International Journal of Communication 10(2016), 1125–1144 1932–8036/20160005

The Myth of Media Literacy

ZOË DRUICK1
Simon Fraser University, Canada

Since the late 1990s, media literacy has become an increasingly prominent paradigm
within the fields of media and communication studies in the United States and
elsewhere. This article investigates the convergence of forces in that propelled this
approach to its currently ascendant position. With a nod to Harvey J. Graff’s analysis of
the mythic power associated with the concept of literacy, the article explores the
techniques and rationales that have coalesced around media literacy, making it at once
central to the operation of neoliberal capitalism and to its critique. Putting media literacy
into a longer history of the instrumental and biopolitical use of media in education and
considering the role of education in connecting children’s interests to moral and
economic regulation, media literacy is taken to be the most recent iteration of a long-
standing set of ideas that have been taken up in different ways by early educational
reformers, postwar development communications theorists, and countercultural media
educators.

Keywords: media literacy, myth of literacy, neoliberalism, education, development

media

In March 1998, the Journal of Communication published an issue entirely devoted to the topic of
media literacy. In his introduction, the journal’s editor, Alan Rubin, observed that, although the topic had
been debated for “several decades . . . it is somewhat perplexing why we really understand so little about
the subject” (Rubin, 1998, p. 3). In retrospect, this may have marked the arrival of a suggestive but
imprecise concept into the mainstream of American communication studies. But by this point it had
already received a good deal of play in educational policy and practice in a range of national and
transnational contexts. The widespread deregulation of the media in the 1980s, the emergence of
postcommunist states in the early 1990s, and the aggressive promotion of both globalized free trade and
the digital economy that ensued led to the centering of media education in democratic discourse by
various strange bedfellows. At about the same time, left-wing educators and media reformers began to
consolidate the political work done with film and video in the 1970s on the new digital platform; USAID
began an aggressive media campaign in the former Eastern Bloc under the rubrics of the National

Zoë Druick: [email protected]

Date submitted: 2015–07–18

1
I would like to acknowledge Vitor Borba, Harvey J. Graff, Jerry Zazlove, and Yuezhi Zhao for their
support of this research.

Copyright © 2016 (Zoë Druick). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No
Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at http://ijoc.org.
1126 Zoë Druick International Journal of Communication 10(2016)

Endowment for Democracy and the Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA); and large
corporations began funding digital literacy initiatives, as did the MacArthur Foundation.

All these groups rallied around the creation of critical capacities in media users and the potentials
of participatory media for democratic citizenship; significantly, each of them used the same rubric despite
their sometimes polarized political views. In fact, only two years after the Journal of Communication issue,
a rift appeared in the provisional networks that had sprung up in the media literacy community stemming
from disagreements over whether to accept funding from media industries and about the importance of
centering activism in their program. Where some saw media literacy as a critique of capitalism and the
embrace of active learning, others saw it as a replacement for censorship or regulation, or even as the
promotion of “tool competence,” an uncritical notion of technology as merely knobs and levers (Hobbs,
1998; Hobbs & Jensen, 2009).

Split notwithstanding, in the new millennium, media literacy has become an important new
paradigm, and shelves of textbooks have been produced on media literacy and related concepts, including
digital literacy, visual literacy, and multimedia and multimodal literacies (e.g., Burn & Durran, 2007;
Elkins, 2008; Hobbs & Moore, 2013; Jewitt & Kress, 2003; Kist, 2005 Potter, 2011; Rivoltella, 2008;
Tyner, 2010; Williams & Zenger, 2012).2 Educator networks and political organizations, such as the
American Centre for Media Literacy and the National Association for Media Literacy Education, have
mushroomed under this banner as well. But in the rush to adopt and apply this set of educational ideas
about the digital society, a telling set of contradictions has emerged that seems worthy of analysis. From
progressive media reformers and youth-centered educators to large media corporations and American soft
power peddlers, there appears to be a place for everyone in this particular tent. Granted, youth are
commonly the focus of educational ontologies in democratic polities, and the politics of education are lost
on no one. Yet media literacy seemingly can be stretched to encompass everything from children’s
understanding of conventions of realism and new forms of sociality to the revitalization of participatory
democracy and lifelong learning and retraining according to labor market needs in the digital economy.3 It
is almost as though media literacy has become shorthand for the challenges and logics of neoliberal social
and economic organization.

