Kirkwood-Webster Times/West End Word/ South County Times Editor
By Don Corrigan
What is media literacy? Why is media literacy especially important as we enter the new age of digital technology? And 100 years after his birth, what would Marshall McLuhan have to say about media literacy?
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia of the Internet, defines media literacy as “a repertoire of competences” that enable people to analyze and evaluate media messages in diverse media modes. Media literacy explores structural features of the media, such as ownership and funding models.
Wikipedia adds to its definition with this elaboration: “Media literacy can be seen as contributing to an expanded conceptualization of literacy, treating mass media, popular culture and digital media as new types of ‘texts’ that require analysis and evaluation.”
The expansive definition of media literacy on Wikipedia works fine for me. However, I know a number of university professors who abhor the Wikipedia phenomenon of today’s Internet. They threaten to assign “F” grades to any student papers that cite Wikipedia as research sources.
I know other professors who often proclaim Wikipedia to be a modern-day miracle of the Internet. These professors encourage their students to start all their research on selected topics with Wikipedia, and follow back to the sources cited in Wikipedia articles for their research.
So which professors are correct in their stance to the use of Wikipedia on the Internet? This, in itself, is a question that is best answered by using the tools provided by media literacy education. And this new kind of literacy prompts the media literate to ask even more questions:
– Who founded Wikipedia? Who owns this information entity? How is it funded? Is it incorporated as a profit or a non-profit?
– Who assembles the information on each post? How often is it updated and who monitors the updates? Do the people contributing to the “Wiki” definitions have an agenda?
– Who uses the information on Wikipedia? How satisfied are they that the information is generally accurate? How does its accuracy stack up in comparison to the old print model of the Encyclopedia?
All of these questions beg an even larger question for those of us, who in one way or another, are involved in the field of media literacy: Are all of the various new media outlets and technologies associated with the Internet changing the way we think?
Media scholar Clay Shirky argues that the Internet has dramatically changed the way we think, improving our access to information and offering incredible large scale collaborations in information sharing – for instance, think Wikipedia.
Shirky, a New York University professor who has been dubbed an Internet evangelist, argues that for the first time in human history, we are embracing new media that allows humankind to pool its once scattered efforts at vanishingly low cost.
In Clay’s 2010 study, “Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers Into Collaborators,” the digital advocate says the aggregated efforts of the Internet range from the mind-expanding resource of the new Wikipedia, to websites which allow humans to come together to address problems on a global scale.
Scholar and writer Nicholas Carr agrees with Shirky that the Internet is changing the way we think, but Carr does not think the changes in our brain functioning are necessarily for the better. Carr is partial to book learning and the printed word and argues that unlike a PC, a Kindle or an iPhone, a book focuses our attention, isolates us from a barrage of distractions, provides us with a focused intellectual experience.
In contrast, the Net scatters our attention and bombards us with a welter of contending stimuli. Carr cites actual laboratory tests that suggest the Internet reconfigures our brain inputs to adapt to flashes of information that provide a sort of drug high – like an ever-changing psychedelic light show at a noisy, numbing rock concert.
In his controversial article, “Is Google Making Us Stupider?” in Atlantic magazine in 2008, Carr observed: “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.”
So where would McLuhan, the primal explorer in the field of media literacy, come down in the debate over the question of how the Internet is changing us? Would he side with the positively digital partisan Shirky or the crotchety, techno-paranoid Carr?
Actually, I suspect he would – in typical McLuhan fashion – come down on both sides. He would certainly employ some of the superlatives of Internet cheerleader Shirky in describing the vast web of inter-connectedness that now links us all together in love and hate, hope and despair.
However, McLuhan would also not hesitate to point out the dark side of this virtual star that increasingly has us all twinkling together. He would undoubtedly sound a lot like Carr in emphasizing its destruction of our powers for true contemplation and analysis; and, in expressing concern for the end of individual identity and any sense of privacy.
And so, dear reader, at this point you might rightfully ask where the author of this column comes down in the debate over how the Internet is changing the way we think? Allow me to confess that I lean toward the disposition of scholar Nicholas Carr, a dinosaur in all these digital matters.
Recall that I was originally set on a media literacy mission to answer questions related to the efficacy and credibility of Wikipedia. But even as I was reading the “Wiki” definition of media literacy on my humming computer’s screen, I was totally distracted by my device’s numerous “Frog” alert sounds indicating urgent new e-mails were arriving.
And when not opening e-mails, I was surfing the Web for articles about the Internet and opening Amazon reviews of books by Shirky and Carr. Their books are in my possession, but I must confess I have never had the patience required to read them in their entirety. I’ve scanned them.
If I might quote my fellow techno-paranoid apostle Carr: “My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.”
So, does this put me on the cutting edge of the new media literacy? Or does it simply make me a new media illiterate?
Editor’s note: GMLP proudly announces Don Corrigan is this year’s GMLP Charles Klotzer Media Literacy Award
