Media Literacy and Well-Being of Young People

Media Literacy and Well-Being of Young People

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Manisha Pathak-Shelat

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Introduction

A few decades back, the title of this chapter would have sounded strange. Most societies and cultural groups have been concerned with child well-being in their own ways. In the public rhetoric about children, “vulnerable” is the term very often associated with children, and adults are held responsible for assuring their wellbeing. Associating media with child well-being, however, is a relatively recent concept. This is a rather complex connection to explore as media, and hence media literacy, childhood and youth, and well-being are all concepts that are socially constructed and historically-culturally-geographically situated. Their meanings keep shifting and so do values associated with these concepts. However, there are also some core ideas about young people and well-being that have endured over times and across cultures. I begin this chapter with an overview of the shifting and contested terrains of media, childhood/youth, and well-being and how media literacy as a concept and practice gets more complex with these changes. I also outline the enduring core ideas associated with young people and well-being. I argue, with the help of research and observations from the field, that media literacy remains a crucial part of ensuring well-being of young people. An important section of the chapter is drawing out the challenges we face today in media literacy programs. I draw most of my examples from India, North America, and Europe because of my personal experience in these regions, but my conclusion aims at pointing out cautions and future directions that are relevant to many other regions of the world.

M. Pathak-Shelat School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] A. Ben-Arieh et al. (eds.), Handbook of Child Well-Being, 2057 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9063-8_143, # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

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Media Literacy: How the Concept Has Traveled

Media literacy, now in practice almost for more than three decades, is still a relatively new (nonmainstream) concept. The basic definition of media literacy is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate messages in a variety of forms (Aufderheide 1993). The Center for Media Literacy has identified five core concepts based on synthesis of scholarly work in several countries. These core concepts make the foundation of media literacy: (1) Principal of nontransparency: all media messages are constructed; (2) Codes and conventions: media messages are constructed using a creative language with its own rules; (3) Audience decoding: Different people experience the same media message differently; (4) Content and message: media have embedded values and points of view; (5) Motivation: media are organized to gain profit and/or power. These five concepts reflect the five key questions that audiences are encouraged to ask when they engage with media: Who created this message? What techniques are used to attract attention? How might different people understand this message differently? What lifestyles, values, and points of view are represented in or omitted from this message? Why was this message sent (Center for Media Literacy n.d.)? Media literacy is a concept that keeps evolving from the way we look at media, literacy, children and childhood, and how all these interact with one another and with the larger sociocultural, historical, economic, and political factors. It would be useful here to take a look at some macro-level social changes that have compelled us to develop new definitions for media literacy.

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How Children and Childhood Have Changed in Different Parts of the World

There was a time, not too far back in history, when a child was considered a miniature adult. In India, for example, a girl was expected to be married by the time she reached her puberty and often delivered her first child by the time she was 16. A boy was expected to enter the family vocation by the age of 16. Gradually childhood started being considered a specific phase in the life cycle with special developmental tasks, needs, and characteristics. This is partly due to the work of sympathetic scholars and researchers and partly due to commercial interest in turning children and young people into a lucrative niche market. Today, children’s needs and rights are recognized as important, as shown by many charters all over the world. Examples include the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, among many others. Most progressive nations have special government departments and policies that are supposed to ensure child rights, and yet, larger forces like globalization, migration, war, and poverty aided by unsympathetic government policies have resulted in multiple divides among children. Assaults like trafficking, child labor, mental and physical abuse, and lack of medical and preventive care have left many children without a childhood in its idyllic notion. A sanitized, rose-tinted approach to media

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literacy is not relevant to many children today. This means media literacy programs have to address new concerns, introduce new content, and try new approaches. The Pew Research Center paints a portrait of the millennials as confident, connected, and open to change (Pew Research Center 2010). In affluent and emerging economies alike, commercial exploitation of young audiences has gone up as children have become a coveted niche market. Globalization is giving birth to a global “youth culture” albeit with local variations. On the other hand, homes and neighborhoods have changed too. With both parents working full time and families in general having fewer children and also an increasing number of only children, young people tend to spend more time with media at home. More homes are now 24 ! 7 connected with one or more media. Due to migration, urban sprawl, and breaking down of traditional close-knit communities, young people have lost many traditional opportunities and places to hang out. This again means young people turning to media to connect with their peers (Boyd 2008). Globalization has changed the notion of youth in non-Western societies. For example, in the Indian Vedic tradition the life cycle is divided into four phases. The first phase, devoted to education and physical training, lasted till a man (yes, it was a patriarchal articulation and also caste-based) was 25 years old and was marked by strict discipline, abstinence, and preparation for adulthood. Now Indian youth exposed to global youth cultures increasingly view this phase as a carefree yet autonomous stage of life when one hangs out, experiments, and indulges in risks, although preparation for adult roles still holds importance. Girls are increasingly staking their claims to youthful escapades. Parent–child relations have changed too over the years in many cultures. Fewer parents now adopt the strictly authoritarian style of parenting, and more children now have increasing autonomy in making day-to-day decisions about education, friendship, leisure, and shopping. They also have more freedom in choosing their value systems. For example, gradual dismantling of traditional joint family and caste-based social organization in India has brought changes in how young people develop their identities and values. Accompanying all these changes is the fact that media have entered aspects of young people’s lives that had previously been governed by the family and a close-knit community. Also, media have taken over many functions hitherto considered the responsibility of the family, community, school, and religion.

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How the Concept of Child Well-Being Has Changed

The approach to child well-being has changed over the years in remarkable ways. The departures from the earlier notions of child well-being can be seen in terms of the change from “child saving” to “child development” (Kahn 2010) and from “child welfare” to “child well-being” (Ben-Arieh 2010). Discussing the social indicator movement Ben-Arieh observes, “We have moved from saving poor and suffering children to promoting children’s well-being. . .Today after more than 50 years not only have we witnessed a shift from child welfare to child well-being, we have seen child indicators undergo a dramatic change” (Ben-Arieh 2010, p. 9).

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The child indicator movement has gone through six major changes during the past 25 years. These changes can be summarized as: a shift from focus on child survival to child well-being, from focus on negative outcomes to positive outcomes in a child’s life, shift in emphasis form well-becoming to well-being, and from “traditional domains of child well-being to a new domain that cuts across professions” (e.g., early indicators were derived from sectors like education, health, and foster care while now life skills, civic involvement and participation, and children’s culture are considered equally important; media and media literacy, therefore, become more relevant to child well-being). Also, the focus has changed from an adult perspective to taking into consideration the child’s perspective as well (Ben-Arieh 2010). The United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) offers a normative framework for understanding children’s well-being. The CRC promotes a holistic view of child development and well-being, giving equal weight to children’s civic, political, social, economic, and cultural rights and stressing that these rights are interrelated, universal, and indivisible. (Again, we should note here that media are intrinsically connected to all these domains.) Also, this framework acknowledges children’s rights to be heard and to have their view taken into account in the matters that affect them. The CRC framework reflects the normative and theoretical paradigm shift in the sociology of childhood. The “new” sociology of childhood stresses the concept that childhood is a stage in and of itself. Being and becoming are both equally important. The new paradigm sees children as “active, creative, social agents” (Ben-Arieh 2010; Ito et al. 2010). Ben-Arieh explains this further using the ecological perspective on child development, which argues that “children interact with their environment and thus play an active role in creating their well-being by balancing the different factors, developing and making use of resources, and responding to stress” (Ben-Arieh 2010, p.10). In a similar vein, Call et al. (2002) point out the broad view of health used by the World Health Organization that takes into account adolescents’ physical, social, and psychological well-being, as well as their collective contribution to the well-being of others. This broader view suggests that media literacy should address not only the use or consumption of media but also participation, production, and civic engagement. It also draws our attention to the importance of linking off-line and online worlds of young people.

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How Media Have Changed

Media have changed in both form and content over the last five decades. Today, young people are exposed not only to print, electronic/broadcast, and digital media but to a variety of new forms being shaped through convergence of these media. An equally great variety is available in media content, though of course, commercial influences still play a significant role in availability of the content. Web comics, blogs, podcasts, mashups, fansubbing. . .it is difficult to keep a track of young people’s media worlds. The second change is what is known as “prosumption”blending and blurring of roles of consumer and producer. Young people today

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consume as well as produce media, especially digital media, and at times they perform these roles simultaneously. Not just that, through new mobile devices, media have entered spaces that were beyond their reach till now like schoolbags, bathrooms and vehicles, and also moments considered too personal to record or share. To give just one example, 83 % of American millennials sleep with their cell phones compared to 68 % of Gen X, 50 % of Boomers, and 20 % of those from the Silent Generation (Pew research Center 2010). The most striking result of all these changes is that for young people today, the boundaries created by adults – information versus entertainment, comedy versus political news, public versus private, work versus leisure, local versus global, real versus reel, consumption versus civic engagement – no longer exist. It is this blurring of boundaries that has challenged media literacy practitioners and policy makers to rethink their assumptions about young people’s engagement with media and its possible consequences for well-being.

