The media literacy movement’s debt to Marshall McLuhan

Abstract

Abstract Media ecologists Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman considered education to be the essential way to counter the negative effects of technopoly, which define a culture that deifies technology, and seeks support, authority and its satisfactions from it. The relatively new subject of media literacy seeks to convey awareness of media’s potential harms and to shield its users from becoming unwilling servants of technology. Marshall McLuhan wrote extensively about education and created the very first high school media studies curriculum for the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) in the United States, influencing the media literacy practitioners to come. The first generation of media literacy teachers in Canada and the United States adopted a broad conception of what was needed for students to be considered media literate. The question to be considered is whether, since then the teaching of media literacy has become focused more narrowly on content analysis and the how-to aspects of media use, while neglecting the theoretical and conceptual roots of media studies.