For decades, the critical study of media had its strongest proponents in nations somewhat
reluctantly receiving American media. For instance, media education has a long tradition in the United
Kingdom and other Commonwealth nations, stretching back to the founding of the BBC in 1922 and the
British Film Institute in 1933, as well as the establishment of the documentary movement, through to
British Cultural Studies of the Birmingham School. However, by 2003, when the new Communications Act

2
Although precise data are not available, judging solely by the number of textbooks (more than 100
cataloged with the keyword of media literacy in my midsize university library), it is safe to assume that
courses on media literacy in high schools as well as in departments of education, English, and
communication studies at university and college levels are being mounted in increasing numbers.
3
Lifelong learning, which has been organized around new technologies, is also subject to an analysis of
governmentality and biopower. It is outside the scope of this article, but see Olssen (2006).
International Journal of Communication 10(2016) The Myth of Media Literacy 1127

delegated the duty of promoting media literacy in the United Kingdom to the newly formed Office of
Communication, it adopted a definition devised in the United States in 1992 (the “Aspen declaration”):
“the ability of a citizen to access, analyze, and produce information for specific outcomes” (Firestone,
1993, p. v; see also Buckingham, 2005). Following the United Kingdom’s lead, the European Commission
took a position in 2006 that media literacy was central to “active and full citizenship” (Sourbati, 2009, p.
248). Today, the articulation of media literacy with democratic citizenship has become something of a
truism in education and communication policy and practice worldwide (Hermes, van den Berg, & Mol,
2013; Penman & Turnbull, 2007).

Yet the simplicity and practicality that emerged with the Americanization of the field has had a
number of ramifications. Unlike earlier media studies paradigms, media literacy tends to mix well with the
media effects tradition so long favored in the United States. Key areas of intervention around media
violence, sexual content, health, stereotypes, and the production of fear also further the effects tradition
(Potter, 2013). Observing that the movement took on momentum after the Columbine shootings of 1999,
film scholar Jim Wehmeyer (2000) observed of the media literacy community in the United States that

many of this movement’s central theoretical concerns and operative assumptions echo
and provide a contemporary forum for the primarily psychologically and biologically
informed threads of mass communication theory and research that so dominated U.S.
academic understanding of media, society, and culture in the mid-twentieth century. (p.
94)

In this essay, I make a preliminary sketch of the career of the American discourse of media
literacy, including its roots in development discourse, to situate the “conceptually diffuse and politically
disorganized” (Cowie, 2000, p. 312) movement of today. From the outset, media literacy’s connection to
both education and media, and its provocative associations with children, youth, and powers of influence,
has attracted reformers and regulators from across the political spectrum, making it a symptomatic term
for tracing the history of a governmental discourse central to discussions of media and modern education.
Yet its emergence alongside the neoliberalization of Western states merits particular attention.

Although it is not my intention to overfetishize the concept of literacy, I will argue that the
consensus that has grown up around this framework for media analysis does have particular significance.
In his in-depth analysis of the “myth of literacy,” historian Harvey J. Graff astutely identifies literacy as
more than a set of skills or an orientation to the world; rather, it is a compelling and contradictory social
symbol that has been articulated to every aspect of social improvement, from citizenship and civility to
higher forms of thought, improved health, and even class mobility (Graff, 1979, 1987). Graff’s incisive
point is that literacy has been isolated from a constellation of social, political, and economic practices
precisely because, when reduced to a set of skills, it is something that can be affected by the school
system, one of the most powerful and far-reaching social institutions of modern societies. Outcomes can
be measured and a wide array of objectives sought after, if never actually met. Far from a simple
objective, then, one might say that literacy represents a powerful and discourse-generating problematic
(see Hermes et al., 2013). In Foucauldian terms, literacies can be seen as techniques of biopower, or the
1128 Zoë Druick International Journal of Communication 10(2016)

“controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomenon of
population to economic processes” (Foucault, 1980, p. 141).

As a fundamental skill that promises to promote improvement in so many ways, literacy seems
immune to opposition, and media literacy is no exception. For this reason, groups of every imaginable
political affiliation have rallied to its flag. In this article, I trace the history of the establishment of the
American concept of media literacy with the kind of attention that Graff pays to its panacea-like qualities.
By now it has become, for better or worse, associated with the promises and perils of employment and
success in the information age, the operation of digital democracy, and, most recently, the growth of the
creative economy. Rather than inventory its successes and failures, I map its dimensions and contours, its
techniques and rationales, with the objective of understanding its growing place in the study of media.

To do justice to this idea, which emerged long before its legitimation in the late 1990s, it is
instructive to consider the history of media and education, from film in the classroom—a technique that
goes back to the earliest decades of cinema—to the consolidation of media’s role in education in the
postwar world, led by agencies such as UNESCO, and the establishment of the field of development
communications. The 1950s and 1960s, in particular, were decades of consolidation for a range of
educational media service providers, generously funded by American industrial and philanthropic
organizations, such as the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, as well as the U.S. state (Simpson, 1994).
The approach of these agencies to finding ways to combine media and education provides an important
backdrop for understanding the current emphasis on media literacy.