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How the Notion of Literacy Has Changed

To complicate things further, the whole notion of literacy has undergone a major shift. “The 1980s and 1990s saw the solidification of new set of paradigms for understanding learning and literacy that emphasized the importance of social participation and cultural identity, and moved away from the previously dominant focus on individual cognition and knowledge acquisition” (Ito et al. 2010, p.13). Kellner and Share (2005) show how literacy is crucial for full participation in one’s culture and society. It is through skills and knowledge to read, interpret, and produce certain types of texts and artifacts that one gains the intellectual tools and capacities for participation. We can easily see why the notion of literacy needs to be broadened if one wants to fully participate in our media-saturated society today. Literacy has traditionally been described as the ability to read, write, and compute, but today we need multiple literacies, including competencies that allow critical and creative engagement with information and media. This “renewed vision for literacy” emphasizes the importance of individuals working within their own social contexts and being able to use literacy skills to navigate social change. As new technologies and media proliferate, opening new possibilities for communication and information, new competencies are required to make effective use of their potential (UNESCO a, n. d.). Several scholars (Buckingham 2007; Kumar n.d.; Livingstone 2009; Snyder 2007) have argued that literacy also can be framed as a property of a society or as a set of social practices instead of individual skill. Hence, different cultures or societies would require a different set of skills and knowledge for full participation. Besides, the individual’s location within the social group would influence what resources are available for literacy and if his or her environment is facilitating or obstructing acquisition of literacy or may be privileging a wholly different notion of literacy. Social and cultural contexts of technology, for example, have a huge influence on digital literacies. Media literacy educators need to consider these social aspects of literacy.

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Enduring Values

Despite these widespread and dramatic changes discussed above, can we say that young people today have nothing in common with the previous generations of youth? Not really. What has endured is the notion that young people are vulnerable, and it is the adult responsibility (especially parental) to take care of their well- being by providing nurturing and safe environment and guidance. The main developmental milestones, concerns, and developmental tasks of adolescents have also remained fairly constant – friendship, learning, relationships, autonomy, and identity formation – even though the ways of accomplishing these may have changed and media’s role in the process may have become more influential. Youth practices and values surrounding these crucial aspects of life have changed, partly due to engagement with new media. The areas of concern, however, for well-being of young people – violence, sexual health, body image and gender inequalities, substance abuse, and commercial manipulation, for example – in which media literacy is expected to help young people, have remained more or less constant despite new challenges to childhood. More recent definitions of media literacy reflect both, the changes and the enduring notions, and have expanded the scope of media literacy. For example, Silver (2009) defines media literacy as “the ability to access the media, to understand and evaluate critically their contents, and to create communications in a variety of contexts.” As she points out, this definition is built on three main elements: access to media and media content; critical approach, the ability to decipher media messages, and awareness of how media work; and creativity, communication, and production skills. This evolution did not take place overnight. The new conceptualization evolved over many years of research, classroom practice, parental inputs, and policy deliberations. The process involved heated debates, angry contestation, and some “aha” moments too. Here is a brief historical trajectory of the evolution of media literacy as a concept and a practice.

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Media Literacy: A Historical Overview

Media literacy is comparatively a young field, and its history is very much tied to scholarly and public discourse over power, that is, how powerful are media effects on audiences and in return how powerful are media audiences in challenging, subverting, and resisting powerful media effects. How one conceives the power equation between the media and the audiences has a direct bearing on one’s approach to media and child well-being. The Frankfurt School led by Adorno and Hochheimer (1972) advanced the pessimistic view that looked at audiences as powerless victims of the mass culture. Early efforts at media literacy based on this radical view took a more technologically deterministic stance that media were external forces and independent entities assaulting and manipulating children who needed to be saved using the weapon of media literacy. Children here were viewed as passive receivers of media content. Media scholars like Blumler and Katz (1974)

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who proposed the uses and gratification theory, Hall (1980) who articulated encoding/decoding model, and Fiske (1987) who emphasized the active role of audiences in interpreting media messages compelled scholars to look afresh at media-audiences power equation. According to Walsh (n.d.), media education can be divided into four distinct historical periods. In the first period that lasted until the 1960s, educators simply ignored the media. As he goes on to describe: Students studied ancient Greek myths while Walt Disney was busy creating American myths of Davy Crockett or popularizing uniquely American fables. Even newspapers were not only ignored, but actually confiscated if a student had the audacity to bring them to class. Books were the only medium worth time and effort. And REAL books – not those trashy paperbacks, either. English teachers taught books; music teachers taught classical music; history teachers taught ancient history in a way indistinguishable from teachers 500 years earlier.

Walsh calls the second phase “the inoculation phase” when teachers attempted to “inoculate or protect students from the dangerous germs of the current media culture.” When the inoculation approach was found lacking, the third phase deployed a different approach called “suck them in” where popular culture and media were used to entice kids into studying more scholarly content. Walsh goes on to show how we are now beginning to teach students “about and with the media they know and use everyday” and that it is still a difficult struggle. This notion is reflected in the current definition that Hobbs (2010, p. 2) has formulated in her white paper on digital and media literacy. She defines digital and media literacy as a constellation of life skills that are necessary for full participation in our mediasaturated, information-rich society. These include the ability to do the following: make responsible choices and access information by locating and sharing materials and comprehending information and ideas; analyze messages in a variety of forms by identifying the author, purpose, and point of view and evaluating the quality and credibility of the content; create content in a variety of forms, making use of language, images, sound, and new digital technologies; reflect on one’s own conduct and communication behavior by applying social responsibility and ethical principles; take social action by working individually and collaboratively to share knowledge; and solve problems in the family, workplace, and community. On the whole, the journey so far has not been easy because media literacy programs have frequently suffered from shortage of funding, near absence of teacher training programs, lack of government recognition, and inadequate policy support amidst many other challenges. As Marc Scheuer, director of the UN Alliance of Civilizations, observes, despite efforts by educators for over two decades, in most countries, policy makers shaping national educational programs have just awakened to the need for media literacy (Scheuer 2009). If it were not for the staunch conviction of the advocates of media literacy about its relevance for well-being of young people, they would have surely given up. The UK, Canada, Australia, France, and some of the Nordic countries, followed later by the USA, have been leaders in developing the concept of media literacy, formalizing it as part of the formal school system, and producing media literacy material. Two of the important milestones in the movement for media literacy are the Grunwald

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Declaration of 1982 and the UNESCO Paris Agenda of 2007. Associations affiliated to the Catholic Church and UNESCO have taken an active leadership in teacher training and curriculum development for media and information literacy. It is heartening to see that the idea has slowly but steadily caught the imagination of educators and parents in many parts of the world. For example, the UN-produced volume “Mapping Media Education Policies in the World. . .” (Frau-Meigs & Torrent 2009) has contributions from scholars in many different countries – Mexico, Morocco, India, the USA, France, Hong Kong, South Korea, Canada, Ghana, Egypt, Argentina, Spain, the UK, Turkey, Finland, and Zambia – although media literacy programs take different shapes and forms in different countries. De Oliveira (2001) reports increasing acceptance of media literacy as an essential academic topic for school children all over Latin America, while in India, its inclusion in formal education is fairly recent compared to programs offered by nonprofit and voluntary agencies since the 1980s. In the next section, I discuss why media literacy has strong relevance for child well-being and consider some reasons that advocates of media literacy advance in support of their decades-long efforts.

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Why Media Literacy

Media literacy has been recognized as an empowering set of competencies, skills, and attitudes because of its contribution to an individual’s physical, sexual, and emotional well-being; its facilitating role in achieving childhood and adolescent developmental tasks; and also its crucial role in citizenship training through democratic participation and civic engagement. A definition by UNESCO integrating media literacy and information literacy makes its importance more explicit: Empowerment of people through information and media literacy is an important prerequisite for fostering equitable access to information and knowledge, and building inclusive knowledge societies. Information and media literacy enables people to interpret and make informed judgments as users of information and media, as well as to become skillful creators and producers of information and media messages in their own right (UNESCO a, n. d.).

Call et al. (2002) suggest that the central factor in adolescents’ health and wellbeing is their interactions with their environments and with the people and settings in their daily lives. Media literacy, hence, is intimately connected to well-being because media are increasingly becoming an important component of the total environment. The Media Awareness Network quotes several leading educators in Canada, the UK, and the USA in their section on why teach media literacy. One of them, Len Masterman, points to media saturation as one of the main reasons. “We are exposed to more mass media messages in one day than our grandparents were in a month,” he argues. Media literacy emerged as a response to social and technological changes associated with the proliferation of mass media when the traditional concept of literacy

