According to an established and oft-quoted definition from the Aspen Institute Report of the National Leadership Conference on Media Literacy in 1989, media literacy is “the ability to access, analyze, communicate and produce media in a variety of forms.” Even more comprehensive definitions have arisen since, such as this from the New Mexico Media Literacy Project, highlighting the production aspect: “the ability to create media, including understanding the ‘text’ (surface content) and ‘subtext’ (hidden meanings) in messages received from: television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, billboards, signs, packaging, marketing materials, video games, recorded music, the Internet, and other media.” While definitions have changed, media literacy scholars, researchers, educators, and activists agree on the import of such endeavors, whether it be for the purposes of enhancing critical thinking skills, raising consciousness, creating more active and prepared civic participants or some combination of these and other practical and ideological intents.

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Media literacy seeks to address the proliferation of new literacy practices in an increasingly mobile, global, digital world. Broadly analogous to print literacy, media literacy promotes the analysis (reading) and production (writing) of texts in a variety of forms. In practice, conflicting assumptions about the definitions, practices, and impact of media literacy are at the heart of contentious debates about its fundamental aims, purposes, and value. Consequently, as media literacy promotes greater access to a wider range of tools and texts, it is increasingly mired in age-old debates about the uses of literacy to frame, shape, and control public discourse. In the process, it touches on the relationships between media literacy, cultural narratives, and the arts.

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By early 2009, the art world migrated away from the waning excitement that once swirled throughout galleries, cafés, and bars, only to continue more cohesively within the new, alternative social networking website Facebook. During the last six months of 2008, there was a 267 percent increase in Facebook members between the ages of thirty-five and fifty-four.1 Founded in 2006 by former Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook became a free, image-based utility that relied upon users’ thumbnail portraits to secure online social connections. It also embraced multi-media, similar to MySpace, but set itself apart in an attempt to achieve a sense of authenticity within a highly pirated, dishonest, and potentially ominous online environment.

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A little animated bird lands on the windowsill of a big building in urban America, where it begins to sing: “Copyright’s for the people | Copyright is to promote creativity | Balancing rights of owners and users of intellectual property.” But a character named Big C, high up in one of the skyscrapers, argues with the little bird, singing, “I’m an owner, not a donor, copyright’s for me | Let me tell you how it’s gonna be | I’m the one who knows | Look at all the things I own | All the copyrights I hold | All under my control | Copyright’s for the folks who own.”

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Marshall McLuhan describes the impact of new media with the phrase “the medium is the message.” McLuhan’s “medium” is any extension of the human senses and he focuses on media such as print, photographs, telephones, and weapons throughout his text Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964). McLuhan’s “message” explains the way a new medium affects a culture, “for the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”1 He provides the railway as an example. This medium “did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human function, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure.”2 Similarly, digital photography “accelerates” or “enlarges” traditional photographic processes. Digital technology allows for greater ease in editing than analog photography, because it transforms photographs from objects into data. Thus, digital imaging technology theoretically disrupts previous notions of the indexical connection between photographic images and “reality.” Digital photography challenges the historical belief that photography is representative of reality. But have viewers’ perceptions shifted in relation to theoretical discussions? While digital technology affects the theoretical notion of the photographic index, these theories overlook the appearance of the image and the social applications of transparent lens-based media. Viewers continue to read digital photographs as representative of reality …

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Let’s start with a photograph taken by Hiroko Masuke—of a billboard featuring an ad for the television miniseries The Andromeda Strain that was printed in the New York Times a year ago.1 The billboard includes a large, horizontal poster for the series, along with a video display showing clips embedded within the poster. What’s not visible, however, is a small video camera (made by the company Quividi) that records passersby as they look at the billboard. The company has developed what it calls the “automated audience measurement solution,” which documents visitors who look at the billboard, channeling the information into a database, from which it decodes the data. It examines factors such as the overall height of viewers, as well as facial features, including cheekbone height and the measurement of space between the nose and chin. The goal is to determine gender and age, and although the company says it does not yet factor for race, it plans to soon.

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When Sesame Street premiered on November 10, 1969, the media landscape for pre-school-age children was limited to what we now refer to as “old media” technologies: television, radio, and print media. The show’s innovative programming design, which integrated animation, live action “street” scenes, and segments featuring lovable Muppets, aimed to use television as a tool to foster early acquisition of language, math, and social skills. Sesame Street also addressed what would become one of the central goals of the media literacy movement of the 1970s: encouraging children to become “active users” of media rather than “passive consumers” of “interactive” programming models. In the days of the old media landscape, such interactivity took the form of children responding to on-screen characters (counting along with the Count) and recognizing the mediated nature of their televisual experience (actors looked directly into the camera/at the audience while simultaneously interacting with fictional muppets in Mr. Hooper’s store, on their front stoops, and even in the trashcans lining Sesame Street).

