What Is Media Literacy?

Some explanatory remarks on an elusive concept

Family watching television, 1958

I. Media Literacy at the Popular Level

“Media literacy” is one of those words you’ll see plastered all over the internet. It’s apparently a very important thing. If you go online and look it up on a social media web site, you’ll typically encounter one of these kinds of claims:

1. So-and-so is an idiot who lacks media literacy (typically in response to someone insulting a narrative-based entertainment product, or supposedly misunderstanding its message)

2. Media literacy is dead, dying, or in decline

3. “Media literacy” is a foolish/self-serving/politicized/incoherent concept

These kinds of claims occur in order from most to least common, with the third following the first two distantly. The first two, more often than not, are used defensively, to shield something from criticism. Here are two examples:

What typically happens is, someone shows up to criticize something for having dicey subject matter, e.g. pedophilia or rape, and then the “media literacy” invoker defends it by saying the critic lacks the ability to properly contextualize the subject matter. When people say “media literacy is dead” (a phrase used so often it has become something of a mantra), they usually say it with the same defensive purpose.

Another common deployment of the first comment type is in response to when someone interprets a narrative entertainment product in a manner differently from how its creators intended it to be understood, e.g. seeing Archie Bunker from All in the Family as the hero, or Ken from Barbie the movie. Since conservatives and right-wingers often will do this with popular entertainment (a consequence of having little they can call their own), they will receive this criticism, whether their interpretation is deliberately done against the grain or not. It has happened enough to where they’ve learned to mock it, like so:

But again, in this invocation of media literacy, the social media user defends his or her favorite show, only this time against bad exegesis.

There is a third common reason people accuse others of having zero media literacy, and that is because someone simply criticized or disliked an entertainment product they like. This a fairly common kind of post, but it is the least interesting version, it often lacks substantiation, and I will therefore ignore it.

II. Media Literacy According to Authorities

All these invocations of media literacy are how people discuss it at the popular level online. But they are quite different from how media literacy is discussed by pedagogues and educators, the people who have planted in these young peoples’ minds the idea that “media literacy” is so important in the first place.

Here is a definition of media literacy from the National Association of Media Literacy Education: “media literacy is the ability to encode and decode symbols transmitted by media and to synthesize, analyze, and produce mediated messages.” It goes on to say,

To become a successful student, responsible citizen, productive worker, or competent and conscientious consumer, individuals need to develop expertise with the increasingly sophisticated information and entertainment media that address us on a multi-sensory level, affecting the way we think, feel, and behave.

In this case, although the organization insists that it isn’t “anti-media,” the discussion emphasizes the potentially predatory nature of the information people encounter. This emphasis can be found elsewhere. One YouTube video about media literacy with over a million views brings up the cultural theorist Stuart Hall, who was largely interested in Marxism and structuralist semiotics, and this video mostly presents media literacy as a shield one can use to protect oneself against bad information. Another video from a channel called “Media Literacy Now,” a creation of a nonprofit organization called the Transformative Culture Project, encourages people to ask five questions about media they encounter in order to become better “digital citizens”:

1. Who created this message? 2. What creative techniques are used to capture my attention? 3. How might people understand this message differently from me? 4. What lifestyles, values, and points-of-view are represented in or omitted from this message? 5. Why is this message being sent?

Again, the overriding sentiment is one of suspicion, not the defense of popular entertainment. There’s also a book about media literacy, technically a training program, featured on the Media Literacy page at Wikipedia, and it’s called Media and Information Literacy: Reinforcing Human Rights, Countering Radicalization and Extremism. Again, media literacy isn’t framed as being about the defense of good things but rather the “countering” of bad things.

So according to our experts, what is media literacy about?

Media literacy is essentially about understanding the process behind the construction of an information product — it’s interested in how the stew is made. Media literacy is about awareness of technique, strategy, rhetorical approach, the actors behind something, their biases and prejudices; the who, what, when, where, why, how. And, unsurprisingly, its emphasis on rhetorical analysis is consistent with the pedagogical approach that American universities routinely practice in their mandatory courses on essay composition for first-year students. It’s very school-ish.

But let’s be clear: its most salient characteristic is one of skepticism towards media information, not necessarily good faith. It certainly can have an exculpatory function — there’s no reason why it can’t — but that is not how it is typically presented by authorities. All the more interesting, then, that the people who most commonly invoke media literacy do so for that purpose.

III. Two Types of Ground: Genetic vs. Perceptual

Despite the similarity of their names, media literacy is not the same thing as media ecology. Both disciplines are used to contextualize information by setting it in relief against a background of some kind, but the manner in which each field does so differs quite a bit.

