Professor of Political Science, Webster University, Author
By Dan Hellinger
We might start with the question of why and how literacy became crucial in a world largely limited to print media, then how the meaning and importance of literacy changed with the advent of electronic media, and then how it literacy changed again with the advent of the Internet. There have always been two dimensions to literacy, production and consumption. In the period of print dominance, this meant simply writing and reading, respectively. The European invention (China was first) of the printing press laid the basis for the written word to be disseminated and consumed via mass media. An important development came with the Enlightenment and pamphleteering, which like the Internet today revolutionized the ability of people to organize and mobilize to resist or encourage social change.
The production of print media evolved in the era of industrial capitalism; the emergence of mass circulation newspapers had enlarging the consumer market for public information, made possible in turn by public schooling. A bi-product, however was the concentration of production of print culture. Despite nearly 100 percent “literacy” as far as writing and reading are concerned, the distance increased between consumption and production. The more complex division of labor in production of news contributed to a decline in the capacity of humans to enter into discourse and deliberation with one another about important questions of the day. The gap grew between production of information and its consumption. Although not recognized at the time, the need emerged for literacy that went between reading and writing.
The need became widely understood after the gap widened again with the development of electronic media, in particular with the emergence of television as the most important media for diffusing information and common sense about social life. This shift in media culture coincides, of course, with the career of Marshall McCluhan, whose work shifted attention from the message to the medium.
At least in the era of print domination, all readers knew how to write, in effect, how to produce content. When we write we have to make choices about vocabulary, the need for context, the need to qualify or attribute claims. Nothing comparable on the production side existed for the network television. When we only watch or listen, we are in a more passive role and lose touch with the kinds of choices commonly made when we produce information. It is not just technology but the concentration of ownership of technology that contributed to this dumbing-down of media literacy.
The advent of cable television, many of us will remember, came with a promise of democratization of production. But media corporations had little intention or incentive to make community production a reality and certainly not to provide resources and training to elevate the production values of community-based production to be competitive with capitalist media. It is certainly nothing innovative to say that the advent of the Internet and World Wide Web, on the other hand, somewhat shifted the productive side of culture back toward those who also consume. On-line or in-print resources provide multiple ways for ordinary people to enter into the production. This may take the form of relatively sophisticated web pages, blogs, interactive games, etc., or it may simply mean going on to a blog or clicking on a reporter’s email address to comment.
It is easy to exaggerate the degree of media democratization underway. I certainly doubt that the new communication technologies will inevitably place media power back in the hands of the people. Governments are learning how to regulate and censor the social media that contributed recently to the Arab Spring and to the emergence of “Occupy Wall Street” in the United States. The poorest strata of the population continue to lack access to the Internet. Corporate capital is flexing its muscle to regain control over bandwidth, something that directly threatens the ability of those with intellectual capital but limited wealth to produce on a par with the ruling class. Internet users may have more choices on the receiving end, but their actual participation in production of messages may be limited to fantasy sports, war games, entertainment – salacious or high-brow.
Still, it seems fair to say that the overall impact of the Internet has been to bring production and consumption of media and messages into a more symbiotic relationship to one another for a larger percentage of people than was true in the era when network television dominated discourse. Those who produce content are better able to understand the underlying messages and assumptions when they consume content.
The Internet and social media (which, I caution again, is reversible) have, then made media literacy more widespread because they facilitate easy access to diverse sources, permit communication though networks that more horizontal than corporate TV networks were at any time, and place in the hands of users tools (software) for communication that are affordable and can be mastered by ordinary people. However, a multitude of voices can produce cacophony, not discourse. And while professional journalists no longer hold a monopoly over gate-keeping, this comes with a certain loss of reliability.
McCluhan exhorted us to study the characteristics of a medium in place of content, but he did mean the message was unimportant when he said, “The medium is the message.” That would be like saying that someone was “literate” if they knew how to operate a printing press but could not read and write. Nonetheless, much of McCluhan’s work seems to me too far distanced from critical analysis of ownership and control over the mean of production of culture and news – control over both the technology and creative process.
Media literacy requires then not only an understanding the process of production and consumption, but how ownership and access influences messages. Print, radio and television, and the most widely accessed Internet news sources all continue to be produced in the hierarchical environment of the corporation. In news this means that we still have know how journalists, editors, publishers and owners shape choices of what is news, what vocabulary to use in covering it, how to contextualize it (or not). We still have to sort the wheat from the chaff on the Internet. The more we know about how these choices are made, the more media literate shall we be.
Dan Hellinger is professor of Political Science at Webster University and author of several books and articles on Latin American and US politics. He has been a frequent contributor to the St. Louis Journalism Review (now Gateway Journalism Review).
