Review: Storify (2011)

Abstract

The National Association for Media Literacy Education’s Journal of Media Literacy Education 3:1 (2011) 14 15 Media Literacy Education: Harnessing the Technological Imaginary Katherine G. Fry Dept. of Television & Radio, Broolyn College of the City University of New York, Brooklyn, NY, USA As I see it, an important challenge for media literacy education in the next decade will be to cultivate a commanding voice in the cultural conversation about new and emerging communication media. To really have a stake in the social, economic and educational developments that emerge around new digital media in the U.S. and globally, media literacy educators need to be part of that larger conversation. Put another way, media literacy education is obligated to harness the technological imaginary and steer it in a productive direction. The technological imaginary consists of the myths, attitudes and values that a culture attaches to new technologies, sometimes in terms of their perceived abilities to fix what’s wrong with society, and sometimes in terms of their perceived destruction of social cohesion (Lister et al. 2003). A less polemic view is that the technologial imaginary is a cultural space for negotiating social issues (Marvin 1988). In other words, any number of concerns—about youth development, about the state of Democracy, about the direction of the economy, etc.—can be framed within a discussion about new technologies as cause, antidote or relevant player. Media literacy educators ought to be wellequipped and outspoken in the public negotiation of social and cultural issues attached to new and emerging media in the realms of education, commerce, information and policy. A widespread public influence can be achieved if media literacy educators set their focus in two areas: 1) emphasizing analysis of media technologies along with media content since the forms themselves shape not only content but also the very ways in which we organize our lives, and 2) understanding that the changes in media and communication rapidly taking place right now are part of a historic continuum of change and should be seen in that larger context. The current technological imaginary surrounding digital media is evident not only in fictional narratives about powerful media and technologies found in television and film (Eagle Eye, Wag the Dog) or advertising (ads for the Droid or the iPhone), but also in the discourses of those politicians, policy makers, educators, and employees within the traditional media industries who tend to focus on the ways in which emerging digital media practices via social networking and the Internet are undermining democracy, journalism, commerce, the needs and future abilities of children and youth, and so on. There is no doubt that purely fear-based dystopian and rosy utopian strands of the technological imaginary are simplistic, and almost never comprehensive or historically-based. But because communication technologies are so rapidly developing right now it seems reasonable that one-dimensional visions of future social interaction, of daily living, and of our vulnerabilities have surfaced in relation to digital communication. So media literacy educators must try to shape the technological imaginary in a reasoned, informed and very public way.