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involving the three Rs- reading, ’riting (writing) and ’rithmatic (arithmetic) – seemed inadequate to meet the new challenges. With the introduction of computers and the Internet and the resulting information explosion, we now also have corresponding concepts of computer literacy and information literacy. We now live in a time when multiple literacies are required to effectively negotiate various aspects of our lives in our complex worlds. (That certainly does not mean that reading and writing are no more important because much of the Internet content is made of written text.) As the historical overview showed, the inoculation approach to children’s engagement with popular media is not valid anymore. Rather, it was never really valid but now the ubiquitousness of media, availability of mobile devices and the Internet, and increasing autonomy and expertise of children with digital media have made it very difficult for parents and teachers to continue their surveillance of children’s media use. Besides, based on their research, Ito et al. observe, “Simple prohibitions, technical barriers or time limits on use are blunt instruments; youth perceive them as raw and ill-informed exercises of power” (2010, p. 343). Ito and her team advise against imposing complicated rules, restrictions, and heavy-handed norms about how young people should engage online. But, I wonder if parents would accept this advice without providing them with another better alternative. Internet addiction, obesity, poor school performance, fear of bullying, and child abuse are some real problems affecting child well-being that concern parents. These problems are – sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly – associated with media use in public rhetoric and more so with the new digital media. Our fieldwork in India showed all kinds of monitoring of children’s engagement with media at home and at school: time limits, lock and key, filters, and requirement of permission from an authoritative person were some of the different means adults used to control children’s media engagement. Some of the ways in which children responded were willing or resentful acceptance, lying, negotiating, and using indirect manipulative tactics. If we want to make new media practices sites of shared experiences rather than sites of anxiety and conflict, media literacy (not just new media literacy) is a wiser approach. The supporting reasons articulated by Masterman on the Media Awareness Network include media’s influence through manufacturing and management of information and through what he calls “selling audience consciousness.” Other reasons are the growing importance of visual communication and the need to prepare for an increasingly media-dominated future. On the same website, Kathleen Tyner calls media the “storytellers of our generation” and argues, “These stories tell us about who we are, what we believe, and what we want to be.” Pat Kipping endorses media literacy for better citizenship, while Maureen Baron finds media literacy an important tool to help prepare students for life in society. I discuss some of these reasons in detail because of their important contribution to child well-being. First of all, young people today chart their life courses in the midst of new opportunities and also new pressures and constraints. Among the many developmental tasks that we expect young people to accomplish as they mature toward adulthood, identity development is the most crucial for well-being and closely

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linked with all other facets of life. Arnett’s (2002) work on youth identity is relevant to this essay because he specifically addresses consequences of globalization for youth culture and identity development. His main argument is that many young people today are developing bicultural identities – one rooted in their local culture and the other in the larger global culture. Local identities are retained even when young people take on global identities, but they do not remain fully intact. Hybrid identities or multicultural identities could be one consequence of this process, but one cannot rule out the possibility of identity confusion in some young people. Because of Western domination of global information and media flows, this risk is more profound in young people from the global South. In contemporary literature on identity (e.g., Buckingham 2008; Giddens 1991; Hall & Gay 1996), an antiessentialist, fluid, discursive notion of identity is privileged over the older notion of identity as static and stable. So, how do media interact with these notions of identity development in youth? I argue that for each of the important dimension of youth identity development, media, especially the new digital media, have significant contributions to make. These dimensions are: adolescence as a moratorium stage where experimentation is valuable, the need for moving beyond the immediate family into the larger world and exploring future roles, tendency for risk taking, importance of peer validation, and identifying oneself as a member of particular groups. These dimensions are complicated by the changes in late modern societies where young people are offered more choices and more exposure to varied lifestyles, value systems, and role models. At the same time, finally each individual is held responsible for one’s own self-project, and the older sources of comfort and stability like parents, religion, and caste (in India) are no longer adequate as resources for identity development. Here, the affordances of digital media extend both opportunities and challenges. The first characteristic of digital media is the increased opportunities for communication and self-expression beyond the gaze of parents/adults. This autonomy and freedom may facilitate the developmental need for moving away from parental and family authority in the direction of more autonomy. At the same time, it may also lead to more risky behaviors by making identity verification challenging and by creating conflict and confusion. The moratorium phase as defined by Marcia (1980) is an active phase of seeking a choice among alternatives. It also entails facing and successfully resolving crisis in order to move further. Media help youth explore other cultures, lifestyles, and value systems from the safety of home/school/library/ cafe´. The anonymity offered by many digital platforms helps them explore and experiment without the fear of being humiliated or punished for making a mistake. Digital media also have the potential of expanding youth peer group from neighborhood or school to geographically scattered locations. Many young people may find more affirming and sharing communities beyond their local contacts. The online transnational civic engagement communities I am studying are an example of such peer communities. Jenkins (2006), among others, also asserts that young people’s continuous activity of revising, adapting, and improving their collection (on web platforms) is one way of undertaking the continuous construction, revision, and updating of self required in the late modernity that Giddens (1991) has emphasized.

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“Identity play” is another notion much debated and researched (e.g., Boyd 2008; Turkle 1995; Weber and Mitchell 2008) and merits a mention here. Sherry Turkle has been one of the most prominent scholars examining identity play and technology. Turkle paints a rather troublesome picture with speaking of identities in the digital age as fragmented, shifting, and partial. She frames online youth identity practices as acts of identity simulation and draws our attention to new levels of identity crisis. Boyd (2008) as well as Weber and Mitchell (2008) refute Turkle’s negative claims. Boyd argues that Turkle sees online and off-line worlds as separated, but one cannot draw a sharp line between online and off-line activities. Besides, barring some digital media like MUD (Multi-User Dungeon/Dimension/ Domain) where identity play is commonplace, most of the time the online identities are very much connected to the embodied off-line identities. Thus, according to Boyd, online identity expression is certainly context-based but that does not make it fragmented. Weber and Mitchell too see online identity expression as a single work in progress, as personal and social bricolage where young people construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct themselves in dialectical relationship with the world. In an interesting study by Valkenburg and Peter (2008), only 18 % of adolescents who used the Internet for online communication indicated that they sometimes or often experimented with their identities when being online. In addition, 82 % indicated that they never experimented with their identities online. Even when we consider the tendency of respondents to not give completely truthful answers, the study indicates that identity play does not seem to be as common as some scholars would have us believe, and it would be unfair to keep young people away from new opportunities simply out of fear for their well-being. At the same time, I would question the assumption about the “affirming community of peers.” Several recent incidents of cyber bullying have shown that online peer communities can be nasty (though according to a review by Brown and Bobkowski 2011, acute and chronic forms of cyber harassment may be rare). When it does happen, bullying or online rejections can have profound negative effect on young people, and here media literacy would play an important role. Despite some risks, if accompanied by proper guidance and channeling, media can expand the resources that young people may use toward identity development. Of course, these resources are governed by the larger youth cultures, state and global policies, as well as markets, but we cannot totally rule out individual agency in their deployment. Media literacy would help in strengthening individual agency and guide students to more empowering use of new media that can be especially helpful to youth whose identities or interests are non-mainstream. These young people can be guided in choosing geographically dispersed but emotionally closer communities. One of the many roles and identities that young people need to consider as part of maturation is that of being a citizen. This is one aspect of identity that has been significantly influenced by globalization, increased transnational flows of people and media, and young people’s participation in online communities. Media literacy is considered an important tool in informed citizenship development and, therefore, an important tool for democracy (Scheuer 2009; Kipping 2004). Getting involved with a cause one cares about, getting networked with youth all over the world,

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developing a public voice, feeling a sense of efficacy – these are all important components of well-being. Macro-level changes affect micro-level contexts which in turn affect well-being of young people (Call et al. 2002). I would argue here that the reverse movement is also possible even though it is definitely more challenging. Media literacy can help young people explore how to use media for changing micro contexts and also provide the opportunities to get engaged in larger movements working toward changing macro contexts. On the more empirical level, Call et al. (2002) identify important areas that need attention for adolescent health and well-being: drug, alcohol, and tobacco use; sexual behavior; and mental health. They give examples from the USA, India, and Jamaica of how, if tapped properly, media can be a tool of promoting adolescent well-being and also for involving adolescents in these efforts. These examples show that media literacy has direct and indirect implications for young people’s health and well-being. Hobbs (2010) argues in support of media literacy in both formal educational settings and informal settings. She looks at media literacy as a bridge across digital divides and cultural enclaves, the tendencies that Boyd (2009), Hargittai and Hinnant (2008), and Watkins (2009) have observed in young people’s media use. Despite many arguments in favor of making media literacy an important part of young people’s holistic education, it is a field fraught with contradictions, questions, and challenges. We fail to design effective media literacy programs if we turn a blind eye to these issues. I discuss some of these issues in the following section.

71.10 New Media Literacies: Challenges and Issues In this section, I outline some challenges that media literacy advocates need to confront and resolve, though I admit they are far from easy to resolve, and in most cases, there is no black-and-white solution to any of these challenges. Besides, most of these challenges emerge from macro-level forces. Acknowledging these issues, being sensitive to their presence, and making at least an attempt to address them at whatever level we can, however, would make media literacy programs more relevant to a larger number of young people. I divide these challenges in two broad categories: one, challenges emerging from the complexities of multiple divides, and two, pedagogical challenges. These categories are, however, not impermeable and some issues fall in both the categories.

71.11 Multiple Divides Multiple divides is the first category of challenges that confront media literacy programs. The nature of divide today is much more complex than the traditional “haves versus have-nots” conceptualization, although economic factors still play a huge role in growing inequalities. Economic factors affect access and availability of media because affordability and infrastructure are crucial indicators for media use.