Like Graff, I use the term myth advisedly, not to refer to a falsehood but rather to invoke the
anthropology-indebted traditions in cultural studies that situate myths as central social narratives
(Barthes, 1972). Graff advocates the use of historical and empirical study to complicate the universal
claims made for literacy. If he has shown that there are delusions of grandeur surrounding literacy, I
argue that, with reference to media literacy, these delusions become scaled up to the core fantasies of
neoliberalism with its promises of democracy through participation in the social networks of what political
theorist Jodi Dean (2009) terms “communicative capitalism.” As with all modern educational initiatives,
media literacy is marked by the governmental qualities endemic to biopolitical projects (Hardt & Negri,
2004; Hunter, 1988). As I hope to show, media education and media literacy have had many different
valences over the past century, but as they become more firmly ensconced in social, political, and
economic institutions of the neoliberal era, they have more clearly adopted discourses that tend to
emphasize neutral methodology and downplay politics, evoking democracy while simultaneously
smoothing out the conflicts and contradictions that the term all too clearly evokes. I will therefore explore
the way in which media literacy discourse has been absorbed into corporate discourses of neoliberal
citizenship in ways that resonate with Boltanski and Chiapello’s (2005) analysis of the anti-authoritarian
capitalism that has evolved since May 1968 and as part of the technology sector’s utopian capitalism
(Turner, 2006). I will take as the basis for my analysis of new common sense in media literacy two
MacArthur Foundation–funded studies from 2009, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture:
Media Education for the 21st Century, and Living and Learning With New Media.
International Journal of Communication 10(2016) The Myth of Media Literacy 1129

The Literate and Illiterate

To bring some context to the current use of the term media literacy, examination of the history of
media in education might be illuminating. To that end, I offer a brief sketch of the use of technologies in
the classroom and the pedagogical expectations that accompanied them. Silent film was the first industrial
visual technology to make its way into the classroom, emerging in educational settings, both formal and
informal, in the late 1890s, almost as soon as the technologies were commercially available. It was not
long before these local and national initiatives, by churches, schools, libraries, and YMCAs, were scaled up
to international agencies, such as the League of Nations’ International Educational Cinematograph
Institute, one of the precursors of UNESCO (Druick, 2007).

The United States is well known as a producer of popular media entertainment, but its role in the
promotion of media education is just as impressive. As far back as the silent film era, U.S. corporations
and philanthropic organizations were keen to become part of classrooms. After 1923, the year that Kodak
released its noninflammable 16mm format and began to steal market dominance away from the French
company Pathé, American educators were able to assemble a powerful network of individuals, institutions,
and philanthropic organizations, including journals such as Moving Picture Age and Visual Education, that
focused on the use of film in the classroom (Greene, 2005; Orgeron, Orgeron, & Streible, 2012; Saettler,
1968; Wasson, 2005).

One of the characteristics of the current discourse of media literacy is its focus on intensification
of media experiences for youth on digital platforms and the presumed dangers of illiteracy. Education’s
twin goals of subjectivization and modernization have long relied on the specter of the illiterate as its
unschooled other (Hunter, 1988). Often, discourses of illiteracy have been tied to colonial relations. As
late as the 1970s, one could still encounter a story in a communication textbook about the surprise of
African viewers when seeing a chicken run across a movie screen or of Pacific Islanders unable to
recognize themselves in a film (Carpenter, 1973). This colonial orientation is part and parcel of
communication as a social science bound up with modernity and imperialism (Alhassan, 2007). As
historian James M. Burns (2002) notes, from the silent period onward, the capacity to comprehend films
was one of a “cluster of skills and abilities” that allowed settlers to claim superiority over “natives” (p. 35;
see also Wilson, 1961). Thus, racist discourses of Africans’ backwardness, childishness, and
impressionability, for instance, were bolstered by a “colonial folklore” that aimed to establish differences
between colonizers and colonized. In fact, ever since audiences were supposed to have jumped up from
their seats when the Lumières’ train pulled into the station on movie screens in 1896, comprehension of
new media has been linked to modernity and often used to reinforce colonial and class hierarchies. As with
many of the claims of media illiteracy, the panicking audience story is a fable of industrial society
(Bottomore, 1999; Gunning, 1989). What is significant for our purposes here, however, is the way in
which the myth of media literacy, the ability to “read and write” with new media, has tended to be
associated with progressive and modern values.

In no less important ways, media were often used in classrooms to create efficiencies. The
demands universal education was placing on education systems in the postwar industrial world required
changes to thinking about how curriculum could be delivered; one answer to the resource conundrum was
1130 Zoë Druick International Journal of Communication 10(2016)

the invention of various “teaching machines.” In his history of classroom uses of technology, Larry Cuban
(1986) notes that the dream of efficiency in education manifested itself as the Taylorization of the
classroom, in which the integration of the student into mechanized feedback loops was hoped to increase
speed and standardization. The concept of teaching machines took on prominence in the decades following
the Second World War; television was a reformer’s holy grail. In 1958, for instance, behavioral scientist
B. F. Skinner published an article on teaching machines in Science, in which he characterized educational
technology as the best way to meet the demands on educational systems:

There are more people in the world than ever before, and a far greater part of them
want an education. The demand cannot be met simply by building more schools and
training more teachers. Education must become more efficient. To this end, curricula
must be revised and simplified, and textbooks and classroom techniques improved. In
any other field a demand for increased production would have led at once to the
invention of labor-saving capital equipment. Education has reached this stage very late,
possibly through a misconception of its task. Thanks to the advent of television,
however, the so-called audio-visual aids are being re-examined. Film projectors,
television sets, phonographs, and tape recorders are finding their way into American
schools and colleges. (Skinner, 1958, p. 969)

The Ford Foundation entered the educational field in the early 1950s through the establishment
of its Funds for the Advancement of Education. As an extension of this mandate, in the 1950s and 1960s,
the foundation provided funding to the National Association of Educational Broadcasters for experimental
projects using TV in schools, including a futuristic airborne regional educational broadcasting scheme in
the American Midwest and a satellite instructional television experiment in India (Goldfarb, 2002;
Perlman, 2010; see also Lindo-Fuentes & Ching, 2012). In all these cases, technology in general, and
television in particular, was presented as a solution to a pressing educational “state of emergency” (Lewis,
2007, p. 689).

Around this time, ideas about the use of technology for education made their way from American
theorists to UNESCO’s projects in the developing world. In UNESCO publications and conferences of the
1950s, the humanist ideals of peace and freedom were translated into matters of technique. When
connected with behaviorist theories of education that dominated American psychology, UNESCO’s work
with media, especially in the global South, mapped a project of centralization and standardization onto the
project of liberal education that dominated modernization theory for the better part of two decades
(Druick, 2011).

Development communication guru Wilbur Schramm, for instance, was a strong proponent of
educational media in developing countries and spearheaded several UNESCO projects, whose outcomes
were published in his many books, including The New Media: Memo to Educational Planners (1967b) and
the three-volume New Educational Media in Action: Case Studies for Planners (1967a). With
McLuhanesque enthusiasm, he noted in this USAID-funded study that “new media” of instruction place a
International Journal of Communication 10(2016) The Myth of Media Literacy 1131

machine or other electronic device in the communication process in such a way as to

extend a student’s sight and hearing through space and time so that he can actually see
and hear the teacher or what the teacher wants to show him. In a still newer generation
of teaching devices . . . the student actually uses a responsive machine—a teaching
machine . . . —and practices by communicating back and forth with it. (Schramm &
International Institute for Educational Planning, 1967b, p. 13, fn 1)

The most extreme example of the theory behind teaching machines being put into practice took
place in U.S.-controlled Samoa, where, between 1964 and 1975, an entire primary school curriculum was
organized around television (Schramm, Nelson, & Betham, 1981). In his study of media education, Visual
Pedagogy, Brian Goldfarb demonstrates the colonial logic of teaching machines, describing how the United
States began experimenting with technological education in low-income schools in mainland United States
and in the territory of American Samoa at the same time. Significantly, these projects emphasized
differential forms of learning for different types of learners. In Samoa, for instance, the one school geared
to college-bound U.S. mainland citizens was exempt from the program (Goldfarb, 2002). Despite the
current mania for integrating new media into classrooms, then, history has shown that often the more
mechanized a classroom, the lower the scholastic expectations.4

Critical Media Studies as Inoculation

The connection of postwar media theory to educational imperatives such as standardized testing
and automation is an essential aspect of the story of media literacy—if only for providing the state of
affairs to which critical media studies responded. In particular, the development of critical media and
cultural studies by the likes of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall in the United Kingdom were tied to
educational projects. Williams and Hall were actively committed to the field of adult education; the
political perspectives of communication studies as articulated in a work such as Williams’ Communications
(1962), which was commissioned by the United Kingdom’s National Union of Teachers, was largely derived
from his work over the previous 15 years in adult education (Workers’ Educational Association and
university extension) (Dworkin, 1997; Williams, 2007).5

The critical media and cultural studies tradition in Britain considered issues of dominant media
and their relation to political economy and social inequality, an analysis that was meant as a preamble to
the struggle for social justice. Interestingly, just as universal education of the 19th century sought to
improve cultural tastes, postwar critical and “environmental” (McLuhanesque) approaches to media study

4
Debunking the idea that technology alone will produce social mobility, Silicon Valley computer
engineering families are reportedly sending their children to tech-free Waldorf schools (Richtel, 2011).
5
Williams and Hall followed in the footsteps of Richard Hoggart, founder of the Birmingham School of
Cultural Studies, who had written about media and literacy, though not in the same phrase, in his 1957
dirge about the working-class consumption of mass-produced culture, The Uses of Literacy (Hoggart,
1957).
1132 Zoë Druick International Journal of Communication 10(2016)

drew on traditions of education as inoculation against media’s deleterious effects (Hunter, 1988).6 Yet
despite, or perhaps because of, their critical perspectives, ideas about the media produced by social
analysts were eagerly sought after by educational institutions and corporate interests involved in the
development of global economies (Turner, 2006). To be sure, the movement of ideas about media studies
and later media literacy into mainstream institutions of social reproduction such as the educational system
did not occur without friction and modification. But it would be incorrect to assume that education and
media typically have been at loggerheads. In the remainder of this essay, I sketch out these connections
to bring greater clarity to the increasing prominence of the media literacy paradigm in educational
discourse in general and higher education in particular.

