Media and Meaning-Making in the Fake News Age

As Professor and former Director of the Harrington School of Communication and Media at URI, Renee founded an innovative communication school that brings together the departments and programs in journalism, film and media, communication, public relations, rhetoric, and a graduate program in library and information studies.

In December 2017, we caught up with Renee to ask her about how media literacy and digital literacy have evolved, and why these two competencies are essential life skills in the digital age. (Interview posted: January 30, 2018)

PIL: When and why did teachers first introduce media education curricula to K-12 students in the U.S.? Since then, how has media literacy evolved? When did digital literacy come into the picture, and how is it different from media literacy?

Renee: We’re still trying to track the history of media literacy education because only a few brave scholars have attempted to trace the roots of this work. One of the reasons why I was motivated to gather and share personal narratives about the grandparents of media literacy is there are many still-unexamined voices and perspectives that shaped the development of the movement and the field.

For example, in the 1930s, Edgar Dale was an influence on American educators when he proposed that students learn about newspapers and film in the context of English education. Also during this time, the Institute for Propaganda Analysis developed and disseminated lesson plans, activities, and newsletters for high school teachers and public librarians that explicitly demonstrated how to critically analyze news and advertising in newspapers, magazines, and radio. These lessons helped students identify persuasive techniques and encouraged students to reflect on their own personal biases. 

When Marshall McLuhan proposed a careful examination of the formal features of television and popular culture, teachers were enthusiastic. His ideas also encouraged educators to more fully consider the cultural context of the medium in relationship to social movements and the larger society. By the 1970s, media literacy became known as “critical viewing skills” and it was embraced by the National Council of Teachers of English. 

In the 1980s, the turn towards cultural studies brought this important work to the higher education community. Stuart Hall helped make theoretical concepts like representation be more easily understood and Sut Jhally started making media literacy videos to address the stereotyped depiction of gender in music videos. The lowering costs of television equipment enabled high schools and communities to build production studios and make their own television programming. Youth media production programs flowered during the 1980s and, as a pedagogical approach, this was a significant shift. 

In the 1990s, educators and scholars conceptualized media literacy as an expanding form of literacy that included both reading and writing practices with a focus on mass media and popular culture. It was only a matter of time before we used the term “digital literacy” to include the technical and cognitive skills needed to use the Internet for lifelong learning. It was a joy to collaborate with libraries on the evolving conceptualization of digital literacy. 

Since 2010, I have used the term digital and media literacy because I am fascinated by the many connections between concepts. Figure 1 shows a comparison and contrast of some key competencies of digital literacy and media literacy. Because of the many ways that people use to create and share meaning, the concept of literacy has had to change.

The four big ideas at the center of the diagram in the figure remind us why we think of digital and media literacy as an expanded conceptualization of literacy. Literacy is the sharing of meaning in symbolic form. We can no longer tie merely literacy to a particular set of cognitive practices like reading comprehension. Reading and listening comprehension are both critically important competencies that are embedded in digital and media literacy. But too many students never get to create anything more than an academic essay to demonstrate their learning.

Today, free and low-cost tools are transforming media creation for the masses. For example, Anchor is a simple tool for podcasting and Piktochart helps me make amazing infographics. It’s shameful that undergraduate students don’t get to experience the thrill of creating media as a way to represent their learning. It seems to me that some of these undergraduate YouTubers, like Nathan Zed, are not well-recognized as role models for civic engagement. That’s one of the reasons why I wrote Create to Learn: Introduction to Digital Literacy. As the figure shows, these competencies are collaborative, critical, and creative, addressing the role of media and digital technology in the larger context of culture and society.  

PIL: A 2015 large-scale study on U.S. teens and their media use confirmed what many of us already know: Young adults spend more time using media technologies than any previous generation. But the big surprise was how much time – nine hours a day, on average – teens reportedly spent looking at their screens. How has the ability to learn and retain knowledge affected teens who spend so many hours online? How are online behaviors different among teens of different socioeconomic groups in the U.S.?

Renee: Because educators have not yet embraced the potential of cell phones for learning, mobile media is viewed as primarily a device for entertainment, diversion, and relationship maintenance. For this reason, there’s not too much difference between kids from upwardly-mobile households and those from working-class families: Boys are playing video games and girls are using social media platforms. Upper middle-class kids get enrichment activities so they use a little less mobile media than African-American and Hispanic kids from poorer communities. Mobile media is a requirement for teens today: It enables us to be in constant contact with family and friends and to create a stream of images and language and sounds to capture the flow of daily life.

