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?
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