that centres upon the assertion that humanity constitutes a single community. Its origins lie in the work of the Cynic School of Greek philosophy and in particular the assertion of Diogenes that he was a ‘citizen of the world’ rather than of a specific place Diogenese claimed affinity with all humanity rather than just those a particular city state. A cosmopolitan was a citizen of the universe or cosmos. It was elaborated and developed through the Roman Stoics and certain Christian writings of St Paul.[1] 1 In later times, it informed a number of key Enlightenment texts.[2]

A number of authors argue that cosmopolitanism contains two strands. On the one hand is an obligation to others above and beyond our obligations to our families and friends. This obligation should be extended beyond our families, beyond our close group of friends and beyond our nation to all humanity. The second strand is the assertion that we should recognise that difference exists between people, afford such differences equal value and respect and seek to learn from the differences in human lives (though of course there may be clashes (Appiah, 2010) between the universal concern and recognition of difference). Opposed to the cosmopolitan vision are the twin forces of the ‘national outlook’ on the one side (the assertion of a homogenised territorial perspective (Beck, 2005, 2006; Beck & Grande, 2007)) and ‘fundamentalism’ on the other (which Beck regards as anti-modern and an unfortunate consequence of liberational post-colonialism which when subverted by the refutation of grand narratives within postmodernism results in a contraessentialist fundamentalism (2010)). Delanty (2006, 2009) argues that critical cosmopolitanism centres upon a rejection of eurocentrism that we need to adopt a post-universalistic understanding and that critical cosmopolitanism with its inherent recognition of difference offers this.

Thus, in the form I use here cosmopolitanism is a social scientifically orientated re-visioning of the idea of a political entity founded upon a recognition and tolerance of difference as a starting point for social action. Halpin (2002) seeks to identify a direction for progressive education from cosmopolitanism and the work of Giddens and Beck and articulates what he terms a ‘utopian realist’ approach for this. He identifies utopian approaches as those, which incorporate a ‘vocabulary of hope’ (Halpin, 2002). Accordingly, utopias help us to ‘relativise the present and progressively to anticipate a better future’ (2002). A utopia is a device through which we can think about our actions and which we can use to plan future action. However, the utopian imagination or ‘daydream’ is moderated by the restraints and practicalities of reality. Accordingly, utopian realism is that which ‘identifies the forces and resources within the present social order that are capable of transforming it for the better’ (Halpin, 2002). Utopian realism provides a broad, sociologically informed perspective through which to think and develop the future of educational activity and for our purposes media and information education in particular.

Accordingly, progressive, critical Cosmopolitanism serves as an underlying, though sometimes unvoiced, critical stance within this book and there is a general sympathy to the sociology of Bauman, Beck, Giddens, Delanty and others and the progressive approach to education advocated by Halpin.

The second underpinning assertion is that integrating media and information literacy is an appropriate and necessary response to changes in the way media technology function and the way in which they are used. Simply put, we need to update media and information literacy to deal with the current and future form and usage of technology. The idea of revising educational practice in the light of changing technologies and patterns of use is, of course, not new and media studies has recently seen significant controversy in what it should study and the methods by which it should study it. In 2010, the noted British media educator David Buckingham wrote a book chapter in which he posed the question ‘Do we really need Media Education 2.0?’ (2010). The question was a response to a number of articles, blog posts and email debate triggered by two other British academics, William Merrin and David Gauntlett who had separately proposed that the discipline of media studies needed updating. These arguments were most fully articulated by William Merrin in his book Media Studies 2.0 (2014). The central argument of Merrin and Gauntlett’s case was media studies had evolved to deal with the extant, analogue, one-to-many media technology of the broadcast era. Digital media and in particular the Internet posed a range of questions that extant media analysis tools simply could not deal with. Buckingham addressed this assertion and challenged it on a number of levels. Buckingham mounts a strong critique of the project of Media Studies 2.0 and is particularly scathing of many of Gauntlett’s claims. Core to  Buckinham’s challenge is the (somewhat unfair) charge that Media Studies 2.0 is an uncritical approach that ‘celebrates’ digital technology and is guilty of missing the heterogeneity of use of media. Interestingly, while Buckingham challenges the substance of Media Studies 2.0 agenda  - that as a subject the focus of attention should shift and that the analytic tools used be revised - he does leave open the question of whether the teaching of media studies, the act of media education needs to be reconsidered albeit with the inclusion of a critical agenda drawn from the existing media education practices: ‘Do we really need Media Education 2.0? Perhaps we do but we certainly still need Media Education 1.0 as well’ (2010).

