Media Literacy and Media Ancestry

So, last year media literacy maven Renee Hobbs published an anthology she edited entitled, Exploring the Roots of Digital and Media Literacy Through Personal Narrative through Temple University Press. The volume includes a chapter I wrote for Renee on Marshall McLuhan, in case you were wondering. Here's the write-up for the volume:

Exploring the Roots of Digital and Media Literacy through Personal Narrative provides a wide-ranging look at the origins, concepts, theories, and practices of the field. This unique, exciting collection of essays by a range of distinguished scholars and practitioners offers insights into the scholars and thinkers who fertilized the minds of those who helped shape the theory and practice of digital and media literacy education.

Each chapter describes an individual whom the author considers to be a type of "grandparent." By weaving together two sets of personal stories⏤that of the contributing author and that of the key ideas and life history of the historical figure under their scrutiny⏤major concepts of digital media and learning emerge.

And here is the Table of Contents:

Introduction ■ Renee Hobbs

1 Historical Roots of Media Literacy ■ Renee Hobbs
2 David Weinberger on Martin Heidegger ■ David Weinberger
3 Lance Strate on Marshall McLuhan ■ Lance Strate
4 Dana Polan on Roland Barthes ■ Dana Polan
5 Cynthia Lewis on Mikhail Bakhtin ■ Cynthia Lewis
6 Srividya Ramasubramanian on Gordon Allport ■ Srividya Ramasubramanian
7 Michael RobbGrieco on Michel Foucault ■ Michael RobbGrieco
8 Gianna Cappello on Theodor Adorno ■ Gianna Cappello
9 Douglas Kellner on Herbert Marcuse ■ Douglas Kellner
10 Henry Jenkins on John Fiske ■ Henry Jenkins
11 Amy Petersen Jensen on Bertolt Brecht ■ Amy Petersen Jensen
12 Donna E. Alvermann on Simone de Beauvoir ■ Donna E. Alvermann
13 Jeremiah Dyehouse on John Dewey ■ Jeremiah Dyehouse
14 Renee Hobbs on Jerome Bruner ■ Renee Hobbs
15 Vanessa Domine on Neil Postman ■ Vanessa Domine
16 Peter Gutierrez on Scott McCloud ■ Peter Gutierrez
17 Susan Moeller on Roland Barthes ■ Susan Moeller

Epilogue ■ Renee Hobbs

And you may notice that the title of each chapter follows a strict formula, so I want to stress that this was not a bit of narcissism on my part. In fact, the title I had given for my essay, not knowing that it would take this final form, was, "The Medium, the Message, and Me: Marshall McLuhan and Media Education" (just so you know).

By the way, Renee's Introduction to the volume can be read online on the Temple University Press's website. And of course the book itself is available for purchase there, and on Amazon:

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And just recently, Renee launched a website entitled Grandparents of Media Literacy that you might want to go check out. Here's the welcome message:

Welcome to the Grandparents of Media Literacy website! You can explore the many people who have influenced the field of media literacy through their work, ideas and creative contributions. These intellectual grandparents may come from fields including philosophy, sociology, literature and more. You can contribute to the website by uploading information about an author, scholar or creative individual whose work influenced your own. You can also share your own story of how an intellectual grandparent influenced your work in media literacy.

And here is some further explanation of the site:

A CROWD-SOURCED NARRATIVE APPROACH TO INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

Reflect on your experience with media, technology, society and culture and think about the writers, artists, filmmakers and others who have influenced your work in media literacy. People with interests in media literacy come from a variety of fields, including writing and composition, media psychology, literacy education, technology in society, sociology, cultural studies, media studies, and communication arts. As an transdisciplinary topic, media literacy scholars and practitioners do not all share the same foundational knowledge. We do not all rely on the same canonical texts that "tell the story" of our shared values and beliefs.

Personal storytelling can help people discover how we have been influenced by the generation of scholars and thinkers who came before us. Anyone can upload an intellectual grandparent, providing information about their work that will enable readers to understand their key ideas and contributions. Anyone can share a story about any grandparent, explaining "how they influenced you." Through this website, we aim to discover threads of previously overlooked connection to understand the subjectively-experienced history of media literacy education around the world.