But the cell phone is also changing the way children and young people think about learning. When you have a camera and photo storage system right in your hand, taking a photo of a blackboard assignment seems far more efficient than copying it down in your notebook by hand. When you have the Internet in your pocket, the job of memorizing facts can seem rather quaint. When information can be accessed at the point of need, the pedagogy of listening to someone lecture on a subject while you take notes also may seem a bit bizarre. Fortunately, in many elementary and secondary schools, students are now learning through project-based, collaborative activities that connect the classroom to the real world, using the power of inquiry to accelerate intellectual curiosity. 

Unfortunately, because of restrictive school cell phone policies, many high school students don’t get exposed to how to use their digital devices for learning purposes. But in an innovative project developed by high school teachers who attended the URI Summer Institute in Digital Literacy, students discovered how to use their own cell phone for time management, study skills, and creative media production. They created short video tutorials to teach their peers and even shared their videos with students at another high school.

PIL: The far-reaching impact of social media on communication continues to be felt. Lately, you have written about conspiracy theories becoming an international phenomenon. What’s driving this change, and how should educators address it? When you showed Mark Dice’s video, “Google Censors Anti-Hillary Search Results,” to high school students in Frankfurt, Germany this past year, what was their reaction? How did you use the digital annotation tool, VideoAnt, to help students anywhere in the world engage with and critique this video, and discover what they believed in?

Renee: Conspiracy theories are on the rise in our culture and their social and political impact is difficult to ignore. They resonate in an age of anxiety because they attack opponents and evoke strong emotions. In my short talk on this topic, I point out that conspiracy theories raise an important question for educators and one that I’m particularly interested in exploring – the challenge of teaching about “bad content.” That’s the digital and media stuff that students encounter when using the Internet or watching cable TV. Most of it can’t be brought into the school context because the content is considered “inappropriate.”  

Should teachers bring such “inappropriate” content into the classroom? Because media literacy explicitly includes a focus on advertising, news, and entertainment media, this has long been an interest of mine. 

Fortunately, media literacy educators have long developed pedagogical methods to interrogate problematic media content (like conspiracy theories) without giving it more attention than it deserves. In Assignment: Media Literacy, I created the “Credible or Incredible” lesson plan, where students must find resources on a topic of interest to them, selecting 10 that range from highly credible to ridiculously bad and poor-quality content, displaying screen shots in a ranked order list and explaining their reasoning. This assignment turns out to be a great formative assessment because teachers and librarians can notice patterns in what students think was more and less credible. 

When pranking videos were all the craze in middle schools, my colleague Silke Grafe and I found a way to talk to students in school about the scary maze game prank and more generally about the practice of creating and sharing YouTube pranking videos. We wrote a paper on analyzing pranking videos to better learn how to help students reflect on the pleasure of the prank as well as the ethical problem inherent in taking pleasure in the pain of another. 

So, now, you want me to talk about my adventures in German high schools? In both Frankfurt and Mainz, German high school students loved the opportunity to analyze the Mark Dice autocomplete conspiracy using the media literacy smartphone. By asking critical questions, students shared knowledge about how search works in Google. Students also recognized the value of using digital tools to support new forms of dialogue and discussion.

Global collaboration matters today more than ever, and in this lesson, German students responded digitally to my American college students who had used Flipgrid to identify and analyze more than two dozen different conspiracy theories. The digital annotation tool, VideoAnt, also gave students a chance to critique the content and form of the Mark Dice video. They could notice the particular way Dice appeals to his audience and how he uses screencasting to create evidence that supports his argument.  

The most important finding of the lesson is that, by analyzing one specific conspiracy theory, students transformed their tacit knowledge of how the Internet works into explicit knowledge through discussion and dialogue. They increased their intellectual curiosity by watching and analyzing the conspiracy video; German students were able to generate more than a dozen questions that the lesson had raised in their minds. They had become more curious.

One student asked, “Are conspiracy theories a new trend?” Another student asked, “How can you prove a conspiracy theory wrong?” One student asked, “Why would people be more likely to believe a conspiracy theory presented by some random person on the Internet than facts presented by an accredited journalist who has researched and investigated the topic as part of their job?” And one girl simply wondered, “Why are we so interested in conspiracy theories? Why do we like learning about them?” This helps underline the idea that inquiry, interpretation, and meaning-making is at the heart of digital and media literacy education. 

PIL: When you addressed the U.N. earlier this year, you began by saying, “how we define violent extremism depends on where we sit … who we called Freedom Fighters in 1985 are now known as terrorists.” How can educators help students ask critical questions about all forms of authority as a step toward fighting messages from violent hate groups? What do curricula for preventing the spread of such violence look like?