The need for this change is evident if we consider the speed, manner in which digital media are spreading and penetrating all regions of the globe. The adoption speed (the time from introduction (less than 10% penetration), to maturity (10%-40% penetration) and then to saturation (40%-75% penetration)) for media technologies has, at least in the United States, accelerated significantly with digital technologies (DeGusta, 2012). Moreover, the adoption rates for mass media technology have followed a pattern whereby once the developed world is saturated, the spread of a technology is tied closely with the development of infrastructure; indeed the adoption of telephone technology has long been considered a measure of development (Jipp, 1963). However, the spread of mobile communications in the developing world does not follow this pattern (DeGusta, 2012). According to the United Nations International Telecommunications Union by the end of 2016, the total number of individual end-user connections to the Internet topped 3 billion, a little over 46% of the world’s population. Fully two thirds of these connections are from the developing world (though there are still over 4 billion people not connected to the Internet and 90% of them live in the developing world). A significant proportion of those who are connected access the Internet through mobile broadband subscriptions and this stood at about 2.3 billion subscriptions; equating to roughly 32 for every 100 inhabitants of the world. Unsurprisingly, the developed world has a far-higher rate of penetration of Internet-connected devices at 84 in every 100 inhabitants than developing countries with 21, although both figures are significant increases on the scores of 2011 and are four times that of 2009. By region, Europe and North America have the highest degree of penetration of both fixed and mobile access; Africa has the lowest at 25.1% (Sanou, 2016). In terms of total numbers accessing, the Internet the Asia Pacific region dominates with over 1 billion users, Europe has a little over half a billion and north America on 273 million (Anon, 2012).

Within these headline figures, there is a lot of complexity. The World Internet Report provides more in-depth data but is limited to six countries: Cyprus (separate results for Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots), Poland, South Africa, Sweden, Taiwan and the United States. This data indicates that within national populations there are differences in Internet access by gender, age, educational level and income. It comes as no surprise that Internet access is highest among those who are young, educated, wealthy and male (Cole, Suman, Schramm, Zhou, & Reyes-Sepulveda, 2013).

These impressive figures are a consequence of significant national and international governmental, commercial and third-sector effort that has been expended in extending access to the Internet in low-participation regions and in widening access to ‘hard to reach’ groups in developed societies. Such activity and indeed the general interest in Internet penetration rates is predicated upon the belief that Internet access is an important component if not key component in economic development and civil society - that a digital divide exists between those without access to the Internet and those with it. This divide will further cement extant inequalities as the Internet’s potential to mitigate economic and social inequality is restricted. However, the digital divide should not be seen simply in terms of access to an Internet connection. Much of the use of Internet technology involves degrees of participation in forms of communicative practice beyond consumption. Internet communication has long been understood to be a communicative and productive activity in addition to its enhanced media consumption affordances (Leaning, 2009a). The dimensions of engagement and activity with the productive aspects of digital media across national, gender, ethnic and class divides is an important and lively area of study and pose fresh problems to media educators. While media educators have historically been concerned with ensuring students can critically engage with content to what extent should the educator be concerned with developing skills in production and dissemination in the student? These two issues: that the ability to engage with social media and participatory culture is tied to political and economic power and that actual engagement in participatory culture may itself immerse the user in problematic power relations present media and information educators with very challenging problems.

1.3 STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

To engage with the two noted themes the book is divided into three parts. The remainder of this part is concerned with understanding the separate histories of media and information education. Chapter Two, A History of Media Education and Literacy, is concerned with the history of media education and media literacy. Literacy is a problematic and contested term and the chapter commences with a discussion of how literacy is broadly understood in terms of media and information education. It is noted that literacy is often used to refer to a level of competence, yet there are a range of ways or dimensions in which this conceptualised. This concern is manifest in any attempt to write the history of an educational practice as education is so often an inherently political endeavour or response. The chapter develops this approach and identifies three broad historical approaches in media education:  a protectionist innoculatory approach founded upon the idea that through media education students can be taught defence techniques against a problematic media; a demystifying approach where by the students are taught to decode the media and in doing so learn the techniques used by the media to deceive and subjugate the audience; and finally a creative productive approach where by students engage in the production of texts and thereby learn the techniques used in communicating meaning and acquire skills appropriate to a work place. The chapter concludes with recognition that all three approaches are still very current and continue to inform contemporary media literacy programmes.

Chapter Three, The History of Information Literacy, turns to the idea of information literacy and charts its history. While the history of media education has a strongly political flavour, information literacy has, with a few notable exceptions, seemingly been a-political in its development. Though both media and information literacy are strongly linked to developments in academia, they owe allegiance to distinctly different fields of practice. Media literacy has been influenced by changes in academic flavour in the humanities and social sciences and in particular the development of critical theory and the response to (and participation in) significant counterculture, civil rights and equality movements of the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. As such media literacy has a strongly political, progressive undertone. Information literacy emerges from a range of disciplines including library and bibliographic studies, information science and computing. Such subjects draw upon a very different epistemology and this approach is reflected in the history of information literacy and the debates that define the field. Accordingly, the chapter commences with the assertion that the field needs to question this a-political nature as many of the topics considered by the subject are political. The chapter then moves to consider the origin of the field and map its evolution along with some parallel fields such as digital literacy.