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Multiple divides exist not only between economically privileged and poor countries but also within countries and communities. Besides, bridging the divide in access does not necessarily mean bridging the divide in use. Studies by Selwyn (2004) and Van Dijk (2005) show that there are not only technological but a complex mix of social, psychological, economic, and pragmatic reasons that affect meaningful use of digital media. Research in India shows how structural inequalities determine one’s social location and how these locations – including gender, class, caste, and place of residence – impact the use of new media technologies (Schwittay 2011). Boyd (2009), Hargittai and Hinnant (2008), and Watkins (2009) , in fact, claim that participation in and choice of social networking sites lead to digital reproduction of social divisions. Hargittai (2007) calls for a more refined approach to the digital divide. Her work has focused on the unequal level of access, use, and participation with reference to the Internet. DiMaggio et al. (2004) and Hargittai (2007) suggest the notion of digital inequalities rather than a divide and look at the differences as existing on a spectrum rather than as bipolar. Skills like e-mailing, searching, chatting, or video conferencing were considered new just a decade ago in many parts of the world. A large number of people had never heard these terms, forget experiencing them. In the USA and Europe, and in elite urban pockets of Asia, Africa, and Middle East and North America (MENA), these skills are very widespread today and are considered part of a basic skill set for any young person. But even today, there are a vast number of young people all over the world for whom these skills are unheard of or are out of reach. During our fieldwork in remote villages and tribal pockets of India in the summer of 2009 and 2010, we met many children who had never ever used the Internet or a computer and some had never seen one. This means that media literacy programs cannot be all about digital media. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen’s argument is relevant in understanding media engagement in young people. Sen proposes that it is important to evaluate the life a person is actually living than just looking at the resources a person may have available (Sen 1997). We observed the reflection of Sen’s argument during in-depth interviews with young people that we conducted in Gujarat, India in 2010. Media use and participation of a girl from an urban slum was much higher and empowering than that of another girl from an urban, elite family with highly educated parents. The oppressive home situation had led the poor girl from a minority community to a feminist organization in the neighborhood that also ran computer classes for girls. Here the highly motivated girl was exposed to empowering ideas and peer group, learned computer, and got Internet exposure too. The girl from the elite and wealthy background came from a very protective but patriarchal family who instilled in her the idea that media had corrupting influence. It was considered wise for a girl from her background to be away from popular media, not waste time on the frivolous things they portrayed, and engage only in activities that could be labeled as “high culture.” Here, despite all the financial and infrastructural resources the girl’s media participation was negligible. This example warns against equating media access with media use, and media use with media participation.

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71.12 In-School and Out-of-School Divide Scholars (Buckingham 2007; Facer et al. 2001; Hull and Schultz 2002) have observed that very often literacy takes place out of school and out of formal institutional context. Hull and Schultz (2002) have discussed the gap between out-of-school literacies and classroom practices. They quote Dewey’s (1899/ 1998) observation on the relationship between formal education and ordinary life, “From the standpoint of the child the great waste in the school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside of the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while on the other hand he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning in the school” (p. 76). It is ironical that with the flourishing youth media cultures, Dewey’s observation is more relevant today than maybe it was in his times. Contemporary scholars in New Literacy Studies (Gee 1996; Hull and Schultz 2002; Street 1993; Szwed 1981) argue for a plurality of literacies, but the formal school systems in most countries still hold a more traditional and narrow concept of literacy. One aspect of the in-school and out-of-school divide is about availability and acceptance of media technologies. School media are still largely print-based. Cell phones and iPods which have become almost extended limbs for some kids are not allowed in most schools. Computers and the Internet are expected to be used in wholly different ways – structured, supervised, and with different outcome expectations – than when children use them when they are on their own. On the other side, taking it granted that all children are tech savvy and have technology access at home often results in assignments that need high use of technology at home. This puts poor children at a disadvantage. Technology is not the only aspect of divide though. Out-of-school media cultures of children and popular media texts targeted at young people subvert and ridicule qualities and behavior normally valued at school (Buckingham 2007; Kenway and Bullen 2001). Even in countries like India where teachers and teaching have traditionally been highly respected, commercial Hindi cinema and mainstream television programs for young people frequently portray teachers as buffoons (e.g., in the Hindi blockbuster Kuch Kuch Hota Hai) and schools as dull and boring places, best avoided or reluctantly tolerated. Well, school-based media cannot and should not become clones of commercial media. Media literacy sessions can get young people involved in discussing this challenge because there is no simple solution to it.

71.13 Intergenerational Divide Media are one arena where the drama of intergenerational divide is being played at its most intense level. With digital media getting more varied and youth oriented, parents (and often teachers) are no longer experts on media. How many parents and teachers today would know about web comics, podcasts, mashups, or fansubbing or are literate in their children’s chat or IM language? Besides, what many adults may find radical or exciting may be commonplace and mundane for some kids. Gone are

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the days when parents chose the books for their teens, chose which magazines to subscribe, and which films to see on family movie nights. And, ironically parents are no longer experts on parenting either! The earlier strictly authoritative parenting style has given way to a more ambiguous style. Children (in better-off strata in many parts of the world) study longer, start working much later, and remain dependent longer on parents (Arnett 2002; Livingstone 2009) but at the same time enjoy more autonomy in every aspect of their lives, especially in choosing media, leisure time use, and peer network (even if the parents are paying for these). Lack of time, knowledge, and technical skill; the fast pace of new developments in digital media; the privacy afforded by handheld and mobile new media devices; and insularity of some youth subcultures mean that even if parents wished, it would be challenging for them to enter the worlds of their children. The same is true for teachers. Livingstone’s (2009) remarks on the individualization of risk in the risk society also point out to the difficult predicament of parents. When self-regulation is valorized over regulation of media industries it may appear liberalizing but as Livingstone states, “For children and parents already absorbed in the fraught emotional conflicts of negotiating boundaries of public and private, dependence and independence, tradition and change, this presents a new burden, adding official responsibilities to what were hitherto private struggles” (Livingstone 2009, pp. 178–180). Many parents feel undermined by the considerable technological complexities involved in regulating their children’s media engagement with no support from the state and a constant assault from the commercial entities. As it is, parenting in late modern societies poses contradictory demands. Parents are supposed to be “friends” of their teenage and young adult children, respect their individuality and autonomy, and yet be responsible for everything from child’s weight to socialization and career. The burden of regulating media use adds an additional component often increasing conflicts between parents and children. Teachers too feel the stress of keeping up with their increasingly media savvy students and their shorter attention spans on one side and simultaneously meeting the demands of “back-to-basics” curricula on the other. It does not, however, bode well for the well-being of either the family or the classroom or society if different generations cannot come together around at least some shared interests and values. It is a huge challenge for media literacy programs to address the intergenerational issue. The heartening observation, though, is that many children still look up to their parents, respect them, and consider parents their role models. This has been especially true in India (Arnett 2002). According to a Scout Association study (2007) of 13–18-year-olds, teenagers in the UK look to their parents as role models much more than celebrities such as David Beckham or Pete Doherty. Of more than 1,000 youngsters surveyed, many expressed “highly positive attitudes” toward their family (Teens See 2007). Rosen (2010, p. 26) has also identified “closeness to family” as a defining characteristic of the iGeneration in the USA that shows autonomy in many other areas. Also, not necessarily all youth would find everything else except technology boring and that all adults are

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technologically challenged. When introduced in an appealing way, young people take interest in films, music, history, and lifestyles of older generations and other cultures. Many adults too find new technologies and video games fascinating. So, it is the challenge for pedagogy of media literacy to develop innovative ideas to create platforms where generations can come together.

71.14 Pedagogic Issues Pedagogic issues form the second category of challenges. The increased gap between adult and youth media worlds has unsettled our conventional but comfortable hierarchies and compartments about education in general and media education in particular. This has compelled us to ask important pedagogical questions about who should teach whom, what, and how. On one side, peer-to-peer learning channels are increasingly becoming more powerful and significant, and scholars have shown much enthusiasm about multimedia learning environments. The positive outcomes include a more flexible and negotiable role for learners (Livingstone 2009) and liberation of children from “the single, exclusive, and intensive focus on the written language which has dampened the full development of all kinds of human potential” (Kress 1998, p. 75). As Green et al. (1998) argue, making full use of the multimedia environments requires a pedagogic shift from a rule-based model of education to an immersive model of “learning-through-doing” (e.g., pitching into the game without reading rules and figuring out by trial and error); though personally, I have my reservations about the value of learning everything by trial and error. Use of digital gaming in education is a new area of pedagogic research that has attracted many scholars. Johnson-Eilola (1998) observes a shift from the historical world view valuing linearity, genealogy, tradition, and rules. According to her observation, games provide environments for learning postmodernist approaches to communication and knowledge: navigation, constructive problem solving, and dynamic goal construction. On the other side, Livingstone’s (2009) review has revealed that notwithstanding the apparently unlimited capacity of the Internet in relation to information and educational resources, it is far from proven that Internet use brings children greater pedagogic benefits than they would have gained without it. Studies by Wijekumar et al. (2006) and Jackson et al. (2006) support these observations. Part of this conflict arises due to a lack of clarity over what should be recognized as learning and literacy. If we consider out-of-school, peer-driven skills as literacy, we may agree with Jenkins (2006) who claim that Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) help children develop soft skills or new literacies that are valuable for formulating ideas, finding a voice, and communicating effectively. These soft skills, as Jenkins describes them, are play (experiment with surroundings as a form of problem solving), performance (the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery), simulation (interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes), appropriation (meaningfully sample and remix media content), multitasking, distributed cognition (interact meaningfully with tools that