Media Literacy and (Anti)capitalism

Even if most of the educational television projects were declared failures by the 1970s,
technology and the classroom were by then well bonded. Cultural critics who had formerly adopted the
inoculation approach now began to be interested in the potentials of media for art and education, the
“creative media approach” (Hoechsmann & Poyntz, 2012, p. 146). Following Freire’s ideas about pedagogy
for liberation as well as McLuhan’s ideas about media as human “extenders” made popular by
Understanding Media (McLuhan, 1964), production began to take the place of critical reception as the
appropriate mode of using media in the classroom (Cowie, 2000; Shor & Friere, 1987). Not only did it
have exemplary ability to engage students, but in one fell swoop it would help to demystify mainstream
media and possibly liberate young minds from corporate culture. As Renee Hobbs and Amy Jensen (2009)
put it, “During the 1970s, media literacy education began to be recognized as a critical practice of
citizenship, part of the exercise of democratic rights and civil responsibilities” (p. 3).

Media education of the 1970s and 1980s was organized primarily around the study of television.
For Len Masterman, one of the most influential media educators of the period, the simple act of bringing
media into the classroom was a way of decentering knowledge and opening up the “potential for genuine
dialogue.” Moreover, Masterman (1997) asserted that the imaginative and investigative approach of
media studies was “light years ahead of the content-bound syllabuses of most traditional subjects” (p.
49). Masterman was highly pragmatic: If media studies could be accepted as a subject in high schools,
with dedicated instructors, it would develop enough institutional legitimacy, he thought, to enable it to
create its own associations and journals. Arguably, it was precisely this move from a media studies on the
margins to the educational legitimacy and institutionalization that would pave the way for new policies
concerning media literacy later in the decade.

Yet, as media education became a part of K–12 school curricula—albeit unevenly and with a
certain amount of resistance from “back to basics” conservatives—the critical, political agenda was often

6
Although outside the scope of this essay, it bears noting that Marshall McLuhan’s preliminary work for his
book Understanding Media was undertaken for a Ford Foundation–funded study on behalf of the National
Association of Educational Broadcasters on teaching with new media. In his 1960 report, McLuhan worked
out some of the preliminary ideas that would be elaborated in his best-selling book Understanding Media
four years later (McLuhan, 1960, 1964).
International Journal of Communication 10(2016) The Myth of Media Literacy 1133

softened and simplified to achieve the kind of instrumentality evident in the Aspen declaration of 1992. As
media education guru David Buckingham (2003) put it,

Media education is proposed as a way of dealing with some very wide and complex
social problems—and if the media are routinely identified as the overriding cause of
these problems, media education frequently seems to be seen as the solution. (p. 11)

Just as the study of propaganda during the Second World War was transformed into the
euphemism of “communication” as it developed into an academic discipline in the postwar world
(Simpson, 1994), so, too, critiques of the media undertaken by 1960s social movement actors and radical
adult educators were taken up and changed by educational institutions in the 1990s under the banner of
“media literacy.” As an example of the gross simplification this shift entailed, by 2003, the American
Center for Media Literacy had released a “MediaLit Kit” that boiled the study of media down to five core
concepts and five key questions (Thoman & Jolls, 2003).

Neoliberalism and the Fast Policy of Media Literacy

Given its connection to a countercultural ethos steeped in the New Left’s foundational belief in
participatory democracy, it seems surprising, perhaps, that the new paradigm of media literacy fit so well
with the emerging doctrine of neoliberalism. Yet, as several studies have convincingly demonstrated,
neoliberalism built its legitimacy precisely on the critique of authority and repressive paternalism made by
social movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005; Fraser, 2009; Hallin,
2008; Turner, 2006). Critiques of the mainstream media, like certain aspects of feminism, were readily
adopted into mainstream culture (including advertising), while substantive social critiques, especially
about economic redistribution and environmental and social justice, were largely brushed aside.

The various dead ends of television in the classroom were overcome by the structural emergence
of digital in the mid-1990s, which corresponded to the dismantling of the welfare state and the
deregulation of the media industries in many parts of the world in the 1980s and 1990s. By the end of the
1990s, notes Brian Goldfarb (2002), “information technology was transformed from a useful resource to
the key to literacy and, indeed, to success in the ‘knowledge- and information-driven economy’” (pp. 7–
8).