Part II concerns computer technology, the contemporary world, and the way in which we are integrated into the world through computer technology. It commences in Chapter Four, The Increasing Closeness of Computers - A History of the Delivery of Computing Power, with a discussion of the transformation in computers and their gradual integration into our personal ‘space’. This transition notes the movement from mainframe computers to desktop computers in offices, their movement from offices to homes, then from homes to hands with the advent of tablet and smartphones and computing’s latest instantiation of shifting from hands to wrists eyes, and other wearable media. It is noted how the increasing intrusion into our personal space, the increased closeness of computers, pose new problems for information and media literacy.

As computers become closer to us, they seem to circumvent the critical acumen we would deploy when faced with media texts. Chapter Five, The Nature of Digital Media Content, looks to the nature of digital media content. While the interpretation of digital media content takes many forms in academia, the focus here will examine participatory culture, transmedia practices and converged culture.

Participatory culture considers the way in which aspects of contemporary culture involve significant amounts of wilful, direct and often creative engagement. In such cultures, the audience plays and active part in creating and contributing to texts. This process is particularly evident in certain social media and creative new media platforms, which host user content. Trans-media relates to the ways in which media texts are often present across multiple media channels. It involves the ‘bleeding’ of content between platforms, of the creation of cross-platform and cross-text story or fictional worlds. Thus fictional worlds operate across games (including different genres and platforms), films, television, apps, audio and other media forms. Converged culture relates to the ways in which certain practices and affordances of social media now allow users to engage with digital media content across the web and apps and engage from host platforms. Thus, users can engage with media content and indicate preference for it, redistribute it themselves and engage with the content through a profile they have established on a social media platform. However while this shift to new patterns of consumption is important it perhaps masks (and is facilitated) by a greater and possibly more meaningful shift. Because of the nature of networked data, consumption of media in a computational environment leaves a ‘data footprint’. This results in enormous amounts of data being created and collected through our consumption of media texts in an interactive networked environment. The consumption of media content in interactive space leaves data trails and through the application of inferential data analysis used in ‘big data’ a far greater ‘instantiation’ of individuals in data is now possible by corporate and state agencies.

Chapter Six, Digital Divides: Access, Skills and Participation, addresses the issue of access to digital media and its relation to participation in civic and economic life. This commences with a discussion of the digital divide. The chapter commences by noting how the digital divide is both between countries where there are differing rates of Internet access and within countries where there are sections of society who do not have access. The chapter then considers three forms or orders of digital divides.

The first order refers to the issue of access and the chapter considers the difference between having physical access to a computer and the Internet and the material assets to pay for the connection and additional expenses. The chapter then moves on to a discussion of the second order digital divide; the skills necessary to be able to use an Internet enabled computer. Access alone is not enough; people require the skills to be able to use digital media. It is also noted that the discussion of such skills is often akin to digital literacy and it is argued that as with certain forms of information literacy training criticality is often not prioritised. The third order of digital divides relates to the ways in which digital media and in particular skills are used and to end they are put. It is noted that research indicates that although there may be greater access and indeed skills within historically marginalised groups than there has been previously, there was a still a division in terms of the specific activities and tasks performed in their use of social media.

In the final part of the book, I turn to considering media and information literacy in the 21st century. Here the differing strands introduced in the preceding chapters are drawn together through a summary of the main issues raised. I then turn to the proposed agenda for media and information literacy. Three specific proposals are made for the future direction of the field and an integrated approach: first that the physical form and interface of devices for the engagement with digital media be understood in terms of consequences of their use in terms of the structuring of our experiences as well as the affordances they impart; second, that the commercial and legal realities of the productive and participative nature of contemporary digital media be developed; third, that an understanding that the use of much digital media involves making available information about ourselves and that such information can be extremely impactful upon us and is used to inform decisions made about us.

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[1] 1 St. Paul’s assertion that ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for all are one in Christ Jesus’ in Galatians 3:28 of the King James version of the Bible has been widely interpreted as a foundation of cosmopolitanism.

[2] Christoph Martin Wieland, one of the key figures in the German Enlightenment, asserted: ‘The cosmopolitans carry the designation citizens of the world in the most authentic and eminent sense. They regard all peoples of the earth as just so many branches of a single family, and the universe a state, in which they [the cosmopolitans] are citizens, together with innumerable other rational beings, in

order to promote the perfection of the whole’ (quoted in Kleingold (1999)).