Digital Media Literacy?

I am just back from the Digital Media Literacy Forum Summit hosted by Channel 4.

Most of the people there — from the worlds of media, edu­ca­tion and policy making — agreed that there was some need for action on digital media literacy (I guess none of us would have turned up, oth­er­wise) but there were some inter­esting tensions between the par­ti­cipants about what that might entail, who it is for and why we need it.

This debate is often framed in terms of fear of and for children. Our society is at once ter­ri­fied of our young­sters and ter­ri­fied for them. The Finnish mul­timur­derer yes­terday was pre­dict­ably dubbed the ‘YouTube Killer’ by the Mail and Telegraph in this morning’s editions, Ewan McIntosh pointed out. As though his video posts were somehow a reason for the outrage. Adults fret about the amount of time kids spend on the Internet, talking in code. Think about stories about “teen­agers …being groomed to be suicide bombers,” or the count­less stories about hoodies. (Almost every teenage boy in the UK wears a hooded top, yet ‘hoodies’ are framed as a social menace in the popular press here). The other image of children on the Internet is dia­met­ric­ally opposite — the child as victim, as the poten­tial victim of an army of ‘sick paedos’, who for some reason, have forsaken parks and schools, and other places where children might actually phys­ic­ally appear, for the Internet.

A lot of the way some sections of society think about children and the Internet is actually about adults and the Internet. Things that are threat­ening or fright­ening get pro­jected onto children as a way of dis­tan­cing ourselves from that.

This is about adults not under­standing the Internet, not under­standing teens, and demon­ising both as a con­sequence. The obvious con­tra­dic­tions in this view are neatly ignored.

Matt Locke made some great points about the need or lack of need for digital media literacy. He argued that the reason that people run into problems on the Internet is because the tech­no­logy doesn’t work well enough yet. Most people actually have a very good under­standing of the pro­to­cols and rules that govern internet com­mu­nic­a­tions. That there are basic­ally six spaces on the ‘net and we already know how they should run:

1. Private spaces. For 1:1 com­mu­nic­a­tions, like email and private chats.
2. Group spaces: for a defined group with a certain interest to talk about that interest. Like news­groups or forums, also Facebook and Bebo.
3. Public spaces: where you publish whatever you’re pro­du­cing for the world to share. Most blogs and sites like YouTube fall into this category.
4. Performance spaces: online games come here, maybe some more com­pet­itive social media spaces, too.
5. Participation spaces: where a common goal is nego­ti­ated pub­lic­ally between indi­viduals, e.g. eBay, Threadless, MySociety.
6. Watching spaces: because not everyone wants to be taking part all the time.

The problems occur because our current tech­no­lo­gical rendi­tions of these spaces are not advanced, nuanced or simple enough. Private com­mu­nic­a­tions fall into the public arena. Commercial entities enter our groups unwanted. This isn’t about our under­standing of the medium; what causes problems is the medium’s inab­ility to provide an adequate service to fulfil the roles we demand of it.

So… digital media literacy. Is it kids or adults who need it the most? Not sure, but start with Paul Dacre, wherever it ends up. What does it entail? One delegate, from the National Media Museum, made the point that issues with online media and pub­lishing can largely be addressed without knowing anything about code, codecs, XHTML, MP3s or film editing. A big issue is ‘when is it fair?’ — when is it fair to share a piece of video you’ve taken on your phone with friends or the public, for example? The answer to that has nothing to do with tech­no­logy and everything to do with exper­i­ence and moral insight. That’s a very valid point and general teaching from parents and the formal edu­ca­tion system still has a huge role to play, as redundant as they may feel if they fail to master iMovie. Another huge issue for me is whether anyone is ready to start deliv­ering digital media literacy lessons that are suf­fi­ciently distinct from former under­stand­ings of mass media (e.g. Williams, McLuhan, Althusser, Eagleton, Hall). The the­or­isa­tion of per­son­al­ised, syn­dic­ated, personally-​​produced media is still very much in its infancy. We have our Marx and Engels, perhaps, but not our Volosinov or Gramsci.

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