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expand mental capacities), collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation (follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities), networking (search for, synthesize, and disseminate information), and negotiation (traveling across different communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms). These are indeed important skills for young people, but the very informal nature of acquisition of these skills makes it difficult to build formal media education programs around them. Besides, formal educational systems everywhere valorize testing and scores, statistical evidence of the value of an activity, and quantitative research support to justify investment. The very nature of soft skills makes it difficult to assess them in quantitative ways. In his book Rewired, Rosen (2010, p. 26) describes the iGeneration that came after the Net generation, specifically kids born in late 1990s and the new millennium. He lists thirteen distinct traits of iGeneration students. These are their (1) introduction to technology, literally at birth; (2) constant media diet; (3) adeptness at multitasking; (4) fervor for communication technologies; (5) love of virtual social worlds and anything Internet related; (6) ability to use technology to create a vast array of content; (7) unique learning style; (8) need for constant motivation; (9) closeness to family; (10) confidence; (11) openness to change; (12) need for collective reflection; and (13) desire for immediacy. I would reiterate here that the iGeneration is not a reality in all parts of the world. These characteristics define rather a certain segment of young people in many different societies. These characteristics, however, challenge conventional approach to media literacy programs. We are still unclear about many aspects of the Net and iGenerations. One example is their propensity for multitasking and the fragmented attention associated with it. There have been contradictory observations on benefits and harms of multitasking. If we ourselves are not sure what consequences a behavior would have for young people’s well-being, how would we address it in the media literacy programs? If as Rosen (2010) suggests, the iGenerations learns through interactive technologies, we need to find new formats for media literacy content to be appealing to them. That means that we actually use the very media that we are often discussing in media literacy sessions, for example, Twitter, IM, virtual worlds, and social networking. But as we discussed earlier, all research does not show children learning more because of technologies. Besides, for our cash-starved schools and media literacy programs, there is always the question of whether the investment is valid. Incorporating new media in teaching would also require changes in teacher training. I also pose another question. At present the very appeal of Twitter, IM, or social networking may lie in their noneducational nature even though as Ito and Jenkins claim, much informal learning may take place. Would these new media lose their appeal for young people once we put them to regular educational use? Media literacy educators also need to be sensitive to a common pitfall – foregrounding technology at the expense of substance. The glamour and glitz of new technologies and the sleek-looking student productions can easily distract young people and mentors alike from the substance of learning experiences. It is still not clear if we

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should let kids alone, let them “hang out and mess around” (Ito et al. 2010) for their well-being (facilitated through soft skills as advocated by Jenkins), or be more vigilant about harm and risks. Should we let the so-called banal use continue in hope for informal learning or push for more structured, educative, and civic engagement initiatives? There has also been much debate among educators over different approaches to media literacy – protectionist, self-expression and empowerment, cultural studies, and critical/activist. The conflict over corporate sponsorship also highlights a philosophical rift between those who focus on analysis of media content and those who view the structure of the media industry as an equally important concern (Heins and Cho 2003). They argue that the tension between simple protectionism and a more nuanced understanding of media influence will continue because of public concerns over media violence, drugs, and other subjects. Kellner and Share (2007) observe that “public policy imperatives are often more directed towards developing a skilled work force to advance economic competitiveness than towards encouraging a critically engaged citizenry.” Kumar (n.d.) and De Oliveira (2001) show how critical approach to media literacy had developed as an anti-imperialist reaction and as a protest toward politically and commercially hegemonic groups but has gradually given way to other approaches. I would argue that all these approaches have their due place in media literacy programs. Risks and harm associated with media are real, especially for some vulnerable young people, but not as pervasive and serious as the public rhetoric claims. They are mediated by many other sociocultural factors (I discuss these factors in detail in my conclusion). The protectionist approach, even if necessary, is not enough. It could be one aspect of media literacy programs, but for long-term well-being and well-becoming of children, empowerment and critical approaches are very important. What pedagogic approaches would best suit the interaction of a new generation of children with a new generation of media is a question we are still struggling to answer.

71.15 Critical Media Literacy and Pleasure Pleasure in and through media is another complex issue in designing media literacy programs. Pleasure is an important component of well-being, and media are wellrecognized sources of pleasure. Do media literacy programs enhance pleasure or they dissect things to death till all the pleasure and willingly suspended disbelief are gone? Traditionally, media literacy programs have ignored the pleasure children derive from media and have often shamed kids into hiding or lying about seeking pleasure from a media text about which the teacher or a parent is critical. Over the years, there have been heated debates between the celebratory and anxious views about children’s engagement with popular culture and the tension between what kids want to see and what they should be seeing instead. My research on the secondand third-generation Indian American girls, gender identities, and Bollywood cinema clearly showed that these girls entered the cinematic experience with a clear determination to find pleasure. As viewers, they willingly suspended

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questioning or critiquing patriarchal gender representations even when in their own lives they objected to stereotypical gender roles (Pathak-Shelat 2010a). Meaning making is a critical aspect of any literacy. We need to think how the process of meaning making remains pleasurable even when critical. Here the important question is whether unquestioningly immersing oneself in a media text and absorbing all the hegemonic assumptions embedded in the text (which might be very pleasurable in the moment) should be valorized in the name of children’s expertise and desire or encourage delayed gratification of pleasure through reflection and creating their own media texts using their critical skills. Critical literacy “invites children not only to crack the code, make meaning, and use texts, but also to analyze texts- considering both, how they work and what work they do in the world” (Comber and Nixon 2005, p. 128). When children are not taught to become critically aware of media-produced popular culture texts, their thinking about such texts go unchallenged (Alvermann and Xu 2003). This again, could feel pleasurable and comfortable but how good is it for long-term well-being of the individual and the society? Today, the high production value and marketing machinery behind popular media make the economic dimension of media very important. The high investment required for media production more often than not results in the control of the hegemonic groups. As a result, media messages often portray the values and ideologies of the dominant groups. If social justice is an important criterion for well-being, children need to learn to question the issues of power and hegemony, center and periphery. But that does not mean that popular culture texts do not have any qualities, aesthetic or other, that bring genuine pleasure to audiences. Here the constructivist framework used by Alvermann et al. (1999) can offer the necessary balance. Constructivist framework sees audiences as constructors of their own knowledge as they actively engage with media. Both the influence of the text and the pleasure from engagement, on one hand, and resistance to the dominant messages from the audiences on the other are acknowledged here. I have personally experienced the tension in the classroom when I chose a popular media text that was an absolute favorite with my students and I was a strong critic of it. Alvermann and Xu (2003), Gainer (2007), and Luke (1997), among others, have also reported similar experiences. Critical literacy is often equated with cynicism and unpleasurable work (Vasquez 2003). I remember attending a film appreciation course in which some of the fellow students would watch a movie the night before it was scheduled to be discussed and deconstructed in the class. “This is the last time you can really enjoy it,” they would claim! The advice from many Bollywood fans to a critical viewer like me would be “keep your brains out when you enter the theater.” But how about introducing children to the “pleasure of politics” (Gainer 2007)? Vasquez demonstrates that critical literacy does not have to be a negative experience at the expense of pleasure. Critical analysis itself can be made pleasurable when the issues addressed are familiar and important for our lives. I have repeatedly witnessed such pleasure in my workshops with students on gender and popular media. Self-reflexivity, negotiation, possibility of reworking the dominant messages, recognizing alternative ways of representation, and finally realizing a vision for social change and justice are all

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components of pleasure. As Gainer (2007) observes, “this is a balancing act that opens space for pleasure as well as critique, and even the pleasure of critique.” Cultivating appreciation of aesthetic aspects of media and the positive role media can play in self-expression, creative activities, and emotional catharsis could bring pleasure too. Gainer (2007) shows how children can enjoy the transactional process of everyday literacies when they deconstruct and become self-reflexive with their engagement with popular culture text, pop music in this instance. Many parents today are concerned about the sexually explicit lyrics in popular music. Gainer’s example shows how two young girls of nine and ten negotiate the tension that can exist between pleasure and critique when engaging with popular music lyrics. One does this by making a conscious decision not to know what the lyrics meant in her favorite songs (so that she could continue to enjoy the song), while the other critically deconstructs the words and then tries to reword the song. Thus, this process is complex and personal albeit influenced by a child’s environment, for example, in this case, the presence of a friendly nonjudgmental adult who is willing to be a partner in deconstruction. I fully agree with Hobbs (2010, p. 6) that there is pleasure and power in being well-informed, engaged, and responsible consumers and producers. I would, however, like to also retain the importance of aesthetic and sensual pleasures that young people derive from media as valuable contributors to their well-being.

