Welcome to the Class!
I am thrilled to be teaching COM 250 Digital and Media Literacy in the Spring of 2024. In today’s media landscape, entertainment, information, and persuasion are increasingly blurred. Sponsored content is so skillfully blended into your social media feed that you may not even recognize it as advertising.
Most American children want to be a YouTuber, a professional videogame player, or a social media influencer when they grow up. Many of the top 200 television shows with the highest ratings are reality shows, depicting ordinary people competing in everything from singing and dancing to losing weight, or just living their everyday lives. In an increasingly performance-oriented culture, the desire for status, fame, and celebrity shapes how we post and share on social media, and it may also affect self-image, self-esteem, and confidence.
And knotty problems raise other questions for all citizens: Who should be responsible for protecting people from the risks and harms of online life? What role should platform companies play in limiting access to dangerous, harmful, or false information? Public concern is growing about the increasing dominance of Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Netflix as they now influence all aspects of culture. These companies collect data on every action you take online and use this information to further shape your experience with online media. With the rise of algorithmic personalization and generative AI, many people recognize how benefits and harms of media are inevitable for people of all ages, all around the globe.
For all these reasons, there has been no better time to acquire digital and media literacy competencies. In fact, we are now seeing a mainstreaming of media literacy as digital media becomes more a part of people’s everyday experience. Media literacy can be used for empowerment, helping people make good decisions about what kind of media they use. Media literacy helps people evaluate the quality of media content and use the power of communication to make a difference in the world. But media literacy is also valuable as protection because people need to protect themselves from the negative influence that media and technology have on human behavior. Media can diminish self-esteem, perpetuate harmful stereotypes, promote violence, and amplify dangerous falsehoods. Both empowerment and protection perspectives are important in developing digital and media literacy competencies.