In both disciplines, the specific media information that people immediately recognize is what we’ll call the figure, and the configuration of background elements that gives rise to it (a configuration to which our attention isn’t immediately drawn) is what we’ll call the ground. In media literacy, every study begins with the figure. The researcher hears or sees the information, and she sets out to determine the hidden information that led to its articulation. This is typically done via inference and maybe some outside research. Media ecology, in contrast, starts right at the ground and doesn’t particularly concern itself with any one figure. Instead, all figures are understood only insofar as they emerge perceptually from their ground. There is rarely any focus on a piece of specific information from which to make inferences about its production. Because of the differences in methodologies, the “ground” each discipline examines is unavoidably going to be different from the other.

Media literacy is mostly interested in a figure’s genetic material, the circumstances in the past that led to the creation of that piece of information. Media ecology, however, is interested in the ground that contextualizes a message right at its moment of transmission. It is not genetic but perceptual (in fact Marshall McLuhan adopted the terms “figure and ground” right from Gestalt Psychology), which means the media ecologist examines a medium’s physical characteristics, its contours — we might even say its filtration mechanisms that determine the content that any given piece of information will have. These two considerations, genetic ground vs. perceptual ground, are perpendicular to one another. And due to their perpendicularity, you don’t often find one mode of analysis intersecting with another. Media literacy analysts almost never bother to distinguish one medium from another beyond simply naming it and moving on. In fact, they use “media” quite glibly, in statements like, “Did you know that American youths spend ten hours a day consuming media?” seldom qualifying what “media” even means in that context.

There are still other differences. Though you can tell an interesting story using media ecology, it is generally a synchronic method of analysis, because it interprets information against what grounds it perceptually as soon as the user interacts with it. Media literacy, on the other hand, is diachronic because it mostly focuses on past circumstances that determine how a piece of information was constructed, or occasionally future possibilities of how it will be understood. This means that it typically has some narrative component.

Consider the five questions of media literacy from the “Media Literacy Now” video quoted above. Four out of five are backward looking and thus ought to be rendered with past tense verbs: Who created this message? What creative techniques were used? What values and points-of-view were represented in or omitted from the message? Why was the message sent? When you start to answer these questions, you start to create a little movie in your head. Why does the Apple Macintosh commercial have a hipster guy representing a Mac, while the office nerd represents a PC? Well, once upon a time, some ad executives sat around and researched consumer perceptions surrounding Apple, and they decided to counter these perceptions by creating a character who represents the demographic to which they’re aiming to appeal, and then they decided that he would be best dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans, because research showed that a sweatshirt conveys blah blah blah… you get the picture.

As for remaining question from that video, “How might people understand this message differently from me?” it is also something that invites you to create a little movie in your head, only it’s about the effect of information rather than what prompted its presentation. You might imagine someone watching All in the Family, maybe some uptight Republican who likes to kick homeless people in the stomach just for fun, he sees Archie Bunker, and he says, “Yeah, ha, ha! There’s my kind of guy! I think I’ll kick a homeless person in the stomach extra hard tomorrow, just for him! Oh, and I’ll make sure that he’s one of those people of color, while I’m at it! Ha, ha, ha!” Well, if that’s the kind of message people would take from the show, then clearly it is irresponsible, whatever its intention might be! Now, whether or not that’s a good analysis, it demonstrates that media literacy has a prominent narrative component to it. You analyze a story by constructing other stories depicting events that either led to that one, or emerged as its consequence. I won’t return to this point for the remainder of this discussion, but it is essential to understanding the media literacy expert.

IV. Is Media Literacy Dead?

Let’s go back to the way media literacy is understood on social media. Consider one of the major claims you see about it: that it’s dead. Is that true? Is it even in decline? The answer would absolutely have to be no, not at all. In fact, it’s more alive than ever before. Young people especially are very aware of how artificial what they’re watching truly is. They are far more interested in the outside circumstances surrounding a piece of information, including both its causes and potential effects, than ever before.

Here’s an excerpt from an interview between Norm MacDonald and Billy Bob Thornton that demonstrates just how clueless the baby boomer generation was about television and film:

Norm Macdonald: When I was a kid, I… now everybody knows how much money movies make, too. Isn’t that weird?

Billy Bob Thornton: We didn’t even know they made money. Y’know? I thought they were real, I just thought these guys got together and… I used to think they shot the whole thing at once. And they just got a camera, the guy walks out of the courthouse, goes and gets into the car, drives across town, y’know?