Paradoxically, once media studies, long derided by the right as at once too amorphous and too
political, had been transformed into the more neutral-sounding promotion of media literacy, it was easily
mobilized by a corporate political agenda of extending democracy around the world (Cowie, 2000). Like
the creative city, media literacy was adopted into what Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore (2015) call “fast
policy” spreading across the global North in the last decade of the millennium. The Scandinavian countries
embraced media literacy in the 1990s, as did Australia, Scotland, and Canada, small English-speaking
nations used to grappling with foreign-produced media. Racially divided societies such as Israel and South
Africa turned to media literacy in the 1990s as a cure “for every social ill” (Lemish & Lemish, 1997, p.
222).
1134 Zoë Druick International Journal of Communication 10(2016)

But all these initiatives paled beside those undertaken by the U.S. government and related
organizations. For instance, the United States amped up its soft power campaigns for media literacy at
precisely the moment when it was pushing for globalization through powerful international agencies such
as the World Bank and World Trade Organization. Funded through California’s Center for Civic Education,
Civitas, an international educational exchange program with an emphasis on emerging democracies in
Eastern Europe, grew throughout the 1990s. (Civitas partnerships have been established between and
among 30 U.S. states and 26 countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America.) Involved organizations
included the American Federation of Teachers, the American Political Science Association, and the Center
for Civic Education (http://new.civiced.org/). Although the themes vary, in 1995, Civitas hosted a
“democracy camp” on media literacy, where “the need for citizens living in democracies to become
discriminating, media-literate consumers was a crucial theme that permeated the readings, lectures and
discussions” (Burroughs, Brocato, Hopper, & Sanders, 2009, pp. 157–158).

Another example is the Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA), a project of the U.S.-
funded National Endowment for Democracy that was founded in 2006 to spread the values of democratic
media abroad and has been a strong proponent of media literacy. In 2009, CIMA released a report on
media literacy by Paul Mihailidis, a journalism professor at Hofstra University and member of the board of
directors of the National Association for Media Literacy Education. The report, titled Empowering Youth
Worldwide, aptly observes:

Few would argue with the need to offer youth effective educational platforms to help
them understand the role of information in an increasingly hyper media age. . . .
Supporting media literacy education for youth can help prepare children and young
adults for lives of active inquiry around media and for a better understanding of ties
between information, community, and democracy. (2009, p. 4)7

Indeed, these were sentiments that could not be opposed.

Ironically, the Freirian critique of the banking model of education resonated with the emphasis on
processing rather than knowledge that was deemed essential to an information economy. Disney, Verizon,
Dell, Apple, Microsoft, Bell, and YouTube all began to generously support digital learning initiatives (Hobbs
& Jensen, 2009; Peters, 1998), indicating just how valuable this individuated approach to media education
could be. Whereas liberal educators tended to see media critique as a form of consciousness raising and
radical democratic practice, corporations approached the teaching of media “reading” skills as the
development of a requisite competency for the neoliberal vision of the creative economy made up of
atomized consumer-producers.

The commodification of community through corporate social media and multiplayer games, and
the injunctions to re-edit and remix that subsequently became ubiquitous in digital culture, created

7
A follow-up report, Media Literacy 2.0: A Sampling of Programs Around the World (Burgess, 2013), was
released in November 2013. Other reports include Media Literacy: Citizen Journalists (Moeller, 2009a) and
Media Literacy: Understanding the News (Moeller, 2009b).
International Journal of Communication 10(2016) The Myth of Media Literacy 1135

innovative new forms of profit extraction from viewers and readers (transformed into “prosumer content-
makers”) in what Jodi Dean (2009) calls the system of “communicative capital” (see also Andrejevic,
2008). In this context, media literacy has been readily adopted as the correct—meaning legal, but also
culturally endorsed—use of new media technologies, which fits well within the paradigm of neoliberal
citizenship. Perhaps most insidiously, media literacy as a discourse of citizenship enables technological
exclusion to become the most salient social issue. This corresponds to Boltanski and Chiapello’s (2005)
identification of “exclusion” as the dominant form of social inequality in network capitalism. The conjoining
of technology to literacy and thence to citizenship makes technology into the overriding prerequisite of
citizenship and confirms a political and economic agenda predicated on unquestioned tropes of
technological progress and individual self-responsibilization.

Did capitalist and imperialist forces steal the idea of media literacy? It is no doubt true, as
Raymond Williams documents with literary studies, that, as new disciplines become legitimized, their
original political objectives are frequently sidelined. However, media literacy certainly did not begin with
the counterculture. In fact, as I have traced here, capitalist interests have long aimed to use media to
train students as well as consumers. Media companies have aggressively sought out the classroom, and
untold numbers of teachers have taken it as their challenge to meet children halfway by studying
industrially produced culture, or by using popular cultural forms as a means for “supervised freedom”
(Hunter, 1988, p. 58). Indeed, media education has long been associated with (neo)colonial educational
projects that sought efficiencies for teaching children (and adults) for whom the system holds lower
expectations. In short, media literacy of all stripes continues the long-standing governmental practice of
braiding education together with technologies of moral and civic improvement. With globalization and the
development of the digital economy, media literacy, with its antiauthority patina, must have seemed
tailor-made as the ideal technique for managing youth, connecting their relationship as consumers of
media with the need for them to be formed into compliant yet entrepreneurial citizens.