So, anyone can sign up, log in, and leave their comments and stories. As one of the contributors to the anthology, there's a page already set up for me. Not the best photo of me, but what can you do? And there's an excerpt from my chapter that can be found under the profile set up for McLuhan, along with any other comments left by others (as of this writing, there's one other comment on McLuhan). It can also be found on my page, under "Stories" and, why not, right here as well:

The experience of suddenly getting McLuhan has been described as akin to a religious experience by some or in more general terms as an epiphany; to use a term popular during the sixties, I was able to grok McLuhan (grok was coined by the science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land to refer to an extreme form of understanding and empathy). In visual terms, it was the kind of experience depicted in comic strips of a light bulb being switched on over a character’s head, which would certainly be fitting, given that McLuhan argued that electric technology and electronic media constituted the basis of a revolution that was reversing the course of some three millennia of Western civilization.

Television was the specific electronic medium that had pushed our culture over the edge, he argued, and one of the characteristics of television was its low resolution image, which McLuhan compared to that of the printed cartoon, which elevated the comics medium in importance (see Scott McCloud’s insightful, McLuhan-inspired graphic nonfiction, Understanding Comics [1993]).

This idea had no small significance for me because I had been reading comics since before I could read (my parents read them to me), despite the fact that the hybrid medium was often disparaged by teachers and others arguing in defense of elitist literary culture. The fact that comics crossed—or, if you like, transgressed—the boundary between literate and pictorial media contributed to my own developing awareness of differences among media, differences in their biases towards different types of content, differences in their effects on the ways we think, feel, act, perceive, and organize ourselves, differences that McLuhan famously summed up by saying, “The medium is the message” (1964, p. 7).

The image of a light bulb turning on is a visual metaphor for an idea (the word is derived from the Greek term for seeing) and perhaps the most basic way of describing the effect of my reading The Medium Is the Massage was that I was suddenly able to see the world from an entirely new perspective (in addition to being a field or intellectual tradition, media ecology has often been referred to as a perspective, although I prefer to use approach in order to avoid the visual metaphor). Or, to invoke Aldous Huxley’s well-known phrase, used to describe his experiments with hallucinogens, the “doors of perception” suddenly opened for me. The reference to perception is particularly significant because McLuhan’s specific approach to media ecology emphasized the primary role that sensory organs play in our thought processes.

Although there are differences between media literacy and media ecology, there is some significant overlap, as can be seen by the inclusion of Neil Postman as well as Marshall McLuhan in the anthology, as well as comics creator and theorist Scott McCloud. And depending on who you ask, other "grandparents" such as Heidegger, Barthes, Bakhtin, Foucault, Brecht, Dewey, and Bruner would also be characterized as media ecologists (not that anyone on that list would necessarily be excluded). 

The Grandparents website itself is an interesting experiment in fostering participation in this project, and perhaps exploring possibilities for a second edition or volume of the anthology. So I would certainly recommend it to you, to at least go take a look, and maybe even sign up, log on, and share your stories.

Trump, McCarthy, and the Art of the Pseudo-Event

I've been thinking lately about Daniel Boorstin, and how well his discussion of pseudo-events, a term he coined, applies to the contemporary political scene. In a sense, the concept of the pseudo-event presages that of fake news, but it's not the news that is fake when it comes to pseudo-events, but rather the event that the news supposedly reports on.

Boorstin's argument is that the introduction of steam-powered printing, as opposed to printing presses powered by hand, made it possible to produce mass circulation papers that could be manufactured cheaply, hence the penny press, and could be distributed on a daily basis. So the technology was in place for the daily newspaper, but the problem was that there just wasn't enough news to fill the papers day after day after day.

For this reason, Boorstin argues, newspapers shifted from news gathering to news making, from relying solely on events that actually occurred in reality, that would have occurred regardless of whether they were reported on or not, to events that were manufactured solely for the purpose of providing content for the media, events that therefore were not real or true events, but pseudo-events.

  Pseudo-events include the interview, the publicity stunt, the press release, the press conference, the background briefing, trial balloon, and news leak. These provide content for the news media, but based on nothing that actually happened in the world. Boorstin notes that pseudo-events are designed to be dramatic, vivid, easy to disseminate and to digest (although also quite ambiguous as to their meaning, but that adds to their interest and intrigue), because they are specifically designed to be reported on or appear on the news media, whereas real events are not. He also notes that pseudo-events spawn other pseudo-events in geometric fashion, as an interview, for example, will lead to further discussion and interviews, etc.


This is a very quick and cursory summary, so let me take this opportunity to encourage you to read the book Boorstin wrote on this subject, The Image. The original version, published way back in 1961, was entitled The Image or What Happened to the American Dream, but a revised edition was published in 1978 with the new title, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. 

