Danah Boyd on Media Literacy

Watching clips from danah boyd’s recent talk (“What Hath We Wrought?”) at the SXSW EDU conference had me worried. It’s ironic, however, in that my worry turns out to be a product of how these clips were framed by Goldie Blumenstyk, a writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Apparently, Blumentstyk didn’t much like boyd’s accusation that media literacy has been perverted. According to boyd, media literacy is not (or, at least, it shouldn’t be) merely telling students to fact check. You have to go deeper, to consider the epistemology behind how facts are used instead. I’m not entirely sure what from boyd’s talk Blumenstyk reacted so strongly and negatively toward, but I suspect that it’s boyd’s assertion that we can’t simply assert authority over someone else’s epistemology. That’s not a game we can win, but it doesn’t stop people in power (or who are looking for power) from playing. Below, I’ve extracted several quotes that I found helpful and included their timestamps. I mostly did this to reassure myself that boyd is not, in fact, turning into a technophobe, but I’ve also come away with a useful lesson: our concept of media literacy needs to continue to develop as the ways in which people use and manipulate media continues to change.

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Notes from boyd’s talk:

• “I meant this talk to be a little provocative” (0:45).
• “When we ask [our students] to challenge their sacred cows [their favorite media sources], if we don’t give them a new framework in which to make sense of the world, others are often there to do it for us, and it doesn’t always end the way we hope it will” (2:40).
• [3:50 – the current idea of media literacy that students are being taught, and which students believe to be “media literacy,” is not adequate. “Don’t trust Wikipedia; Google it.”]
• “We equate freedom of speech with the right to be amplified” (16:40).
• [Relevant to our class: boyd mentions Godwin’s Law and Poe’s Law around 19:30.]
  • [From Wikipedia: Godwin’s law […] is an Internet adage that asserts […] if an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Adolf Hitler or his deeds.]
• “I don’t want us to think that any media literacy critique is enough for us to deal with what’s actually going on” (28:40).
• “This is about making sense of an information landscape where the very tools that people use to make sense of the world around them have been strategically perverted by people who believe themselves to be resisting the same powerful actors that often we think we should be able to critique” (29:20).
• “One of the best ways to gaslight the public is to troll the media” (32:00).
  • [Gaslighting: “It makes someone confused and disoriented” (33:40). Once someone has been gaslighted, they require quite a bit of therapy to get them back to where they were.]
• “When you start to empathize with worldviews that are toxic, it’s actually really hard to stay grounded” (39:30).
• [You have to teach your students about epistemological differences—not just how bias is evidenced by an end product, but why different groups have different biases to begin with. Where are these biases coming from? (40:50).]
• “We can not and should not get in the game of asserting authority over epistemology” (43:10). [We need them to understand how facts are used in different ways; it’s not enough just to fact check.]
• “We need to recognize that information can and will be weaponized in new ways” (44:55).