Media Literacy Meets Broccoli

What does broccoli have to do with media literacy? Let's begin today's discussion with a photograph that I shared with fellow students in my virtual library science course. After posting this photo without context, students had the option of commenting on my photo to answer the following three questions: What message does the photo convey? Why did the person take this picture? What tone does the photo convey?

Image Source: Personal Photo

When it comes to media literacy, I like to think of it in three parts - the text, the subtext, and the context. For starters, the text refers to the observations of a piece of media. What do you observe with your senses? The text of this photo is simple. A hand holding a piece of broccoli. 

The subtext, meanwhile, is the interpretations of a piece of a media. One student's interpretation was that the photo's purpose entailed demonstrating the size difference between the hand and the broccoli. This student also interpreted the photo's tone to be either confusion or amazement as a reaction to this size difference.

Lastly, the context is the conditions surrounding a piece of media. Since I took the photo, I can speak to the context. Prior to taking the photo, I decided to make broccoli for dinner. When I opened the broccoli package, I discovered two broccoli crowns and one, as I called it, "baby broccoli." I found the size difference between the baby broccoli and the broccoli crowns quite amusing, which led to taking the photo for my own entertainment. It also led to me singing "bay-bee broc-leey" in increasingly higher pitches to the amusement of my roommate. I'd intended to save Baby Broccoli for my final broccoli bite, but to my (exaggerated) despair, my roommate had cleaned my mess on the kitchen counter, mistaking Baby Broccoli for an unwanted scrap. While I was boiling the far larger broccoli crowns, my roomie tossed Baby Broccoli. I had too much dignity (and common sense) to risk rescuing Baby Broccoli from the trash bin. Nonetheless, the photo lives on as the only evidence of Baby Broccoli's existence, and I still sing bay-bee broc-leey while making this delicious veggie for dinner.

If my silly little broccoli photo had that much context, what does that say about the larger world of media? Advertisements. Music. Television. Games. Apps. Socials. We are surrounded, if not bombarded, by media. Although we can certainly navigate media without developing our media literacy, we're left at a disadvantage when we do so, robbing ourselves of the opportunity to more fully understand the subtext and context behind the media we consume and create.

So how can we develop media literacy? Aside from the framework of text, subtext, and context, we can utilize other frameworks to develop our media literacy. One such framework was developed by writer Howard Rheingold, pictured below:

Image Source: Brittanica

Howard Rheingold proposed five key social media literacies. As said by Rheingold in his article Attention, and Other 21st-Century Social Media Literacies, "Ultimately, the most important fluency is not in mastering a particular literacy but in being able to put all five of these literacies together into a way of being in digital culture." So what are these five social media literacies? Although his article dives much deeper, here's the gist:

• Attention: What are you directing your attention to? How are you directing your attention? Are you splitting your attention and multitasking? Are you giving your focused attention to just one thing? Which method of attention works best for a given situation? 
• Participation: Which social media communities do you join? Are you a passive observer, or an active participant? Do you create content to contribute to communities?
• Collaboration: Do you connect with others? Do you work with others? Do you implement collective action through social media to create positive change in the world? 
• Network Awareness: Do you understand the nature of technical and social networks? Do you act on this understanding to make the most out of social networks? Do you mindfully build personal and professional learning networks through social media?
• Critical Consumption: Can you discern who is (and isn't) trustworthy? Can you differentiate information from misinformation? Can you recognize that social media is "not a queue; it's a flow."

Of these five competencies, which are most important for my students to know? Considering that I work primarily with elementary and middle school students, I'd say that Attention is the most fundamental literacy. Students have access to boundless social media platforms. By learning how to direct their attention, they can essentially direct the "flow" of social media, prioritizing content, connections, and communities that help them grow. Participation and collaboration are also important to keep students connected to each other, positive role models, communities, and ideas. Network awareness and critical consumption can help students navigate the choppy waters of social media, building a ship that can handle this rougher kind of flow - instead of a vessel doomed to sink in doomscrolling.

Attention, in my perspective, is key to developing any of these other social media literacies. Students can only fully participate if they direct their attention from passive lurking to active involvement. Students can only collaborate by directing their attention to others in their social media communities. Students can only develop network awareness by directing their attention to the inner workings of social media. Lastly, students who develop critical consumption learn who to give (and who not to give) their attention.

Considering that Rheingold's article was written in 2010 (over a decade before writing this blog post), it's worth asking, are these literacies still accurate? Is Rheingold missing any literacies? I'd attest that his five literacies are still highly relevant, but only stay relevant when adapted to current contexts. For example, this article was written before the pandemic, which means virtual learning wasn't nearly as normalized and devices weren't nearly as commonplace in classrooms. Connected to tech at home and at school, one aspect of developing attention may involve knowing when to disconnect from screens and social media. In that vein, paying attention to one's own feelings on social media (social-emotional learning) is a key literacy that could be integrated into broader social media literacy. As another addendum, we now have more awareness and acceptance of neurodiversity; I'd be curious how we can adapt this media literacy framework to welcome students who have unique neurological processes of directing attention. 

Image Source: Genius Within

In addition to having many new societal contexts to consider, we have many more mediums available for social media, leading to a far broader range of expression and connection. As said by communication theorist Marshall McLuhan, "The medium is the message." Now that we have more social media mediums, discerning which medium suits the message (and why) can be critical to social media literacy. I'd attest that this component could be included under the umbrella of Network Awareness, since discovering the right medium involves developing an awareness of how social media networks offer unique variations of mediums. For example, Snapchat and Instagram both prioritize photos. However, they share the "message" (photos) in unique ways and to unique audiences - shaping the subtext and context for each photo, even if it's the same photo shared on both sites.

In addition to navigating more mediums (or at least, variations of these mediums), students are also navigating more misinformation. To teach students how to distinguish fact from fiction, I'd like to be more intentional about integrating media literacy in my library programs. I'd also like to make better use of my opportunities at the reference desk, weaving in media literacy as opportunities arise. For example, if a student is looking for books on gems, I can offer books published by the Smithsonian and discuss the museum's background in gemology, lending credibility to the book and modeling finding credible sources.

To conclude this post, I'd like to share one more story about something green. No, not broccoli. This story involved a leprechaun at the library. While I was staffing the reference desk, a mother and her son approached me. The mother said she needed my help finding a book to "settle an argument." When I asked which book she'd like me to find, she replied that she needed a book about Robin Hood, settling the score that Robin Hood is "not a leprechaun" and just has a "similar outfit." After reviewing the search results on the catalog, we decided on the book Robin Hood and the Golden Arrow - a story that mom and son read together at the library.

Image Source: Amazon

Just as Robin Hood can easily be interpreted to be a leprechaun, media can be interpreted in limitless ways, especially by kids just starting to develop social media literacy. That's why it's so important to learn this literacy early on. We can learn text, subtext, and context. We can teach attention, participation, collaboration, network awareness, and critical consumption. It can be as simple as inviting a child to investigate the correlation between Robin Hood and leprechauns. As long as educators continue to direct their own attention to media literacy, children can begin to develop those skills for themselves, serving them well in childhood and beyond.