If you talk to most baby boomers, even the most discerning ones, you’ll hear similar anecdotes.

Professional wrestling is an especially good example of how media literacy has evolved over time, since it demonstrates the comfort with which the average fan in earlier times could sustain internal contradictions between what he felt in the moment of the event and what he knew to be the reality at an abstract level. The wrestling journalist Dave Meltzer occasionally brings up polls from as early as the 1950s showing that the majority of the general public knew that the outcomes were predetermined and the wrestlers were cooperating with one another. Yet, at the same time, it was quite common for fans to physically attack the bad-guy wrestlers as they were leaving the ring (Roddy Piper, for example, was stabbed in the chest). Whatever the fans of yesteryear understood about the nature of the sport in their quiet moments of contemplation, many would gladly forget about its artifice as the spectacle was unfolding before their eyes. They allowed themselves to believe, they cheered and booed the wrestlers rather than the promotion, and they didn’t think much about the booking as such, the ground of the performance.

But nowadays, it is incredibly rare for a fan to attack a wrestler out of genuine hatred, and when a wrestler does create real hostility from the fans, the fans will typically target the promotion for “platforming” him, doing what they can to threaten its income. Thus, bad-guy wrestlers can’t really be all that bad, and the heat they generate must be reached through a process of negotiation between themselves and fans. Moreover, when a fan boos, he’s just as likely to boo the booking as he is to boo the wrestler he dislikes, and even then, the boos in the latter case are now often ironic! This somewhat depressing video, in which a little girl and a bad-guy wrestler insult each other at a fan convention even as he signs autographs for her, demonstrates a high level of media literacy from everyone involved, and it would be inconceivable even just thirty years ago.

Occasionally, someone on social media will figure out the truth, like this:

(Speaking of that Billy Dee Williams story, I also recall hearing an interview with Jason Hervey, who played Kevin’s older brother Wayne on The Wonder Years, talking about how people would confront him in public and yell at him for being mean to his little brother Kevin). But in media literacy discussions, such understanding as seen in the post above is rare. For the most part, people really seem to think that we’ve fallen from a mythical Golden Age of perfect analytical skills.

V. What “Media Literacy Is Dead” Really Means

Again, when people mourn the death of media literacy, they’re most commonly doing so in an exculpatory way, defending a good story from bad analysis. For a good video example, here’s an insanely long one with over 300,000 views. No, I didn’t watch it, and neither should you. But I can provide two much quicker examples:

The first post is about Nabokov’s Lolita, while the second is about some throwaway anime, but the message is the same in both: just because a story features bad things doesn’t mean the story or its author endorses them. This is a pretty reasonable point, but there’s a serious problem: it doesn’t have anything to do with media literacy.

Media literacy, remember, is about unearthing the ground that gives rise to the figure. For this reason, it means going outside the message itself to think about its genetic conditions, the multitude of factors that brought it into being. As I’ve shown, people in the past didn’t consider the ground when they read a book or enjoyed some piece of entertainment. They remained focused on the figure. Media ecology actually provides an explanation as to why this is: it’s a hangover from the age of print. According to Marshall McLuhan, these three things, 1) the purely visual aspect of novels and other books, 2) the west’s use of phonetic alphabets, and 3) the standardization of typeface, spelling, and punctuation through the printing press all came together and conditioned us to focus entirely on the message being conveyed, since those three elements all made the perceptual ground of the information as seamless and unnoticeable as can be. Thus, people would refrain from considering the extrinsic elements that house the ideas being written, give rise to them, and so on. One can infer that early television and film was looked upon with the standards we give to written media, like a novel, and the critics sure treated film that way.

In our current electronic media paradigm — where messages are conveyed in “acoustic space,” as McLuhan calls it — the figure is constantly brushing against the ground, always at risk of being overtaken by it, making that ground the new figure, putting that new figure itself in jeopardy. There’s always a new layer of information to focus on, always uncovering itself, always making everything unstable. If you’re evaluating a story while constantly considering its external factors, you’re interested in the ground rather the figure, and you’re thus more at home in the electronic world.

What these social media accounts are bemoaning is thus not the decline of media literacy, but rather the failure to evaluate an entertainment or literary product entirely according to what’s there in the figure. They’re bemoaning the decline of old-school literary analysis, not media literacy at all. You don’t need to read a biography on Nabokov and his views about pedophilia to realize that the narrator in Lolita is unreliable: it’s there in the text. Same goes for the evil character in that throwaway anime, probably. The people attacking these things like Lolita and that anime are probably asking themselves questions like, “Even if that character is supposed to be understood as bad, what if he influences a real pervert in real life?” That’s the kind of question that media literacy authorities encourage you to ask, since it focuses on extrinsic considerations that go beyond mere literary comparison.