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In the current hypermedia age, the borders of information are increasingly indistinguishable. There now exist few, if any, limits to how far, fast, and wide messages may travel. Across the globe—from the growth of community internet in rural Europe and the Middle East,1 to the expansion of cell phone technology in India2 and Africa, our media-saturated world is shrinking.

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The ostensible purpose of this Louis Vuitton ad is to promote the company’s luggage line by highlighting a popular bag known as a duffle. The work, like many of its kind, features a celebrity endorsement, but in this case, the model is unexpected: the former General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and first and last President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. It would be an amusing choice for a spokesman if it weren’t so troubling.

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This essay highlights the enforced reception of documentary genres and in particular, the limitations of documentary filmic and photographic images of war through the implementation of socialistic ideology. We must approach all “historical” documents with skepticism, especially master narratives, and question whether the images have been retouched and/or reinterpreted. Looking at photographs years later, we can grasp which are “historical” fakes—mis-annotated, staged, or retouched photos—by contrasting them to others or even better, to negatives, if they are left behind. This would, of course, mean interpreting images apart from their captions and contexts, provided by editors and publishing companies, as well as finding extra materials to compare them.

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In 2004, I worked as the Director of Art and Public Education at the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts (EBCPA) in Richmond, California, and was presented with the challenge of developing a media literacy curriculum for local elementary school children. Working with young children was new for me. Most of my experience involved leading media literacy workshops for teachers and teens. The curriculum was part of a larger project called “Learning Without Borders,” which integrated media arts activities into the curriculum and daily life of three local elementary schools with predominantly African American and Latino students. The project also included three distinct subunits of Mexican and African music, dance, and theater arts.

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“We’re going to interview the original Freedom Riders,” I announced as we rumbled through Montgomery, Alabama, in a 105-degree van, camera gear stacked in the back. “Don’t screw it up.” This directive barely masked my insecurities as the new video students sat silently in the back.

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Distinctions concerning what things are, how we define things, how they appear, and what their appearance tells us about them, are quixotic. In the case of cities, which have long been represented in art, literature, and photographic and electronic media, a second level of complication arises: cities represent themselves. Buildings, plans (both vernacular and grand), and history; marketing for tourism and civic pride; neighborhoods; ethnic, racial, and class identities (among other expressions of style) are ways in which a city produces itself and images of itself simultaneously. Even the theatrical stage with its perspectival backdrop was imported from city streets. Compound these significations, the diverse cluster of popular, cultural, and artistic images that comprise our view of the city with the convergence of disciplines that take cities and the urban process—the complex interactions between natural and built environments and social relations that make up the dynamic course of urban history, economics, politics and everyday lives—as their object, add the complexities of film studies, and one has a challenging subject.

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They are different. They are not a new race of humans, not without the same old issues, frailties, and faults. Digital natives, however, “all born after 1980, when social digital technologies, such as Usenet and bulletin board systems, came online” (1), do communicate in new and different ways, and older adults (mostly “digital immigrants” often puzzled by technology) had better pay attention to them. Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives is a useful book for parents, educators, cultural observers, and scholars of communications and technology. With the proliferation of iPods, video games, Facebook, YouTube, and laptops, young people today face new multimedia opportunities and new problems. Adults must become involved in helping youth navigate both the opportunities and the problems.

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The history of artists employing language as an artistic medium is the subject of two recent, and very different, books. Stephen Bury’s Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant-Garde 1900– 1937 explores how the historical avant-garde utilized print media as a key mode of artistic production while Liz Kotz’s Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art examines how language, transformed in the wake of new recording media, functioned as a structural and durational template for artists in New York during the 1960s. Together, these books offer a new perspective on the history of artistic practices—a perspective that begs us to think critically and creatively about how language operates within all cultural productions. While neither author is a media studies scholar, their books contribute to a broader discussion about media literacy by making apparent how central the practice of co-opting media formats and messages has been for artists throughout the twentieth century. In fact, if media literacy is generally understood as “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media in a variety of forms,” then it becomes apparent after reading Bury’s and Kotz’s books that artists have consistently worked not only to access and employ the means of communication available in their cultural milieux, but have often pioneered contemporary media literacy practices by applying strategies of collage, appropriation, and distortion to language; thereby creating alternative modes of exhibition and distribution for their language-based works.

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