Media education and the limits of “literacy”: Ecological orientations to performative platforms

Abstract Recently, talk of “fake news” – and its relation to wider epistemic crises, from climate denialism to the creep of global ethno-nationalism – has renewed attention to media literacy in education. For some, revived discussions of media literacy offer protection (e.g., strategies for identifying and critiquing media bias and misinformation). For others, they offer empowerment (e.g., equipping youth to produce media messages that challenge misinformation or represent marginalized perspectives). In this article, we consider how such approaches, while often generative, retain a focus of media pedagogy that centers the actions of individual humans – namely, “literacies,” or practices associated with the interpretation or creation of media texts. This orientation, we suggest, elides more distributive agencies, human and nonhuman, that animate contemporary media contexts and their usage: the imbrication of material (hardware), aesthetic (interfaces), computational (algorithms), and regulatory (protocols/defaults) actors with wider networks of institutional governance and political economy. Drawing from theories of scalar assemblages, posthumanist performativtity, and platform studies, we demonstrate how an alternate orientation to media pedagogy – one grounded in “ecology” rather than “literacy” – provides a wider repertoire of resources for navigating contemporary media environments, including (but not limited to) the challenges wrought by post-truth politics. Importantly, we suggest that an orientation of “civic media ecology” does not obviate traditional representational concerns of media literacy, but augments them by making legible the performative entanglements that constitute and animate processes of media production and consumption.