If these “media literacy is dead” accounts really knew what they were criticizing, they’d realize that media literacy is, if anything, their enemy. Or at the very least, they’d realize that the recent growth in media literacy has created something like a Dunning-Kruger effect, where a little bit of knowledge is more harmful than none at all.

VI. Media Literacy as Political Correction

I’ll conclude with a comment on the media literacy people who use it to do battle against conservatives. These social media accounts seem to understand better what media literacy really is about, and they mostly use their knowledge to correct conservatives who “misinterpret” some piece of entertainment that has an overtly liberal or at least anti-right-wing message. This is because these accounts rely heavily on extrinsic information to prove their points: they dig up interviews with the director, artist, musician, or whoever is creatively involved. They go into the biographies of everyone in the production. They bring up who funded it. They’ll do whatever it takes to show that no, the conservative who likes the Barbie movie (or whatever) is in fact mistaken. Barbie is a feminist movie, not a reactionary one. The Boys is an anti-fascist show, not a fascist one. All in the Family is a liberal show, and Archie Bunker is the bad guy. These people represent the side of the debate in literary criticism that believes authorial intention is absolutely essential to understanding a work’s value, and thus they care deeply about what authors have to say of their own works.

But again, while these people seem to better grasp what media literacy is according to how their teachers have instructed them, it’s fascinating nonetheless that they mostly use it as a way to defend corporate entertainment from scary interpretations. It’s telling: media literacy is presented by teachers as a bulwark against misinformation, but every time you see it mentioned by media viewers, it’s used as a bulwark to defend the information itself against misinterpretation. It should make absolutely clear who dominates the culture industry. Anyways, I would pity these people if they weren’t so fun to toy with.

The question of authorial intent has been a part of academic literary criticism for quite a while, and throughout most of the twentieth century, the debate settled in favor of the notion that the author’s personal feeling about his work doesn’t matter. First the New Critics, then the deconstructionists came along and reiterated the same message: when a text has been released into the public, it’s out of its creators’ hands. Even the psychoanalysts were on board, since they felt that an author won’t necessarily know his own true intentions, since the subconscious mind is elusive and shapes the conscious mind in sometimes unexpected ways (the conscious/subconscious mind is another figure/ground relationship). Then, when identity-group advocacy became an explicit part of critical theory, that all changed. All of a sudden, if a woman told a story about sexism and you tried to deny that she’s fully in control of her expressly stated intentions, you’d be on thin ice. Same goes for any guy from a colonized country telling a story about racism, and so on. Before long, “the author” made a return, though in a simplified way. “The author” came back, but as the representative of a category; a cliché. I don’t think media literacy could have thrived as it currently does in a situation where people still believed in “the death of the author.”

Yet all the same, part of media literacy isn’t just about authorial intention. It’s also about asking how a message might come across to different groups of people. While it’s mostly interested in a message’s genetic factors, it is still interested in a message’s potential consequences, and this is where anyone who doesn’t take media literacy so seriously can have some fun. Though media literacy people will constantly mock the “bad interpretations” of conservatives, make no mistake: their mockery conceals a deep feeling of insecurity. After all, if authorial intention is highly important in evaluating a work’s quality, then what does it say if a considerable portion of the population simply fails to understand the author’s intent? And if the author doesn’t achieve what he was intending, has he not failed at delivering his message by media literacy’s own standards? This is why it’s impossible to “own” conservatives by attacking their media literacy, and if anything, conservatives can always double down in their refusal to understand. A particularly clever conservative can get all Freudian and go, “Oh, that show’s creator wasn’t fully aware of her own intentions.” And if a sufficient amount of people don’t care what the author’s intended message was, then it’s the author who has been proven to be media-illiterate, not his “misinterpreters.”

Here we find the great Achilles’ heel of the media literacy people. When they tell conservatives to “take a media literacy course,” the conservatives can always pull a Bartleby the Scrivener and reply, “I would prefer not to.” Beyond that, conservatives don’t even need to respect the author at all, even when they do know what he was attempting to accomplish: they can simply use tools of digital media to edit their own meaning into these corporate entertainment products and thus turn propaganda for one side into its diametric opposite. I welcome all of this mischief, personally.

But I do also hope that they can make some time for material that isn’t just corporate trash.