71.16 Commercial Entities in Media Literacy The relationship between the market and the civil society has been one of the longest ongoing debates ever since civil society emerged as a peculiar modern concept in various versions between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. Some of the important questions arising out of this debate are: Should markets be conflated as an integral part of the civil society or they should be treated as distinct spheres? Should civil society guard itself from penetration of market forces or let them be co-opted? How have commercial forces shaped the media that have such a pervasive presence in civil society today? What ramification would that have for the public sphere and individual well-being? These questions become more complex today, when conventional boundaries between the roles of consumer and citizen have blurred. For example, consumption can now be linked to civic engagement since consumption has become a way to express one’s citizenship values as reflected in movements like fair trade, green consumption, boycott, and buycott (Nelson et al. 2007). Besides, we find an increasing enmeshing of commercial and editorial content in the mainstream media. Newspapers carry “advertorials” without any qualms, television channels regularly have sponsored news capsules, and the Internet has no conventions for marking advertising from editorial content that previous media have had, at least in principle. Helping children differentiate between the commercial and editorial content in media and assisting them in evaluating source credibility have been major

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educational goals in media literacy programs. The new media scenario makes this task more challenging. Children stumble upon more and more “adult” content today as they navigate the media scene dominated by ratings and profit motive that sees pornography and violence as the two most successful strategies for attracting eyeballs. The focus on individual responsibility to be media literate creates additional burden for children, teachers, and parents. Livingstone (2009) correctly points out that the finger will be pointed at the user for being unskilled, incompetent, gullible, or naı¨ve instead of at those who provide biased, incoherent, manipulative, and inadequate texts. The intrusion of commercial media in children’s lives has taken another controversial form. Schools in many countries all over the world are today in a situation where on one hand they are facing diminished government support and public funding, and on the other hand, the demands on them to be competitive are growing rapidly. Commercial media organizations find this an opportune moment to get their foot into the formal school system, especially on the pretext of providing computers, television sets, and Internet facilities for students. Molnar and Morales (2000), in a report from the Center for the Analysis of Commercialism in Education (CACE), discuss the following categories of commercial encroachment in schools: sponsorship of programs and activities, exclusive agreements that give corporations exclusive rights to sell and promote their goods and/or services in the school, incentive programs, appropriation of school space for corporate messages, sponsoring of educational material, provision of electronic programming and equipment in return to right to advertise, privatization of school management, and fund-raising for school through commercial activities. What would be the impact on children’s physical and mental health if organizations sponsoring media literacy educational material and programs were also engaged in either producing and/or marketing or advertizing products like cigarettes and junk food to children? Also, the so-called educational material would most likely paint a distorted picture of the world for children from the corporate point of view. Channel One (a television program in American public schools) and Youth News Network (YNN, a program in Canadian public schools) are two examples of such controversial organizations. The difference is that Channel One thrives today in the USA despite several voices opposing it and some states having a ban on it, while YNN had to withdraw from the Canadian schools because of a tough fight put up by parents, teachers, and the Canadian Association of Media Education Organizations (CAMEO) (see Pathak- Shelat 2006 for more details). The role of commercial entities in media production and media literacy is the issue at the root of the debate that has media educators split all over the world, especially in the USA. This debate is also about whether media literacy is an academic field or a social/political movement (see Kellner and Share 2005 for a summary of how the two leading American media literacy organizations ACME and AMLA are divided over key differences in their approach to media literacy). The stand one takes on the debate is reflected, among other things, on the decision regarding corporate sponsorship for media literacy programs. Educators and parents who oppose corporate sponsorship for media literacy argue that getting sponsorship from entities one is

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supposed to critic and question is like “sleeping with the enemy.” The question, however, is whether profit-making bodies should always be held under suspicion or is there a possibility that they could play a positive role in child well-being? If a media literacy program is spearheaded by a nongovernment organization or a nonprofit, can we take it for granted that it can do no harm to young people? Are markets always to be suspected and NGOs not? Commercial entities play an ambivalent role in youth cultures today. Their attention to young people as an autonomous niche market may feel empowering to youth. They also provide sites for self-expression and creative engagement. On the other hand, youth cultures all over the world are becoming more and more commercially driven, and this complicates the arguments about youth agency. For a resource-starved field like media literacy, there are again no easy answers here.

71.17 Media Literacy Today: Priorities and Concerns The changing societies and media landscapes have brought us both new opportunities as well as new risks and threats. Amidst all these changes, however, a profound concern with well-being of young people remains at the core of media literacy. The problem is that even with very good intentions for child well-being, the public discourse on young people’s engagement with media is very often hyped and off-balance, either overly pessimistic or overly romanticizing and celebratory. There are many reasons for this: adultism, technological determinism, normal concerns about risks and harms with any new technology, and mass media’s preference for sensational headlines in place of nuanced discussion. The pessimistic rhetoric mainly focuses on how media are taking young people away from their families and friends and bringing up a generation of isolated individuals wedded to their machines. This rhetoric paints a picture of a selfish, lonely, disengaged individual spending hours and hours in front of a screen. The accompanying fears are Net addiction, weak social ties, reduced social capital, decreased community and civic engagement, lack of political interest, poor scholastic performance, obesity and other health hazards, identity crisis, and an overall decline in social integration. The pessimistic viewpoint also raises a cry over bullying, exposure to pornography, online risks of pedophiles/stalkers, and myriad other crimes. The positive hype associates unprecedented liberating qualities with digital media and sees young people as having an intuitive and spontaneous command over new technologies. The combination of the two is supposed to be transforming the world and revolutionizing the way young people develop their identities and experience learning, play, leisure, communication, and civic and political engagement. The democratic nature of digital media is supposed to be producing a generation that is bringing in a new, more democratic global civil society. When one looks at the empirical research in different countries, the picture that emerges is somewhere in-between. For example, a review by Brown and Bobkowski (2011) found no relationship between adolescents’ Internet use and negative well-being indicators such as loneliness, social anxiety, and depression or

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daily life satisfaction. In fact, Internet communication appeared to facilitate friendship formation among introverts and extroverts alike. Lonely, socially anxious, and depressed kids, however, were found more at risk. Even when the rhetoric is based on research, one has to be careful about drawing broad generalizations because problems with conceptualization, design, methodology, and sampling often affect the validity and reliability of research findings. I will site an example of a recent news story from India. The story from the online version of the leading Indian newspaper The Indian Express is titled “How Safe are Indian Children Online?” (I. E. August 8, 2011). The story reports on a sample survey commissioned by the global security tech firm McAfee. The actual finding of the survey only reveals that 62 % of affluent children surveyed admitted to having shared personal information online. Based on this finding, the story claims, “Children are increasingly exchanging information indiscriminately in the virtual world exposing themselves to cyber exploits.” In the next section of the story is a quote from a Cybermum at McAfee India who, according to the story, is a freelance writer, teacher, and mother of two who has been roped in by McAfee to use the company platform to blog about the dangers children face online and share ideas to steer clear of them. “The threats are numerous, ranging from cyber bullying, stalking, abusing, sexual communications, and advances to spams and scams,” says the Cybermum at McAfee India, but no findings from the survey have been cited to actually support this observation. Research on new media engagement is nonexistent for many countries. Where it is there, it is still in the early stages. In some areas like video games, studies report contradictory findings about benefits and harm, so media literacy efforts in this direction tend to be tentative. Some researchers tend to neglect the “fundamental continuities at the levels of form, content, and economics between old media and new media” (Buckingham 2008). Livingstone (2009) has critiqued the technologically determinist approach of research where the Internet is positioned as the key agent of change, for example, in asking “impact” questions that mask crucial importance of ongoing social changes. Nevertheless, in either form – optimistic or pessimistic – the public rhetoric is likely to affect how young people, parents, educators, and policy makers perceive media’s influence on well-being of young people and the priorities for media literacy today. If we subscribe to the notion that young people of the iGeneration are the natural experts on media and do not need intervention, we would deprive them of the much needed set of values, attitudes, and competencies that media literacy would equip them with. If we succumb to moral panics, we would end up with coercive tactics and over-surveillance of children’s private worlds. There is some evidence of risk in children’s engagement with media, especially new media, but not as huge as the pessimistic rhetoric indicates. When parents become victim of the moral panic rhetoric, their first reaction is to ban or limit media use practices. This might also lead to restricting valuable learning opportunities. Media literacy training, therefore, has to look at how to increase the positive contribution of digital media and minimize the risks – a tall order, indeed. What we need is a more balanced view of children’s engagement with media that keeps child well-being as its focus but is based on empirical observations and inputs from young people themselves. I outline some priority areas that media literacy

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programs today need to address: putting critical thinking and critical literacy at the heart of media literacy; recognizing the need for convergent literacies including the ability to create with media; maintaining regional, cultural, and contemporary relevance of the programs; nurturing the activist mind-set for proactive media engagement; exposing young people to the vast potential and different possibilities that digital media have brought with them; and reconceiving the role of adults with reference to media literacy.

