Consumer Smarts: Reclaiming Control through Media Literacy

Back in November, when we began our research I was also in the early stages of my first months of college taking a class called Attention!. This class focused on doing research about the history of the “Attention Economy,” meaning how attention has become the currency of the twenty-first century. Through a series of books and research papers, we journeyed through the history of social media in order to learn about our own servitude to the advertisement devices, like our phones, which perpetuate our so-called “free economy.” As subjects to the unsolicited consumption of our time by the hands of the media on billboards, posters and posts around every corner, their success is not only measured by the money we spend towards that company but also the time media spends in our mind and subconsciously influencing our decisions. 

In the beginning, I was worried about how this class would change my relationship with technology and perpetuate frustration and guilt surrounding my online habits and participation. This hesitation about learning and pushing the boundaries of what is comfortable, I saw, was very normal among not only my peers in my class, but the peers in the DemocracyReady NY youth cohort. At the same time as my class, in our cohort we were in the early stages of addressing our own backgrounds with media literacy. We utilized Figma (brainstorming) boards to collaborate on crucial questions such as identifying the systems of power within the education institutions that we come from and how that influenced our relationship with media literacy. Through our discussions we found out that our own definitions of media literacy stem from the type of content that we consumed growing up in the school system. This violative definition was due to inconsistencies in technology integration across classrooms in New York as well as coursework that focuses on literacy analysis. With this examination of dynamics infused by the knowledge of our own backgrounds as young people and students, we  grasped how school and government administrations can influence our interactions with technology both positively and detrimentally. 

What I noticed through these two experiences was that there was a common misconception that the necessity of active Internet engagement and being informed of its dangers would cause young people more frustration and guilt. While I expected that these experiences were going to make me feel guilty of my technology use and increase my frustration by learning methods to resist technology in a class and a college where devices are integral learning appendages for students, I was happily surprised when it did not make me feel that way. A key part of this success was looking more closely into history and taking the nebulous idea of media literacy and defining what it means to each of us.  

With the development of technology, we have exasperated the use of dopamine receptors to control viewers and capital. This dangerous harvest of human emotion is why media literacy is so important: so that students learn to regain autonomy over their time and attention, and reclaim it as their own currency that they should know how to use and spend wisely. Most of our “free thinkers” tend to fall into this pipeline of conformity, this fallacy is explained in The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu. In the book Wu writes that intellectuals “who read everything, insist on having options and think of themselves immune to propaganda, are in fact, easy to manipulate” which leads them to “ultimately choose between manufactured alternatives” (Wu, 48). 

These pseudo-options were things we wanted to avoid in the DemocracyReady NY Youth Cohort. We began talking to peers nationwide in various youth organizations, professors and faculty at New York institutions and a member of the New York State Board of Regents.I was glad to see that this sentiment was shared across all change makers. I was ecstatic to see that we were tackling an issue early enough that we all could acknowledge and see there was a problem, have the same frustrations with the lack of answers and come together to share and outsource solutions.

Having a community is extremely important to media literacy education. In An Essay on Liberation written by Herbert Marcuse, he mentions the question of how to be an individual in a society that relies on a group identity. Marcuse writes, “The question is no longer: how can the individual satisfy his needs without harming others, but rather: how can he satisfy his needs without hurting himself, without reproducing, through his aspirations and satisfactions his dependence on an exploitative apparatus which, in satisfying his needs, perpetuates his servitude” (Marcuse, 4). Mercuse addresses a complex issue of how dangerous having so much information is and the need to have a careful balance with the use of devices. Learning media literacy can help young people develop this balance. In the webinar the DemocracyReady NY Cohort hosted this year, Nardos Mengesha (Co-Director of Education of Encode Justice) talked about how working with AI involves “prompt engineering ” (designing inputs for AI tools to produce desired outputs or Human- Computer Interaction) to make sure that humans have the power to pick safe and useful information. Learning prompt engineering, for example, could be a helpful media literacy skill young people can use to navigate new technologies. 

When I think back to my initial research interviewing my peers about their experiences with media literacy education I was un-surprised that that term either wasn’t talked about or held completely different meaning to different people. I was surprised at how varied the conversation was and how the conversation did not stop to just simply talk about technology but how media literacy began to apply to politics, repressive school administration and the need to innovate further.

Technology is changing expression and communication, but that doesn’t mean it's dangerous. A quote from one of my peer interviews sums up the general consensus, “The information we get on the Internet is really messed up, you don’t know what’s true.” We know the danger, we know our own limits, now it’s time to know what to do with this uncertainty. In the future I hope that all kids of all states can have access to media literacy education as I experienced in my first semester in college. This education could include the opportunity to learn about the anthropological history of media, the place it holds in our society, and the tools to be critical information consumers.