Two Studies: Living and Learning With New Media

and Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture

In 2006, the MacArthur Foundation allocated $50 million to its “digital media and learning”
initiative “to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play,
socialize, and participate in civic life” (digitallearning.macfound.org). As part of this initiative, two
multiauthored academic studies on youth and digital culture were published: one led by cultural
anthropologist Mizuko Ito and the other by communications scholar Henry Jenkins. In both studies, the
concepts of media and digital literacies figure prominently.

The study by Ito et al. (2009) is comprised of 28 ethnographic studies of youth and media and
considers the contexts in which youth use new media networks for socializing and learning. The authors
pay particular attention to the difference between adult and youth conceptions and knowledge about new
media and the lag between schools and everyday technology use. The project maps out teenage uses of
new media and then interprets them through “four key analytic foci” (p. 13): participation, publics,
literacy, and learning. For the purposes of this discussion, I will focus on the analysis of media literacy
1136 Zoë Druick International Journal of Communication 10(2016)

that the study engages. Ito and the other authors demonstrate their sensitivity to definitions of literacy
that emphasize its situatedness and embedding in relations of power.

In our work, we suggest that not only are new media practices defining forms of literacy
that rely on interactive and multimedia forms but they also are defining literacies that
are specific to a particular media moment, and possibly generational identities. (Ito et
al., 2009, p. 26)

While identifying youth practices online as literacy throughout the study, the authors advocate for adults
to recognize youth’s activities as meaningful, demonstrating that there is a generational rift in definitions
of literacy and its value.

The study by Jenkins, Purushotma, Weigel, Clinton, and Robison (2009) takes a more explicitly
normative approach to digital technologies in the classroom and identifies 11 core skills “that all youth
need to learn if they are going to be equal participants in the world of tomorrow” (p. 21), including play,
simulation, performance, appropriation, multitasking, judgment, networking, and transmedia navigation.
Using existing innovations in the K–12 classroom as models, the report suggests that there could be a
more “systematic consideration” of the development of these skills in the curriculum. “We do not want to
see media literacy treated as an add-on subject,” write the authors. “Rather, its introduction should be a
paradigm shift that, like multiculturalism or globalization, reshapes how we teach every existing subject”
(p. 109).

Taken together, the two studies provide a useful snapshot of the consolidation of new media
literacy discourse in the early 2000s. In some ways reminiscent of television and video literacy projects of
the 1970s and 1980s, Ito et al.’s study adopts a cultural studies approach to the existing media practices
of youth that refuses to judge their practices, seeing in them new forms of sociality and engagement that
adults should presumably strive to understand and marshal in positive directions rather than ignore or
attempt to destroy. Jenkins et al.’s study extends this approach by making suggestions about how K–12
classrooms could incorporate some of youth’s own new media literacies. Both agree that youth practices
should be understood and combined with more institutional forms of learning to create the participatory
digital publics of tomorrow. The studies are designed to help adults who work with youth to both
understand digital platforms and improve their skills and practices. The virtues of enhancing publics and
the values of participation are taken to be tacit. But the digital divide stands in as the only reference to
social and economic inequalities; and unlike other kinds of inequality, this one has a built-in solution. As
with Graff’s analysis of the myth of literacy, media literacy is presented as a social panacea that gives
focus to curricula and becomes a goal to be striven for, if never fully achieved.

Several educational theorists have connected new educational initiatives—such as lifelong

learning—to the governmental and biopolitical projects of neoliberalism (e.g., Gillies, 2008; Lewis, 2007;
Olssen, 2006; Simons, 2006). The significance of this perspective is that it considers that utopian visions
of education are not realized against biopower so much as through it. For instance, Dewey’s mandate
against the wasting of a child’s life—though progressive—is biopolitical through and through (Lewis,
2007). In this way, Foucault’s notion of biopower can be seen to encompass governmental projects of
International Journal of Communication 10(2016) The Myth of Media Literacy 1137

many political persuasions. Neoliberalism’s emphasis on the efficient training and operation of
entrepreneurial subjects allows for diverse practices of freedom as long as the competitive logic of the
marketplace prevails (Foucault, 2008; Simons, 2006). The emphasis in the recent McArthur Foundation–
funded reports on the successful operation of youth in the digital realm is not situated in any kind of
opposition to capitalist relations. On the contrary, ensuring the efficient operation of critical, competitive,
individualized subjectivities can help to shore up capitalist values. Further, their call for parents and
educational institutions to facilitate and enhance youth’s digital practices and literacies presents those who
do not as backward thinking (possibly digitally illiterate) and therefore by definition neither modern nor
progressive. In this perspective, the fostering of media literacy is tantamount to the cultivation of youth’s
“human capital,” something that neoliberal regimes demand of both parents and schools (Foucault, 2008).

