Am I Really Just a Mindless Consumer: A Peak into a Day of my Media Diet

I like to think of myself as an informed media consumer. I’m pretty sure we all do. The ideal version of ourselves is someone who questions every story we read or hear. We’re doing extra research and fact-checking everything to make sure the information I am consuming is reflecting the truth of the world and is not simply filling me with a steady stream of propaganda. I would like to think that I am one of those viewers who deeply engages with every piece of media I see, trying to dissect all of the messages so I can see the reality behind the headlines, and using all of the key skills of media literacy. But, the truth of my situation is far from the ideal. In reality, I don’t question much of the media that is presented to me and how it got there. Much of the time, I simply look at it, assume it will be good enough, and move on. For the rest of this blog post, I will try to outline a typical weekday of media consumption for me.

5:00 AM

I get up, and soon after I have put on coffee and got myself a little ready for the school day, my media diet begins. I usually like to think that I don’t like to think of myself as someone who uses a lot of digital media, but there is one digital media service I use a lot during my downtime: YouTube.

I have found YouTube to be the most versatile of any media service I can imagine. No matter what topic I can think of, I can find someone who is talking about it, many times for hours and hours on end. Whether it be US college football or the fall of the Roman Empire, I can find multiple people who will talk about it and sound authoritative about it.

But, “sound” is the key word in that last sentence. Many of the people I watch on YouTube can use the vocabulary of the expert, but I never check their credentials or look into any additional sources to actually verify their claims. I just kind of take them.

Now, when they are talking about a football game on the weekend, I don’t think my worldview will be destroyed if I learn they were wrong, but when the events are of actual real world importance there are more chances for misinformation, especially considering how much of a problem misinformation is becoming for students and adults. As well, the news content I consume on YouTube does primarily reflect my worldview. I don’t try to seek out content that comes from other sides, and this has lead me to being in a bit of a “filter bubble” of my own creation.

7:30 AM

I am at school now, and I get a little time for current events before my day starts. I go through my typical repertoire of news sources: CBC Saskatchewan for local stories, The Guardian, and The New York Times for international ones. I’d like to think that my go to sources give a fairly broad brush of potential stories and views, but I do recognise that I’m not getting everything, and there are a lot of views that are left out, particularly more marginalised perspectives.

8:45-12:00 PM

The teaching day has begun.

This is the part of the day when my inner media critic tries to come out. I want to be able good media literacy skills to my class to make sure my students are able to make informed decisions in their media choices. I try to show them how to verify the validity of sources, and how we can tell if a news source if reliable or not. I try to explain what shows bias in sources, and how these biases can shape the information that comes out.

This is where my ideal version of the media consumer can come out. When I am able to put on the disguise of the expert, I am able to feel like an expert.

12:00-1:00 PM

Lunch time in the staff room. An hour spent reflecting on the morning that ways with my colleagues. Much of time is spent talking to colleagues about what the morning was like and what they hope their afternoons will be, but there is also a good amount of time spent scrolling on phones trying to spend a few minutes lost in our own media universes. This is one of the things about human interactions in the 21st Century. No matter how close you are to a person, as soon as there is a lull in the conversation the phone is not too far away. Whether it be in line at the grocery store or when there is a conversation I don’t want to be involved in at work, there is always my phone there to try and make it seem like I’m wrapped up in something more important than what is happening around me.

6:00 PM-end of day

Most days, I try to have my work stuff done by 6:00 PM so I can have time for other commitments, such as university classes, family, and other hobbies. If there is one part of my media diet that I try to include in my end of day it is a print book. I always try to make sure I have a physical book with me that has nothing to do with work or school and is purely for fun. I hope that is a way for me to keep me reading as a pleasurable activity, and I like to have one part of my media diet that is totally analog. I don’t know if there is any real benefit to this, or if it is just a placebo, but it has become the way that I like to close out my day.

I would like to be able to find more of a balance in my media consumption going forward. More of a balance between screens and other mediums, as well as having more time to reflect on what I’m taking in and being less passive. I don’t know how I’ll strike that balance yet, but hopefully I’ll find a path soon.