Renee: We’re still in the infancy of learning how media literacy can help to counter the rising tide of radicalization and hate. As the development community jumps on this topic, I feel it’s important not to over-dramatize claims about the value of digital and media literacy. Radical communities appeal to people because they address relevant issues and create feelings of acceptance and belonging as they tap into people’s need for a sense of purpose. I feel that the ACRL has offered tremendous insight on teaching about authority, helping us all realize that authority is not a fixed and tangible quality of a text. Awareness of the constructed nature of authority has profound implications for civic learning. 

I am interested in learning about the differing ways in which “radicalization” is depicted in entertainment television shows, movies, and videogames. I like to teach with film trailers because they can be used to explore narrative themes and stereotypes. Antiheroes have grown to be a staple of entertainment media. Today, many movies position viewers as the rogue warrior, fighting against the establishment. In Suffragette, the 2015 British historical period drama about women’s suffrage in the United Kingdom, director Sarah Gavron invites viewers to identify with the young woman who becomes a terrorist. Here violence is presented as necessary and justified.

Learning to recognize propaganda in entertainment and on social media will need to become an increasingly important skill in the years to come. That’s one of the reasons why I created Mind Over Media, a crowdsourced gallery of contemporary propaganda. We’re pleased to be working with six European media literacy organizations to increase its global reach in 2018. Stay tuned to see what we learn from the collaboration!

PIL: While writing articles, reports, and books, at the forefront of media literacy education in formal educational settings, it’s your 2010 report for the Knight Foundation that outlines strategies that go beyond the classroom. While educators are deploying curricula that encourage students to develop media literacy skills, how are they motivating students to transfer these skills beyond classroom assignments, into their media consumption, at large? As far as creating media, how can digital authorship impact critically important participation in media and society? 

Renee: Student voices add much value to issues of public concern. But the issue of how and whether youth media voices actually impact civic discourse raises a question that Tufts University professor Peter Levine has called the “audience problem.” Sometimes media composition is approached as a mere exercise in expression (or a form of play), without enough focus on the communicative intentionality that is inherent in authentic media works. Levine worried that student media makers create media that no one will see or hear because the work of youth media makers does not meet audience conventions for watchability. 

As learners, students are developing competences for citizenship in a highly mediatized cultural environment where increasing polarization makes democratic discourse more and more challenging. This is a challenge for media professionals, let alone for beginners, who experience a range of conceptual and technical problems when it comes to digital authorship. Teens and young adults face many obstacles in creating media that is perceived by viewers as “worth watching” without substantial support from mentors whom co-construct work. 

Some educators put a high value on helping students to create work that is not only watchable but also contributes to community discourses on social issues that matter. One of the best examples of this is the work of POPPYN, a Philadelphia youth media program at Temple University Community Collaborative of Philadelphia (UCCP) who produce a monthly news program, What’s Poppyn. Each episode features a theme on issues of interest to youth, including access to clean water, the foster care system, and Syrian refugees. This show reaches a real audience of Philadelphia teens through its broadcast on local-access television. 

Student-created work can be re-appropriated by other media outlets in ways that transform the work’s meaning. For example, Youth Radio’s Elizabeth Soep has documented challenges that may occur when youth media projects get disseminated and distributed to larger audiences. Sometimes the afterlife of a story takes an unexpected turn. She notes that today’s digital authors must also know “how to access, understand, and act on analytics – meaning compilations of data that reveal how content is being consumed.” When authors know how “what parts of a story users click on, how long they stayed, what users’ points of entry were into the piece, where they went when they left, and what platforms they used to share the story with friends,” they have a better understanding of how their work is consumed and used. 

One thing is certain: For digital authorship to impact critically important participation in media and society, students and educators alike must be able to take risks and prepare for the unexpected. 

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Renee Hobbs is an educator, advocate, teacher, and scholar. She is the founding co-editor of the Journal for Media Literacy Education, an open-access peer reviewed journal. In 2012, she served as Digital Literacy Fellow for the American Library Association Office of Information Technology Policy (OITP).

During the course of her career, Renee has published seven books, and has written dozens of scholarly works in the fields of communication, education, and health. Her latest book, Create to Learn: Introduction to Digital Literacy (2017) is a primer on using multimedia for storytelling so students can learn the value of critical thinking and crafting messages.

Smart Talks are informal conversations with leading thinkers about the challenges of higher education and teaching and learning in the digital age. This interview with Renee Hobbs was made possible with the generous support from the Knight Foundation and a grant from the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), the largest division of the American Library Association.

Smart Talk interviews are open access and licensed by Creative Commons. The interviews are an occasional series produced by Project Information Literacy (PIL).

Suggested citation format: “Renee Hobbs: Media and Meaning-Making in the Fake News Age” (email interview) by Alison Head and Margy MacMillan, Project Information Literacy, Smart Talk Interview, no. 29 (30 January 2018) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial 3.0 Unported License.