5 A’s for Media Literate Citizenship

ACCESS to media

AWARENESS of media’s power

ASSESSMENT of how media portray events and

issues

APPRECIATION for the role media play in

creating civil societies

ACTION to encourage better communication

across cultural, social and political divides.
 Appreciation

• How can we appreciate the necessity of

media’s role in civil society?
• How do the subtleties of a media culture
influence our social reality?
• How do the media build identity?
• How can we appreciate diversity through
understanding media?
• What are the new ways media are
empowering citizenship?
Appreciating technology and
identity…
Bald Cypress Juniper Gray Birch Maple Poplar

Chesnut English Ivy Hibiscus Oak Sassafras

Barberry Flowering Dogwood Magnolia Pine Witch Hazel

Media help us build
identities around
products, messages,
ideas, cultures, and
communities…understa
nding these
connections can help
cultivate an
appreciation for the
necessary role of
media in our lives and
our democracy.
APPRECIATION 1 – SOCIAL
MEDIA AND NEW CIVIC
DIALOG

“Just as moveable type raised the value of being

able to read and write even as it destroyed the
scribal tradition, globally free publishing is making
public speech and action more valuable, even as its
absolute abundance diminishes the specialness of
professional publishing” (79)
 Partly Because of our
Increasingly Mediated
lives…
• 53 Hours Per Week with Media in US
(Kaiser, 2010)
• Over 8 Hours a day average engaged with
Screens (Ball State Study, 2009)
• Estimated 5-8 billion Google Searches per
month today (Google)
• 6 Billion minutes a day are spent on
Facebook globally every day (Facebook)
 Paradoxes of the Information Age

• Multiplicity of voices | Multiplicity of

“realities”
• Information richness | Information fatigue
• Citizens who know more facts | Citizens
who have less truth
Q1: What Are Social Media?
Social media use web-based
technologies to transform and broadcast
media monologues into social media
dialogues. They support the
democratization of knowledge and
information and transform people from
content consumers to content producers.
 Three Traits to Social Media

1. Concept (art, information, or meme).

2. Media (physical, electronic, or verbal).
3. Social interface (intimate direct,
community engagement, social viral,
electronic broadcast or syndication, or
other physical media such as print).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
How are Social Media changing our
Society?
 Industrial vs. Social Media
• Reach - both industrial and social media technologies
provide scale and enable anyone to reach a global
audience.
• Accessibility - the means of production for industrial media
are typically owned privately or by government; social
media tools are generally available to anyone at little or no
cost.
• Usability - industrial media production typically requires
specialized skills and training. Most social media does not,
or in some cases reinvent skills, so anyone can operate the
means of production.
• Recency - the time lag between communications produced
by industrial media can be long, compared to social media
(only the participants determine any delay in response).
• Permanence - industrial media, once created, cannot be
Shifting Information Flow
1. Sharing
2. Cooperation (Production)
3. Action (Collective)

“Ridiculously easy group-forming matters because

the desire to be part of a group that shares,
cooperates, or acts in concert is a basic human
instinct that has always been constrained by
transaction costs” (54).
“It isn’t just that our communication
tools are cheaper; they are also
better. In particular, they are more
favorable to innovative uses,
because they are considered more
flexible than our old ones. Radio,
Television, and traditional phones
all rely on a handful of commercial
firms owning expensive hardware
connected to cheap consumer
devices that aren’t capable of very
much” (Shirky, 77)
“Communities of Practice
are inherently cooperative
and are beautifully
supported by social tools,
because that is exactly the
kind of community whose
members can recruit one
another or allow themselves
to be found by interested
searchers” (101)
Why are social Media enabling
new modes of dialog, as Shirky
claims?
convergence | collective
intelligence
 Convergence Culture

Two principal trends: the tendency of modern

media creations to attract a much greater
degree of audience participation than ever
before, to the point that some are actually
influenced profoundly by their fanbase,
becoming almost a form of interactive
storytelling; and the phenomenon of a single
franchise being distributed through and
impacting a range of media delivery methods.
COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE
“…the ability of virtual communities to leverage the
combined expertise of their members. What we
cannot know or do on our own, we may now be
able to do collectively” (Jenkins, Convergence
Culture, 27)
“What holds a collective intelligence together is
not the possession of knowledge—which is
relatively static, but the social process of
acquiring knowledge—which is dynamic and
participatory” (Jenkins, 54).
 Collective Action
“Collective Action, where a group acts as a
whole, is even more complex that
collaborative production, but here again
new tools give life to new forms of action.
This in turn challenges existing institutions,
by eroding the institutional monopoly on
large-scale coordination” (Shirky, 143)
Convergence Communication
• All or no Mediated communication?
• Digital Migrants vs. Digital Natives?
• Digital Divide to Participation Gap?
• Networking or Voyeurism?
• Stronger community or weaker
community?
• More expression or more exposure?
• Democratizing or Fragmenting?
CASE IN COLLECTIVE INTELLGIENCE /
ACTION:
Why do people post to Wikipedia?
“Print not only forces editors
to make unnatural decisions,
it layers symbolism onto the
length of topics…In the
Britannica, length is a symbol
of importance. In Wikipedia,
length is a manifestation of
interest and passion, even if
only of a single person.”
(207-8)
1. Exercise some unused mental capacities
2. Vanity – Making a mark on the world
3. Do a good thing (nonfinancial motivation)
(Shirky132-3)

“The Internet is the first big communication

network to make group communication a native
part of its repertoire…[it offers] the flexibility
that allows people to design and try new
communication tools without having to ask
anyone for permission” (157-8)
“An Article is neutral when people stop
changing it ”

“The trust we place in Britannica enables

us to be passive knowers: you merely
have to look a topic up to find out about it.
But Wikipedia provides the metadata
surrounding an article—edits, discussions,
warnings, links to other edits by the
contributors—because it expects the
reader to be actively involved” (142).
New ways to Organize
Information
New Platform for Mapping
Information…
New Avenues for Dialog
Looking at New Perspectives for
media and group collaboration
New structures for knowledge

“…knowledge exists between the

contributors. Social knowing changes who
does the knowing and how, more than it
changes the what of knowledge” (144).
 How do we understand the
CONNECTIONS among social
media and our communities?
How is the Future Changing our
Modes for Communication?
• Investigation vs. Aggregation
• Social Mapping our Civic Worth
• Remix / Repurpose / Repackage
• Realizing all we don’t read
• Collective Action, like all media action, is both good
and bad
• It’s about credibility, not authority
• Finding the Civic Through line of it all
• IT’S NOT ABOUT THE TOOLS!
 appreciating media’s necessary role in the
future of civic society

• CONNECTING Skills to Citizenship

• CONNECTING Analysis to Production
• CONNECTING Culture to Creation
• CONNECTING Responsibility to Empowerment
• CONNECTING communities, media, and
citizenship
Will the future tools for media bring the world
together in new “participatory” ways…?

When we change the way we communicate, we change

society. The tools that a society uses to create and maintain
itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life”
(Shirky, Here Comes Everyone, 17)
Who are the story tellers that will lead us in a digital
age? How will they work? And who will they work
for?

Kevin Sites in Yahoo’s Hot Zone

http://hotzone.yahoo.com/
Will collective intelligence change how
much
we know?

“…the ability of virtual communities to

leverage the combined expertise of their
members. What we cannot know or do on our
own, we may now be able to do collectively”
(Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 27)