71.18 Putting Critical Thinking and Critical Literacy at the Heart of Media Literacy The common perception across the world is that young people are natural experts on digital media. This myth may lead us to believe that there is no need for digital literacy programs for this population. First of all, all young people are not technically competent to make full use of the potential of digital media. My experience with high school and college students in India as well as in the USA has compelled me to question the “natural expert” myth. Second, even if they are technically competent, technical literacy does not mean critical literacy. There are some special aspects of digital media that call for revising the content of traditional media literacy efforts to suit digital media. The earlier mass media maintained a strong distinction between producers and consumers and used a range of elite filters to select material. Consequently, audiovisual media literacy education centered on recognizing and critiquing these elite filters, their role, and the political-economic factors that aided filtering and gatekeeping. Digital media have posed an opposite dilemma for us. Gatekeeping had its own problems, but it also served some useful purpose through verification of information and sources. Digital media have introduced prosumption, and also it is considered the individual’s responsibility to evaluate the credibility of the content and the authenticity of the source. The sheer volume of media exposure in daily lives of young people itself is an issue because “in an age of information overload people need to allocate the scarce resource of human attention to quality, high value messages that have relevance to their lives” (Hobbs 2010, p. 1). We welcome “democratization” of communication and positive contribution of citizen journalism, but it has altered the form of media literacy training. Also when the powerful commercial interests govern the Net and thrust their “user-friendly” content in the faces of young people, it is difficult for them to decide where the truth lies. “Critical literacy must be broadened to include information searching, navigation, sorting, assessing relevance, evaluating sources, judging reliability and identifying bias” (Livingstone 2009, p.187). My research on youth media participation in Gujarat, India also showed that though parents are important stakeholders in media literacy, schools and nongovernmental organizations can play a very big role. This is especially true for young people from limiting home environments (Pathak-Shelat 2010b). Kellner and Share (2005) draw our attention to some disturbing trends in formal education that may have serious repercussions for well-being of young people. One of them is the

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current obsession with standardized high-stakes testing. Overemphasis on reading and math by conservative educators ignore aesthetic and critical thinking aspects of education. The other is instrumental progressivism that emphasizes competencies at the expense of knowledge and strips critical thinking of its political potential (Robins and Webster 2001). My main concern with competency driven education is the total absence of sensitivity development and social justice considerations. Globalization, cutthroat competition, and salience of the economic and power considerations are changing the nature and purpose of education all over the world. Cognitive and psychomotor (skill-oriented) domains are given priority over the affective domain of education and feelings, sensitivity, appreciation, and empathy as the goals of education are ignored. In such times, even sensitive parents and teachers are often forced to join the bandwagon, and children become commodities in the global capital market. So, retaining the importance of a broader notion of critical thinking and sensitivity has now become a priority area for new media literacy education.

71.19 Recognizing the Need for Convergent Literacies Including the Ability to Create with Media Writing and production of media have been recognized as powerful ways of becoming critically media literate (Gainer 2007; Goodman 2003; Vasquez 2003). Earlier media literacy programs focused on media use, but today, media participation is gaining more and more attention from educators and justly so. If we cannot call a person literate if he or she can read but not write, can we call a person media literate if he or she can use media but not create with them? Buckingham (2007), Chen & Wu (2010), Chen et al. (2011), Hobbs (2010), Kellner (2002) and Kotilainen (2009), among many other scholars, have stressed on the ability to create, produce, as well as participate and communicate and not just search and retrieve information online. As it is, prosumption is the quality that defines much of youth media culture today. It is also at the heart of the horizontal networks that challenge conventional hierarchies and imbalances in communication flows. In my workshops on gender and media with journalism students in India, I observed that critical analysis and creative expression strengthened each other so they should be looked at as complementary rather than opposite domains. Media participation and creative production also facilitate self-expression and the feeling of “being heard” which are crucial for well-being of young people. Media literacy can be a powerful tool for voice and empowerment in young people. Shah and McLeod (2009) and Shah et al. (2009) argue that communication competence is the most crucial foundation for civic competence. Media literacy programs can help develop communication competencies and also channel young people’s spontaneous competencies in civic direction. Participation in media fulfills several developmental needs of young people. This is one reason why UNESCO has identified youth participation in media as a key strategy at various levels – local, regional, national, and international. These observations are

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endorsed in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and other key UN documents (Asthana 2006). A UNESCO study by Asthana (2006), on youth participation in media, offers an interesting range of examples from Ghana, Haiti, India, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, Mozambique, Nigeria, Somalia, South Africa, Vietnam, and Zambia that best exemplify innovative approaches and strategies adopted by youth in using media for social and personal development. The case studies show that the learning process went beyond the instrumental acquisition of skills and techniques. Participation provided the young people a context and a community within which to explore imaginations and ideas. Such a process of learning that situates educational activity in the lived experience of young people is dialogical and open-ended. The various media become more than facilitators and instruments; they enable and mediate learning and literacy. They become “social networks” of learning (Asthana 2006). A Stuart Foundation study in 2003 claims that as a result of participation in youth media practice, youth participants gained a voice and sense of social responsibility, improved basic literacy skills, increased confidence and credibility, learned how to relate to adults and peers more positively, strengthened career-related skills, made more successful transitions to adulthood, and experienced transformative changes in their lives. All five programs covered by the study had created environments that fostered a feeling of physical and emotional safety among their participants – a basic precondition to positive youth development and well-being. When we incorporate production as a part of media literacy programs, it would be wise to remember that children are embracing technologies earlier and earlier. Their whole approach to technology is different than adults as technology for them is no longer a tool but something at the center of all their activities, their lives (Rosen 2010). This requires us to reframe some of our assumptions about media literacy. For example, I would question the fifth core concept (mentioned earlier in the chapter under the section Media Literacy: How the Concept Has Traveled), that of motivation, that claims that media are organized to gain profit and/or power. Today a large number of young people around the world use and create media, especially digital media, just for the joy of self-expression, for participating in a shared media culture and to make peer connections. This is one reason why they do not take copyright issues seriously. Their own creations are out there for anyone to enjoy, share, and play around with. The legal dimension of use, production, and prosumption, therefore, will become an important component in convergent literacy. Inclusion of legal dimensions is especially important for the youth from emerging economies like India, China, Brazil, and several Southeast Asian countries. Young people in these countries are rearing to participate in the global digital sphere but do not always have adequate resources to do so. The copyright protected software is very often beyond their reach and means. In a highly peer-driven media culture, these young people can, knowingly or unknowingly, become victims of illegal media practices. Thus, a comprehensive media literacy program needs functional, critical, and legal dimensions that touch upon media production, consumption, prosumption, and convergence – a challenging task, indeed.

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71.20 Maintaining Regional, Cultural, and Contemporary Relevance of Media Literacy Programs Cultural relevance of media literacy programs is, again, very important but very complex. Culture itself is a nuanced, fluid, and complex notion. Intersections of ethnicity, geopolitical currents, globalization, structural imbalances, religious revival, and many other macro-level forces make cultural relevance a slippery issue to handle because there is a fine line between cultural relevance and cultural protectionism that valorizes fossilization of culture. To begin with, there are huge cultural differences between various regions of the world, but globalization has also spurred a commercially driven global youth culture that is aspirational and leaning toward the Western notion of what a young person should be. Also, media literacy emerged as a formal concept in the Western countries, and these countries had both the will and the resources to strengthen it as an academic and activist field. Media literacy programs, therefore, predominantly reflect Western sociocultural concerns, economic and political structures, and philosophical thought. Chinese and Indian media have now global reach but Western corporations still dominate the global media flows. It is true that young people in global South are differently affected from globalization than their counterparts in global North, but what complicates the picture is that there are huge differences between and within the countries of global South too. For example, in India we have young people who have no access to media other than the local and traditional folk forms. We also have young people in India who are 24 ! 7 connected to the most state-of-the art technologies and are the driving force behind local and global digital youth cultures. Our fieldwork in Gujarat, India (Pathak-Shelat 2010b) showed that television was still the dominant medium for a majority of children in our study and that a large number of school-going children reported newspaper reading as a daily activity. In one-day media diaries collected in selected locations in Gujarat, India as part of another project, 14-year-olds (especially from small towns and rural areas) showed strong influence of newspapers on their perception of India and the world. Digital media were found to be still aspirational and shared, and there was much family control over their access and use. Marketing-oriented websites tout India as the big cell phone destination, and in a way, it is true, but numbers and percentages play their own tricks in India because of its large population. So, while a very large number of Indian young people use cell phones, the number of young people who do not have a cell phone is larger. An effective media literacy program has to be developed locally, taking inputs from successful programs worldwide and also from young people from various social locations of the region. Kellner and Share (2005) point out another area of priority for media literacy programs –sensitizing children to multicultural and social difference. As more and more kids live in multicultural societies today, acknowledging difference and learning to build bridges across cultural differences is important for an environment that is conducive to well-being. Media play a significant role in our perception of identities based on race, class, gender, nation, and religion, and they also influence how we treat those perceived as “different” from us. As global flows of people and

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media increase, media literacy can be an important tool in orienting young people toward diversity and recognition of hitherto excluded marginal identities. Individual well-being is highly dependent on social and community well-being. Individual well-being is almost impossible in a community rife with poverty, crime, rampant inequities, and hostility. The UNESCO/UNITWIN Network is an example of a collaborative effort in this direction. Five universities have collaborated with UNESCO to generate cross-cultural resources and curricula that consider cultural and religious differences while encouraging open dialogue, respect, and mutual understanding (UNESCO b, n. d.).

71.21 Nurturing the Activist Mind-Set for Proactive Media Engagement “The active audience” notion has shifted the focus of media literacy programs to interpretation and meaning making and softened the earlier strong critical-political component in media literacy. We cannot afford to ignore the critical component though. In fact, we need to develop a strong proactive spirit in young people, parents, and teachers because several recent developments in the political economy of media show that we cannot take media access for granted. A healthy, open access, and equitable media environment is of the utmost importance for well-being of young people. Independent and nonprofit media organizations provide the necessary counterview to the corporate governed media. This is especially crucial if we want to retain and encourage participation of young people from poor and marginal groups and from the global South in the public sphere. Without open access to media, globalization would take an ugly form of elite, Western, and corporate hegemony, and our dream of democratic and participatory communication would be shattered. Montgomery raised an alarm in 2008 that many business practices were trying to undermine the archetypal “level playing field” and that in the absence of an affirmative policy to guarantee network neutrality, civic and political participation would be in peril (Montgomery 2008). Much of her pessimistic predictions are coming true today, but there is also a strong movement growing in support of Net neutrality and open-source media. A comparatively small number of young people seem to be aware of these issues or seem to understand how corporate control can affect their much cherished peer-to-peer networks. Media literacy programs can play a significant role here.