What Even Is Literacy Now?

Literacy used to be something that was very easy to define. It was the ability to read and write text. This was a pretty basic thing to get across. As long you were able to understand written text, most people would define themselves as being literate. However, this has become more complicated over time.

Literacy skills and what it means to be literate have changed and adapted over the last few decades. It is no longer just about being able to read and write, but being literate means being able to see deeper structures at play in the world around us. Therefore, greater literacy skills give us a better understanding of our world and our place in it.

Digital and Media Literacies

In the Bulger and Davison article, I liked how they described media literacy as helping “make visible what are often invisible structures” (2018). This incapsulated for me not only what media literacy is, but what the goal of all literacy should be. If someone is truly literate in any medium, they should be able to see the structures behind it that make it work, the intentions behind it, and the impacts it could have. I don’t think this is different whether we are talking about a mathematic formula or a movie. We still want our students to translate the information they are receiving and deconstruct it to make meaning for themselves.

A few weeks ago when looking at Ribbles’ 9 areas of digital citizenship, I was able to see how the internet has impacted literacy and the way texts are consumed. The internet has taken texts that used to be uniform in their consumption and has made every media environment we are in totally unique. For media literacy, students should be encouraged to not only be fluent in different forms of language forms, whether they be visual, written, or auditory, but they should be also be engaged with the process of how media is presented to them and the implications for how media is made. In the article “Exploring Echo-Systems: How Algorithms Shape Media Environments“, James N. Cohen argues that our contemporary media literacy education does not go far enough if we only stop at the individual pieces of media that our students our consuming. Cohen argues we also need to allow students to investigate the environments that their media environments are being produced. He mainly agues about the role of algorithms in shaping the media environments we live in, and to be fully media literate in a modern age, students need to be able to navigate the world of algorithms and how they shape the unique media environments we live in.

Going beyond that, Cohen also argues that contemporary media literacy should be more engaged with the types of media environments people experience online. I remember taking Media Studies 20 way back in the day when I was in high school. We studied what were considered to be the main forms of media at the time: print, television, and film. When I was in journalism school, this was expanded a little bit. We were encouraged to use the fairly new social networks of Facebook and Twitter to promote our projects, but I don’t think our professors viewed these platforms as having as being a new type of media with their vocabularies and ecosystems. At the time, we weren’t really taught what to do on Twitter to make a good post because my professors at the time didn’t understand them fully. Now that there has been enough time to create greater understanding of them, I hope they can be more robust media educations about these social media platforms.

For Cohen, this means students having a better understanding all of the different aspects of their media environments, such as feeds, and how these contribute to things such as data collection that companies use. To really investigate and deconstruct the environments students are in, they need to understand the implications of these environments, how they contribute to them, and who benefits to them.

Digital Communication

The last thing I wanted to talk about in terms of modern media and digital literacy is the concept of digital communication. Online communication has given us a new vocabulary to use both online and off. Things such as hashtags and memes have become a part of everyday life, and as such they should be considered a part of modern communcation.

At first, I would have thought this idea was silly. I thought memes and emjois were just silly frivolous things that could be easily forgotten. But, I went to James N. Cohen’s website, and Cohen also argues that people need to be more involved in “meme literacy.” Going through the website, I started to see that memes, emojis, and other digital images have greatly impacted how we communicate with one another, and they should be treated with more respect. As we go into a more digital world, we need to be more willing to engage with what once would have been considered only online. These eventually become a part of our everyday language and need to deconstructed as legitimate and not as novelties.

This also extends into all forms of communication that happens online. I remember back in my undergrad days, we talked about encouraging students through fan-fiction on platforms such as “Wattpad” to allow students to read and write in less intimidating environments, but this can also be extended to all social media environments. In English Language Arts, we have been good for a long time about getting students ready to write letters or editorials, but now we need to be preparing students to communicate in a digital world.

To wrap up, I’ll leave with a question:

What key skills do students need to communicate in a digital world?