Abstract
Media literacy has become one of the key qualifications for taking an active part in contemporary society. As media technology becomes more intuitive and media and other social practices intertwine more and more across everyday living, this chapter draws on three contrasting but randomly-chosen popular media texts to tease out how they both situate and address various forms of environmental literacy.
TopMedia literacy has become one of the key qualifications for taking an active part in contemporary society. As media technology apparently becomes more intuitive and media and other social practices intertwine more and more across everyday living, this chapter draws on three contrasting but randomly chosen popular media texts to tease out how they both situate and address various forms of environmental literacy. Historically, media literacy has been defined as the ability ‘to access, analyse, evaluate and communicate messages in a variety of forms’ (Aufderheide 1993: xx). While other scholars highlight the concept of information literacy (Koltay 2011), digital literacy (Hobbs 2011), ICT literacy (Friemel and Signer 2010), new media literacies (Jenkins 2006) and most recently social media literacy (Livingstone 2016). Today communication scholars stress that both media’s affordances, coupled with social interactions play a crucial role in understanding an ever-evolving mode of (digital) media literacy (Livingstone 2016). Following theoretical considerations around securing robust models of democracy, media literacy has privileged the importance of ‘knowledge’ (Potter 2010: 680), ‘information’ (Buckingham, 2007: 45), and ‘analytical competencies’ (Koltay 2011: 217); all the while great emphasis is generally placed on the development of critical thinking.
With an apparent backlash towards Climate Change adaptation and mitigation, effort has to be placed on promoting new modes of education and most importantly environmental and visual literacy across all aspects of media and communications studies (see Wang et al. 2018). At the outset, critical engagement around environmental literacy is certainly not simply a top down process of disseminating correct attitudes, values and beliefs, but alternatively incorporates and facilitates a dialogue with audiences and citizens of different persuasions and across all levels of knowledge and human engagement. The primary aim of this process includes helping to highlight and at best co-produce consensual solutions for the major environmental challenges of our time.
Yet, as Sonia Livingstone suggests, ‘despite enthusiastic calls for new digital literacy programs’ and the recent ‘embedding of media literacy requirements within national and international regulation’, there remains little agreement concerning media literacy or ‘how to measure it, and therefore little evidence that efforts to improve it are effective’ (Livingstone 2011). By all accounts, this general critical assessment also rings true with regards to the short-term evolution of environmental literacy.
Nevertheless, environmental scholars should learn from their media colleagues and probably go back to basics, asking well-established media questions, including what do citizens and consumers know about their changing media environment and what should they know about the natural environment? Then, most critically, asking more long-term systemic questions such as what pedagogical and curricular tools need to be developed to underpin pertinent questions like, what does it matter if they don’t have this knowledge and, in whose interest, is it if they do? (see Brereton 2019)
Key Terms in this Chapter
Low Carbon Media Production: Movement to help reduce the carbon footprint of media production and in turn help to signal how other industries can also strive to reduce the carbon footprint and help to reduce emissions generally.
Eco-Feminism: Applying conventional feminist theorising to evaluate the relative power of female sensibilities in promoting more radical environmental agendas, compared with Patriarchal and other modes of engagement.
Environmental Ethics: Applies a broad range of moral and philosophical values to the urgent need to protect the planet and in particular ensure justice for all sentient creatures. War and passivist debates as highlighted remains of course a key area of research within this field.
Narratology: How stories are told remains a key pedagogical and aesthetic strategy for critically analysing all types of media and their effects on audiences.
Active Citizenship: Focusing on how media can help promote new forms of active engagement with environmental and other political issues.
New media Literacy: Moving from the logics of analogue with its well-articulated aesthetics norms to that of more interactive digital interfaces and evaluating both the continuities of these technological shifts, together with their rupturing of usage and radical changes in engagement.
Environmental Literacy: Is a subset of media literacy and incorporates all aspects of critical environmental engagement which in particular speaks to contentious ongoing debates around climate change or what has come to be described as a climate emergency.
Critical Digital Literacy: With the rise of new forms of online and mass media channels and platforms, great effort is being placed in developing more questioning of the tools of media usage and ensuring audience usage is not being solely driven by the affordances of the technology (technological determinism) but rather are encouraged to engage more actively and self-consciously in their usage.
Genre Theory: Textual literacy of film or any form of media requires a deep appreciation of the codes and conventions that define genre productions, while also focusing on how audiences relate to such schema.