Media education and the limits of “literacy”: Ecological orientations to performative platforms

Abstract

Recently, talk of “fake news” – and its relation to wider epistemic crises, from climate denialism to the creep of global ethnonationalism – has renewed attention to media literacy in education. For some, revived discussions of media literacy offer protection (e.g., strategies for identifying and critiquing media bias and misinformation). For others, they offer empowerment (e.g. equipping youth to produce media messages that challenge misinformation or represent marginalized perspectives). In this article, we consider how such approaches, while often generative, retain a focus of media pedagogy that centers the actions of individual humans – namely, “literacies”, or practices associated with the interpretation or creation of media texts.

Keywords

• Media literacy
• Digital literacies
• Media ecology
• Platform studies
• Literacy studies