Although articulated in new ways, I argue that these discussions bear a genealogical connection
to the history of technologized education. Not only do they translate youth practices into the language of
literacy, thereby mobilizing the positive values associated with the term that Graff describes, they also
consider ways that scholastic practices could be brought closer to the market-based technologies,
platforms, and practices available to youth today. They normalize and endorse technology-based modes of
relating and learning and suggest practices to enhance the individualized subjectivities that are shaped
through them with democratic values of participation and inclusion. In short, these studies demonstrate
the consonance of education with mediated subjectivities and reinforce the need for teachers and parents
to catch up with youth in the technocapitalist marketplace.

Conclusion

In this essay, I have teased apart the multiple tensions and contradictions present in current
media literacy discourse. The term media literacy refers as easily to learning about the formal aspects of
the media as it does to claims about the risk society, citizenship, and even democratic revitalization
(Bazalgette & Buckingham, 2013). In my view, this slippery-ness cannot be avoided simply through the
use of clearer distinctions (such as critical versus top-down media literacy), because the myth of media
literacy clearly cuts across political lines, and in some ways is fundamental to the practice of all media-
based pedagogy. As both threat and promise, new media have been a central object of attention and
concern for teachers and administrators for more than a century. Over the decades, the perceived threat
of media and popular culture to high cultural values and traditional forms of literacy has been offset by
promises that being involved in certain sanctioned forms of media production and distribution would
counter the presumed deleterious effects through a logic of inoculation. The emergence of the Internet
and the digital economy has solidified—rather than created—the bond between technology and education.

Exhibiting a desire to justify their existence in the neoliberal economy by claiming to produce
labor market–ready, flexible, tech-savvy workers, cash-strapped educational institutions—including those
at the postsecondary level—have become ever more closely bound to technology producers (Bady, 2013;
Rotella, 2013). In this context, practices of media literacy become a self-protective strategy, so as not to
bite the hand that feeds. Within the logic this practice provides, critical approaches to the production of
media messages compete for attention with other aspects of the risk society, such as information about
online security and safety as well as anxieties about cyberbullying, identity theft, violent video games,
1138 Zoë Druick International Journal of Communication 10(2016)

viral advertising, terrorism recruiting, and all the typical fears that surround modern youth (Shade, 2011).
Media literacy promises resources for practices of freedom in this new fearful media environment, but
questions about how media literacy itself legitimates education under technocapitalism also need to be
posed.

From a cultural studies perspective, the rise of media literacy discourse is clearly linked to a
constellation of social, political, and economic conditions—primary among them neoliberalism. The logics
that it mobilizes—of inoculation against degraded culture, of reason over mindless pleasures, and of the
active use of media for democracy—engage a set of deep-seated governmental problematics productive of
the subject of modernity, homo economicus (Foucault, 2008). Proponents of all political stripes support
the essentially governmental imaginary that an educated subject will be protected against a destructive
system thanks to guidance that will make him or her aware of the connections between knowledge and
power. This approach aims to mobilize the media themselves as a democratic counterforce, presuming the
vulnerability of corporate media to critique. However, corporate media culture, more pervasive than ever,
has come to demand this critique, which at the very least serves to legitimize its self-proclaimed provision
of diverse choices on neutral platforms. For the most part, ideas about media literacy appear to operate
seamlessly to help young people become better media consumers and media producers within the
structural compulsion to participate that drives communicative capitalism.

In placing current media literacy discourse in relation to long-standing practices of using media
as an efficient means to introduce modern practices—including market relations—into education, what I
have offered here is an incentive for future research. More consideration is required, I contend, of the
work that media literacy discourse performs in various institutional and policy contexts—in the United
States and beyond. Institutional education, as an intrinsic part of the project of modernity, has been
consistently criticized for not integrating fully enough a range of techniques and technologies that would
engage students more effectively. Historical examples show that, in the United States, the marketplace is
perpetually being presented as a more efficient educator than are public educational institutions,
consistently marked as conservative and beleaguered. This is not new. Nor, for that matter, is the
appropriation of the seemingly oppositional discipline of media studies into the mainstream of K–12 and
postsecondary education, which has taken place over four decades or more. However, with the advent of
communicative capitalism and compulsory digital participation, normative discourses of media literacy as
tied to citizenship, participatory democracy, and even diversity cannot be assumed to work in univocal
ways. What demands the attention of critical communication scholars now are the ways such ideas are
articulated—however unwittingly—to forms of governmental justification immanent to the current
neoliberal formation.
International Journal of Communication 10(2016) The Myth of Media Literacy 1139

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