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This book is essential reading for anyone interested in media ecology, and apart from the topic of news, Boorstin also discusses the shift from heroes to celebrities (something I've written about), from travel to tourism, and other topics related to a loss of authenticity and coherence. Much of it is a conservative critique, but one that is more often than not right on target, and forms the basis of others that followed, including Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death.


So, there is no question that Trump, as a celebrity, is a human pseudo-event, but also someone highly skilled at publicity, which is to say, at manufacturing pseudo-events and manipulating the press. This has been the case for decades, but what seems especially relevant now is the way that he used Twitter as a candidate, and uses it now as president, as a kind of instantaneous press release. And every tweet has been treated by the news media as if it were a singular event requiring attention and analysis.

And in thinking about that, Boorstin's discussion of Senator Joseph McCarthy just recently jumped out at me. I think the parallels are quite clear, and altogether stunning (and if you don't know who McCarthy was or don't know much about him, no judgment, it has been a long time now, I've linked his name above to the Wikipedia entry on him, and please go take a look).


So let me turn now to Dr. Boorstin, and consider what he had to say:

... it is possible to build a political career almost entirely on pseudo-events. Such was that of the late Joseph R. McCarthy, Senator from Wisconsin from 1947-1957. His career might have been impossible without the elaborate, perpetually grinding machinery of "information" ... And he was a natural genius at creating reportable happenings that had an interestingly ambiguous relation to underlying reality. Richard Rovere, a reporter in Washington during McCarthy's heyday recalls:

He knew how to get into the news even on those rate occasions when invention failed him and he had no unfacts to give out. For example, he invented the morning press conference called for the purpose of announcing an afternoon press conference. The reporters would come in—they were beginning, in this period, to respond to his summonses like Pavlov's dogs at the clang of a bell—and McCarthy would say that he just wanted to give them the word that he expected to be ready with a shattering announcement later in the day, for use in the papers the following morning. This would gain him a headline in the afternoon papers: "New McCarthy Revelations Awaited in Capital." Afternoon would come, and if McCarthy had something, he would give it out, but often enough he had nothing, and this was a matter of slight concern. He would simply say that he wasn't quite ready, that he was having difficulty in getting some of the "documents" he needed or that a "witness" was proving elusive. Morning headlines: "Delay Seen in McCarthy Case—Mystery Witness Being Sought."

 I'm not sure I want to characterize Trump as a genius, but this seems so very similar to the ways in which Trump has masterminded the process of getting the attention of the news media, often in attempts to distract from other less favorable news items. The ambiguity characteristic of pseudo-events is very much a part of this process, as an inordinate amount of time and space is devoted to trying to figure out what his tweets mean, whether they're to be taken literally or figuratively, whether they represent policy, or simply what the hell covfefe means.

The really perverse part of all this is the ways in which journalists are manipulated to serve the politician's ends, despite their own best intentions. Let's read a little more of what Boorstin has to say about McCarthy:

 He had a diabolical fascination and an almost hypnotic power over news-hungry reporters. They were somehow reluctantly grateful to him for turning out their product. They stood astonished that he could make so much news from such meager raw material. Many hated him; all helped him. They were victims of what one of them called their "indiscriminate objectivity." In other words, McCarthy and the newsmen both thrived on the same synthetic commodity.

Senator McCarthy's political fortunes were promoted almost as much by newsmen who considered themselves his enemies as by those few who were his friends. Without the active help of all of them he could never have created the pseudo-events which brought him notoriety and power. Newspaper editors, who self-righteously attacked the Senator's "collaborators," themselves proved worse than powerless to cut him down to size. Even while they attacked him on the editorial page inside, they were building him up in front-page headlines. Newspapermen were his most potent allies, for they were his co-manufacturers of pseudo-events. They were caught in their own web. Honest newsmen and the unscrupulous Senator McCarthy were in separate branches of the same business.

And that business is entertainment, as Postman would point out. And this is where we really need to take our journalists to task as collaborators. They were seduced by the higher ratings they gained by reporting on Trump, when what they really needed to do during the election was to stop reporting on him so much of the time with no valid justification, stop giving him so much attention for no real reason, stop feeding the beast. The constant mentioning of his name, the continual focus on his candidacy, reinforced his image as an important figure, and therefore as someone who could legitimately become president. Journalists simply could not help themselves, but all that coverage, even when it was not positive, helped him much more than it hurt him.

So now, we have a human pseudo-event as president. I guess you could say that what we have now, I am sorry to say, is a pseudo-president. And, what else is there to say but that what we have now is the triumph of the image.

