Mark Zuckerberg recently ended the fact-checking programme on Facebook and Instagram. Zuckerberg attributes the move to a deep sense of distrust that many people have developed in the fact-checking process itself. Predictably, netizens, media pundits, AI experts and fact-checkers are understandably dismayed, and have labelled this as an anti-democratic move that allows lies to be spread and stymies media literacy.
Is Meta’s decision really a step in the direction of media illiteracy? Trying to build back trust using fact-checking, a seemingly disruptive audit of what the media disseminates, is a flawed exercise. Even if the most well-meaning fact-checkers claim to be detached and neutral from politics and ideology, selectivity is core – which facts are you checking?
Zuckerberg is right in that the increasing level of public distrust should be at the core of this matter. While checking facts is currently the best we can do, distrust still prevails.
Structures and operations of the media are fragile, flawed and opaque
Let us step back a little. Literacy programmes all over the world seek to address forms of illiteracy. Our understanding of the world in recent decades has become media-mounted, and for a large part, media literacy is a modern form of literacy. Hence, media illiteracy must be rampant in our societies – a presumed state that media literacy efforts purport to solve.
However, the structures and operations of the media are fragile, flawed and opaque, and this lends to a contrary position – that our literacy is also flawed and unstable. Brian Street, who is well-known for his proposition of “literacies” states that literacy is contested because it is deeply ideological and “always rooted in a particular worldview and a desire for that view of literacy to dominate and marginalise others”.
But because, as it should be fairly evident to us by now, and as theorists of media ecology have argued for more than a decade, we live a media-life, where everything is “mediatised”.
Media literacy is not new, but it has emerged with astonishing popularity since 2016, when Donald Trump took over US Presidency for the first time and the world of media went into a tizzy trying to deal with how easy was to manipulate facts – and win after it came to light that “news” stories were manufactured in East Europe to rig the elections.
In the US, I witnessed the rolling out of media literacy programmes in 2022 for high schoolers. Because the Democrats first proposed the Bill and the first state to roll out the media literacy programme –Illinois – was a Democratic state, there was pushback, distrust.
Notwithstanding a lot of scholarly interest and some independent attempts on the ground, any institutional ascent of media literacy in India has been thwarted by our government’s disinterest in making policy around it while also claiming during Covid-19 that the government was making people media-literate through educational updates about efforts to overcome the pandemic.
The textbook definition of media literacy is that it seeks to enable and empower citizens at large to do the reading and writing as defined above. Definitions have evolved over about 40 years, but it is agreed by and large that media access and the ability to analyse and construct media messages are cornerstones of a media-literate person.
In India, independent and sponsored programmes in media literacy address specific communities in debunking myths and fake news. For example, they try to create public awareness about the perils of believing dreaded WhatsApp group messages. Above all, media literacy programmes create awareness of the legitimacy of legacy media and draw our attention to specific media platforms or messages that are flouting the integrity with which we have associated our media practices.
The paradox of media literacy
The paradox of media literacy is that as people have grown media-literate (either organically by consuming media over periods of time or by programmatic interventions by media literacy), they may also understand how the media, in all its fallibility, operates.
With a decline in public trust in the media, as recent studies have shown, there is also a rejection of the media itself. Hence, as a tool to bring back trust, media literacy merely asks us to place our trust elsewhere – this is the problem with trust, to borrow from Adam Seligman’s well-cited book of that name.
The idea that illiteracy is a state of ignorance from which people must emerge can be contested. And it is. Scholarly works are beginning, sporadically, albeit, to observe that a conscious rejection of literacy exists in societies. If literacy is the ability to read and write, the rejection must happen at two levels – refusal to consume, or refusal to express or re-produce.
However, just to complete the paradox, consider what happens to a less informed citizenry: If the information is not being consumed using the so-called legitimate media, someone else is filling the gap, and that’s where the trouble lies.
By not exposing the obvious within the media, we could be exposing an illiterate citizen to a modern and progressing world that constantly demands our literacy. In the age of media prosumerism, this kind of illiteracy should worry us, especially if we consider the political and hegemonic factors that deter people from the “writing” part of media literacy.
University of Auckland’s Ethan Plaut, who notes that this strategic illiteracy of writing is not new, argues that the deliberate avoidance of literacy as a social ritual is tantamount to the avoidance of social practices – activities through which we produce, maintain, repair and transform our world. This might remind us of the non-cooperation movement that Gandhi led against the British raj.
My contention is that media illiteracy is by definition deliberate because media illiteracy can no longer be a default state in our media-societies – with exceptions, of course – that make our exposure to the media not merely possible, but mandatory, using devices and methods that are traditionally not considered media (such as phones).
Hence, the only way a typical community or its individual can be media-illiterate today is by refusing to be media-literate.
Media illiteracy gets even more complex if we consider the fact that our digital media platforms enable a conflation. We now dwell in a world of narrative fusion. It is no longer possible – much more so for a digital native – to differentiate between genres. Information is blended in the same cauldron with opinion, news, entertainment, reason and emotion.
Modern technology and forgotten local myths dwell together as they are both narrated with equal conviction. That juxtaposition is exactly the problem for modern science as we observe in the case of the narrations around the Covid-19 pandemic.
This kind of conflation is the mixing of minds in a way that was impossible without the aid of global and public message-production platforms on social media that still carry the perceptive stamp of approval of the written word. But mediated interventions that purport to help us understand our world are the very instruments that render our media illiteracy.
Media illiteracy dwells within the ecology of the media
Wrapped in the compulsions of selected realities, mediated narration is bound by the features of visibility. Algorithms have come with programmed capabilities to limit our world further. The outcome of such selective visibility/invisibility, which is the sutured and mystified form in which mediated narration presents our self-perceived truths, constructs our media illiteracy.
Should we assume, then, that everybody is media-illiterate? When French philosopher-theorist Jacques Derrida claims “I am writing for illiterates”, it is a confounding statement, yet it helps us understand that illiterates are content consumers, too. The “we” I am referring to is the media consumer, for whom stories are constructed and narrated—not the “experiencer” who is simultaneously the subject and object of this narration. It is in that light that I would like to view Derrida’s statement.
As tempting as it may be to claim that we all live mediated lives, this is, of course, not true at all. That is where we must draw a distinction between illiteracy, media illiteracy and disempowerment.
Thus, we must differentiate between the so-called media prosumer, seemingly empowered to read and write media texts, and the media object, the communities and individuals around whom the stories are written. Who is the more media-literate of the two? This is where a flip awaits.
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A media prosumer’s understanding of a distant (or “distantiated” as Anthony Giddens would say) reality is not the same as the experience of the object of the story. The marginalised and discredited father of the victim of brutalisation and murder in Hathras in 2020 remains invisible and unable. Whose illiteracy is that?
Our societies’ media illiteracy dwells within the ecology of the media: It is a product of the media’s aesthetic manoeuvres and processes by which mediated narration selectively renders texts and presents the world to the media prosumer.
Our media literacy is an ideological form to attain stable definitions of our societies. It is the chalice that contains served understandings, the Grecian urn that asks us to behold the beauty, not what lies within. The invisible is non-existent and this fracture forms the most prominent feature of the prosumer’s illiteracy.
The writer is the founding Dean at Mahindra University School of Media, Hyderabad, and the author of the book News Aesthetics and Myth: The Making of Media Illiteracy in India, recently published by Routledge. Views are personal.