71.22 Exposing Young People to Vast Potential and Different Possibilities That Media Bring with Them We discussed earlier how wider exposure to other cultures through digital media can develop multicultural sensitivity, a prerequisite for becoming a world citizen. Dahlgren (2007) notes how young people are discovering common interests with a potentially huge network of like-minded peers, developing new critical skills, and

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building alternative deliberative spaces – all activities that raise the possibility of a virtual public sphere. Buckingham (2008) and Livingstone (2009) have both, however, reported the banality of most digital media use by young people. “Recent studies suggest that most young people’s everyday uses of the Internet are characterized not by spectacular forms of innovation and creativity but by relatively mundane forms of communication and information retrieval” (Livingstone 2009, p. 62) and also that “there is little evidence that most young people are using Internet to develop global connections” (Buckingham 2008, p. 14). My fieldwork in India during the summer of 2010 supports these observations. The young people in my study, for example, were much more familiar with commercial websites and gaming platforms than civic engagement websites or peer-generated communities. There is not much research available on global civic identities, but the research on single national identity has established the relationship between civic engagement and civic identity in youth (Montoya 2009). One could hope that this relationship sustains at the global level too. Openness, spontaneity, low-commitment participation, and self-reflexive and strategic communication within a flexible, peer-based network, etc., are some of the characteristics of digital media that scholars like Dahlgren and Olsson (2008) and Livingstone (2009) see valuable for civic engagement. Youniss et al. (2002) have shown that civic identities can be developed through civic engagement by allowing youth to explore ideologies, developing awareness about civil rights and duties, and encouraging them to see their actions as interdependent and meaningful to the larger society. Establishing a collective and also an individual sense of social agency and awareness of moral and political responsibility to society are also important. Digital media certainly have potential to facilitate these processes at both local and global levels. When schools and national media focus on national identities and patriotism in their messages, it is the more diverse and free digital media that can give youth a balanced global perspective. There are many transnational civic engagement websites and online social movements (TakingITGlobal, Global Youth Action Network, The Invisible Children, Youth Ki Awaaz, to give some examples) that give young people opportunities for addressing global issues. These processes, however, rarely occur on their own. There are a number of factors like unappealing design of adult-led digital platforms, broad but weak nature of online relationships, the capacity to filter communication to suit one’s own predetermined ideology and the resulting stratification, low commitment and easy exit, and increasing consumerism (Levine 2004) that may negatively impact digital media’s contribution in global civic engagement. Levine and Lopez (2004), Livingstone (2009), and Zhou (2008) have also observed that online civic engagement sites were very effective in mobilizing those already interested, but they did little to engage the disengaged. There is much potential for creative expression, entrepreneurship, and hobby or special interest development through digital media. Sometimes local or community radio and newspapers also facilitate such development. This is not something that young people always find on their own. All these observations show us that young people need platforms, support, and guidance without undermining their capabilities if they are to use the positive potential of media. Media literacy programs can

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expose young people to media platforms and uses that can have positive impact on their well-being. They can also help youth get involved in design and development of such platforms. Media literacy programs can show young people that there are other avenues of identity construction and expression beyond buying specific brands. At the same time, media literacy programs can give young people opportunities to experiment with other media like street theater, community radio, posters, and songs which they find fascinating but rarely get a chance to explore in the world saturated with digital media today.

71.23 Reconceiving the Role of Adults with Reference to Media Literacy We have observed that despite the growing autonomy of young people, adults do have an important role to play in child well-being. It would be detrimental for wellbeing of young people if adults and young people inhabit two distinctly different worlds. Ito et al. (2010) argues that given the centrality of youth-defined agendas in both interest-driven and friendship-driven contexts, the challenge is to build roles for productive adult participation that respect youth expertise, autonomy, and initiative. This is a challenge. Whatever we say about the child-driven media agenda today, adults still play an influential role in developing and marketing hardware and software, shaping macro-level policies, and shaping the immediate microenvironment of children. It is not just parents and teachers, but many other adults who contribute to young people’s media and educational environment. Hobbs (2010) points out the need for active support of many stakeholders: “educational leaders at local, state and federal levels; trustees of public libraries; leaders of community-based organizations; state and federal officials; members of the business community; leaders in media and technology industries, and the foundation community.” In certain instances, young people want to be outside the adult gaze, but in certain others, they do want adults to see and hear what they express. Media-literate adults can see and hear kids better. When we look at critical literacy as an approach to enhance democratic participation and sensitivity to social difference, it is important to consider that not all parents and teachers have the required sensitivity themselves. Adults carry their sexist, racist, and other baggage into their interactions with both kids and media. Thus, looking at the centrality of adults in young people’s lives, and the changing society where adult authority is being constantly challenged, we need to reconceive the role of adults in media literacy programs. Freire (1970, 1971, 1972), credited with introducing and popularizing the concept of critical literacy, was one of the first to question the teacher-student hierarchy. In Freire’s approach, the line between the teacher and the student is blurred as they both become learners in the process of “reading the word and the world” (Freire and Macedo 1987). Ito et al. (2010) suggest that adults act as coconspirators and experienced peers rather than authority. Chavez and Soep (2005) talk about “pedagogy of collegiality” where adults and youth work as collaborators.

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De Oliveira (2001) introduces an emerging professional in Brazil and Argentina known as educommunicator. According to De Oliveira, an educommunicator works hand in hand with teachers at schools and with professionals at commercial media, at cultural centers, and at educational television channels in order to help put children and adolescents in the center of today’s information culture. Whatever our pedagogic choice for media literacy programs, it is certain that in the new media literacy programs, adults and young people will occupy flexible locations, sometimes as teachers, sometimes as learners, and sometimes as both.

71.24 Conclusion Media literacy, especially critical literacy, can be a significant positive contributor to well-being of young people. I question both, the over-pessimistic and overromanticized view of young people’s engagement with media. I argue for a more balanced approach where we do not smother young people with over-surveillance and governance of every aspect of their lives, but we are available when they need guidance and support. I wholly support Ito et al.’s (2010) argument that “hanging out, messing around, and geeking out” lead to significant learning. I would also, however, reiterate the questions that Buckingham (2008) has raised: Is media participation civic participation? Is it free choice when there isn’t much to choose from? Is your interpretation your own when you are already conditioned by commercial images and messages? Another important point to remember is that however saturated the world is with media technologies and however “connected” the young people are, there is a world beyond media. Many young people turn to media when more appealing options are not available at home or in the neighborhood. If we overfocus on media, we would forget that many threats to child well-being emerge from factors other than the media. Media are associated with several risks and harms in the areas like aggressive behavior, gender roles, sexual relationships, body image disturbances, obesity, and substance use (Brown and Bobkowski 2011), and I do not say these risks are not real. If you scratch the surface, however, there are factors and processes beyond media that are at play in many instances. I use some examples of media’s negative relationship with well-being discussed by Brown and Bobkowski (2011) to explain this point. Research has suggested that lonely and socially anxious kids are more likely to use the Internet to communicate with strangers (p. 97) and hence would be more at risk. These children can be helped better if we examine the factors that make them lonely or anxious in the first place, rather than governing their Internet use. Similarly, Brown and Bobkowski (2011) have reported a three-wave panel analysis (p. 98) that found that middle school students’ aggressiveness predicted their concurrent use of violent media. They also showed that the students’ violent media use and aggression were stronger for the adolescents who were alienated from school and for those who were victimized by their peers than for those who did not face such social challenges. Similarly their review on cyberbullying (p. 100) found, “the behavior also seems to be a symptom of particularly troubled youth.

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Research and educational programs that target online harassment should take into account that it is likely a component of broader patterns of negative behavior among at-risk youth.” Our overall culture valorizes violence as a sign of masculinity, slimness as a sign of femininity, and finds no problem with sexualizing children or marketing harmful foods and gadgets to young people. These practices are creating problems for child well-being and not just media. This is why media literacy cannot be the cure of all problems but rather just one way to facilitate child wellbeing. Lower levels of media literacy are further associated with other forms of social exclusion and relative deprivation. We have to remember that deeper social, institutional, and technological conditions sustain or undermine media literacy (Livingstone 2009). At the end, I would like to draw attention to the recent uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and India, the riots in the UK, and their global repercussions. They have raised fresh questions about the role of digital media, especially social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, and youth prosumption in civic identity, engagement, and global civil society. Research on these recent phenomena might prompt us to reformulate some of our views on media literacy. Despite several challenges that we have discussed in this chapter, the good news is that media literacy has remained a vibrant field where debates are not shunned and new resources are constantly being developed. Alliance of Civilizations, NORDICOM, and the Media Awareness Network are among the clearinghouses where new resources and ideas are available to all. Many countries now have national and local bodies to support media literacy efforts. Still, the pace at which new media technologies, genres, and practices are being evolved, and the way media are entering more and more facets of young people’s lives, media literacy advocates have their work cut out for them. When we add the sustained struggle to retain democratic and open nature of media to the daunting challenge of keeping pace, media literacy will remain an area where we might never quite have the satisfaction of having accomplished our goals. Perhaps, in that challenge lies the real appeal of the field.

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