On Media Ecology Books and Book Series

In my previous post, A Good Causality, I neglected to mention that our new co-edited anthology, Taking Up McLuhan's Cause: Perspectives on Media and Formal Causality, was published as part of the UK publisher Intellect's new book series on media ecology, which is being edited by my friend and fellow media ecologist Phil Rose. 

This represents the third book series devoted to the field of media ecology to have been launched. The first one, which I proposed and was supervisory editor for, came courtesy of Hampton Press, back circa 1994-1995. After publishing many books in the series for well over a decade, Hampton decided to stop publishing new books of any kind, the owner was essentially retiring, so although the books that were published would continue to be sold, this essentially brought the series to a close.

For several years, there was no active book series devoted to media ecology, and I have to credit Phil Rose for the push to find a new publisher to start one up. It was at his urging that, following the successful publication of Amazing Ourselves to Death, that I proposed a new book series to my publisher, Peter Lang, which was accepted with the title, "Understanding Media Ecology" (that's a title I was going to use for a book of my own, but Peter Lang wanted to distinguish the new series from the old Hampton Press series, and like that title, so I gave it up).

So far, three books have been published in the Peter Lang Series: the second edition of Bob Logan's Understanding New Media: Extending Marshall McLuhan; Bob's collaboration with Marshall McLuhan that had never been published, with additional material updating it for the contemporary media environment, The Future of the Library: From Electric Media to Digital Media; and Dennis Cali's attempt to produce a media ecology textbook, Mapping Media Ecology: An Introduction to the Field.

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The next book in the series is one that is very near and dear to my heart, and is already listed for pre-order:

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But more on that when the time comes...

In the meantime, as I mentioned, Phil Rose was also able to successfully propose a new media ecology series for Intellect, and Taking Up McLuhan's Cause was the first book published in the series, and hard on its heals was another anthology, this one edited by Phil, entitled Confronting Technopoly: Charting a Course Towards Human Survival. The term technopoly was coined by Neil Postman, and the book follows up on his major media ecological work, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.

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As you can see, this second offering from Intellect is also, unfortunately, only available in hardcover, and priced for library sales. In any event, here is the blurb describing the collection:

In 1992, Neil Postman presciently coined the term “technopoly” to refer to “the surrender of culture to technology.” This book brings together a number of contributors from different disciplinary perspectives to analyze technopoly both as a concept and as it is seen and understood in contemporary society. Contributors present both analysis of and strategies for managing socio-technical conflict, and they also open up a number of fruitful new lines of thought around emerging technological, social, and even psychological forms.

And here are the contents (you'll probably notice a familiar name early on):

Introduction: The Question Concerning Technopoly
Phil Rose 

Part I: Contextualization 

Chapter 1: Contextualizing Technopoly
Lance Strate 

Part II: Digital Manifestations  

Chapter 2: The Omnipresent Opiate: Rethinking Internet Addiction in the Network Era
Ryan S. Eanes 

Chapter 3: Probing the Media Ecology of Self-Tracking Technologies:  A Postmanist Critique and Defence
Yoni Van Den Eede 

Chapter 4: Navigating the Mobile Village
Zack Stiegler and Nick Artman 

Chapter 5: Insolent Networks: The Auto-Mated Social Life
Gary Kenton 

Part III: Ideology and Geopolitical Considerations  

Chapter 6: Striking Symbols: Re-Sounding Words from Leonard Cohen to Neil Postman
Ruthanne Wrobel 

Chapter 7: Jane, Stop This Crazy Thing! The End of Progress and the Beginning of a Third Way
Arthur W. Hunt III 

Chapter 8: Divinizing Technology and Violence: Technopoly, the Warfare State, and the Revolution in Military Affairs
Phil Rose 

Chapter 9: Posthuman Postmanism: Confronting Technopoly with Deep Media Ecology
Niall Stephens 

Part IV: Confrontations: From Education to Liberation  

Chapter 10: Postman’s Hope: Rethinking the Role of Education in Technopoly
Ellen Rose 

Chapter 11: The New Social Media Curriculum: Confronting Technopoly with Education
Geraldine E. Forsberg 

Chapter 12: Black Mountain College: Experiments in Form
Michael Plugh 

Chapter 13: The Arts of Liberation in the Age of Technopoly
Edward E. Tywoniak

A very nice collection of work indeed, and an important addition to the media ecology literature. It may be too much for most folks to buy, but again, maybe you can beg, borrow, or steal a copy!