Digital Media: Usage, Complications, and Education

            Last week I got an opportunity to check out a pretty interesting little documentary called Digital Nation on PBS’ Frontline series. Needless to say, it was something of a surprise to myself, as I consider myself a fairly media-savvy individual; for a couple of reasons. First, and foremost in my mind, was how there is a rising generation of people (young and old) who are becoming increasingly wired to an electronically based community, where preferences, information, personas, and even entire lives, are lived online. The second thing that caught my attention was how does a heavily digital society effectively educate itself when it comes to overall media literacy.

            First off, in the film, digital media is the area that is primarily focused on and how it affects people. It fascinated me to no end how much time people could spend on personal electronic devices and individual’s attitudes towards their interaction with digital media. It seemed as if the prevalent idea amongst people was that digital mediums were a part of life, so why not live to the greatest digital extent possible? Call it simplicity or vulgar Luddite-ism, but I found that idea to be quite fearful. Now, the great trap and issue of that opinion is that I am not a technophobe and embrace technology a great deal (for goodness sake I’m writing out a thought using electrical impulses on small slivers of conductors and semiconductors projected onto a thin film of liquid crystal display). However, how does a complex world engage with people on a deeper level, when  digital and electronic interaction equal, and maybe, eventually, outweigh tactile, personal interaction?

            I felt that PBS’ made ardent and auspicious strides to be balanced on a complex, fluid, issue. For instance, there is a kind of duplicitous set of discussions taking place within the documentary. There is a discussion going on about how virtual/digital experiences are becoming more and more meaningful to us as organic beings; but hold on, in a discussion about virtual experiences used as recruitment devices by the military we have young people saying that virtual experiences are that, virtual, whereas tactile experiences are separate and unconnected. In a way, this dual sided discourse mirrors another issue brought up by the Digital Nation; what role does digital media have in schools? Just as in the former topic, this area is fraught with adherents and ideas from different angles on the subject. On the one hand there is the position that schools must be adaptable to society by making scholastic institutions more like personal/private practices using digital media. On the other, there is an attitude that school is an experience that must stand unique from the personal lives of the students, a distinct area of the students’ lives away from the usual distractions.

            I suppose this is where media literacy education enters the discussion. Media literacy education is something that most people don’t often consider in their consumption of media; succinctly put, it is to be literate about media in general. Perhaps this is too succinct and must be further dissected; to be “classically” literate a person is supposed to be well-read and generally knowledgeable about a subject in order to become more active in creation and discourse. So, in the modern definition, a person ought to be able to critically “read”, engage, and create media in its various forms. So, half of the goal of media literacy is to help a person be mindful, not only of what they engage with, but why they are engaging it, and it’s affect them, long after the experience has ended. The other major part of media literacy education is, getting individuals to create media using the same critical and analytic tools used in the consumption of media.

            It is this dual nature that makes media literacy education a difficult action to carry out. Creation has become easier and easier, with the mass availability of digital devices, whereas, the hard part, is trying to educate consumers how to analyze and critique their own media usage. That is what makes the conundrum of digital media usage in schools so difficult, especially for media literacy education.  It is one thing to aspire towards goal of creating media competent individuals, and a whole different kettle of fish to carry out the goal. I think an analogy that can be used is to study the public education legislation of the United States, particularly the No Child Left Behind act in the early 21^st Century. Theoretically, the idea was to reframe the educational focus onto subjects such as math, science, and literacy; by testing the knowledge of students on those subjects and slowly raising the expectations of the students’ overall competency in those specific fields. All well and good, however, most any educator (teacher or administrator) will attest this legislation was a horrendous, if not a complete, debacle for public education; setting American public schools back decades behind the educational systems of other leading nations.  One of the reasons for that was because the legislation assumed that successful students were production units birthed from a process that given the right amount of time spent on a subject and tempered by the threat of financial impediments to their institution, would cause students to become critically engaged, highly educated members of society. However, people aren’t units of product; people are people, with all the foibles that phrase entails. Without the ability to address the needs of students as individuals, institutions began to falter, deteriorate, and, for some, fail in trying to abide by this legislation. How does this relate to media literacy education?

            The way that the previous analogy relates to media literacy is that there is a similar predicament at the center of media literacy education and public education. That is, the varied demographic that has to be addressed by the educators. This is especially difficult, now, for media literacy. This is mainly because of the explosion of digital media into multiple facets of life previously dominated, exclusively, by other mediums (writing, films, television, etc.). This, seemingly, sudden arrival of mass digital media creates a unique dynamic. There are older people, who have lived many of, if not most, of their years without this technology and access to media that, suddenly, is heavily integrated into the fabric of their interactions. Then there are a kind of in-between set of people, like myself, who are quite comfortable with media usage in this digital realm, however, we might remember a time when there was not ready public access to the internet, nor digital saturation (I know I remember times like that). And finally, there are people who are saturated with digital media, and always have been. From the time they are born they have a digital/online presence, even if it is controlled by their parents, up to now as young people confronting the difficulties of impending biological/social change. With such a varied set of experiences, besides the individuality of people, it suddenly becomes difficult to confront such an amoebous concept as media literacy.

            Fortunately, as Americans now seem to be a bit behind Asia and Europe in dealing with digital saturation,  much of the heavy lifting has been done to enact individualistic efforts towards media literacy. One of the foremost places is in Britain, where a group of media producers, theoreticians, sociologists, and every day educators, have tried to create a collective manifesto for media literacy education. A huge part of their manifesto is to address the issues of mass digital media usage by individuals. One of the most mentioned aspects to the various subsets of the manifesto is trying to get individuals to think about the root of their media usage. Mainly, what media do they use, and then why? Once an individual is able to understand what media they primarily use and why, then some analysis and critical thinking about what is being consumed can more easily be encouraged by the educators. If a consumer can become more self analytic, and become comfortable with critical intake of media then it stands to reason that the critical audience will attempt to become the critical creators; with a cycle in place it should become easier to adapt and engage an ever changing landscape of media. That is, of course, until we have the next media revolution, then it will all have to start all over again.