Getting our Collective head out of the cloud(s)
At Mhor, we’re always thinking about media literacy. Well, that and what’s for dinner. But apart from overcooked pasta, the thing that bugs us is how often the conversation about media literacy is perceived to be separate, or tangential, to digital inclusion.
We don’t agree. As soon as you switch on a new device, critical thinking is needed. What am I agreeing to with all these terms and conditions? Do I really want my location tracked? How much of my information or privacy am I giving away with the various taps, clicks and swipes I’m doing? That’s relevant on day one of acquiring digital skills, which for new learners has to also be day one of media literacy, having the ability (and the time, including that of anyone supporting those learners) to pan out, pause and reflect on what’s happening.
In our digital lives, this patience isn’t encouraged. Think of the brightly coloured “accept cookies” button versus the sad grey menus you’re forced to click through as you opt out. Again.
Or consider the emotive pull of fake news and clickbait, the drive to make you feel before you think, all to drive more activity and feed the holy grail of internet churn: engagement.
And this isn’t tinfoil hat stuff; the internet is a big old data-gathering beastie because that’s where a lot of the money is – a swirling gyre of tracking movement, then selling that information to advertising, which generates ads, which spurs clicks, which creates more behaviour to be logged and sold. It’s what Shoshanna Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism”.
We love that there’s slowly becoming more of a focus on criticality in the online world, such as Ofcom’s Making Sense of Media and its digital emphasis. It’s incredibly valuable to introduce key questions for new learners, say when they’re reading a news article and querying “Who’s presenting this to me? What’s their agenda? How can I gauge its truthfulness?”
I had all this in my head when I attended a recent session by NeoN Digital Arts entitled “We don’t buy Nestle but we still use Google… Help!” They’re part-way through a journey of questioning how, as an organisation, they can live their digital lives more ethically. For me, it opened doors to even bigger questions than the core media literacy stuff – not just “can I trust this web page?” but at a level above that: “how are these platforms and supply chains working? Who truly benefits? And at what cost?” Thinking about the frictionless way that sleek cloud-based digital offerings are proffered to me, there’s maybe an even plainer way to say it: just because I can, does that mean I should?
NeoN commissioned their discovery as an artwork, which you can read all about here, and I’m fascinated to bounce off this to learn:
- How we at Mhor can take practical steps to make our digital landscape more ethical, but also, and moreover…
- How we can share that learning, that process of discovery far and wide, particularly with new learners as part of the mix of media literacy and critical thinking?
This second element feels like an idea with such legs, and a conversation that should not, in any way, be the sole provision of techy types or concerned professionals. We’re all, whether we like it or not, mired in this digital landscape and the ethics of our choices affect us all. So, let’s democratise that by making these questions part of our everyday, and including everyone in them.
Feels like something… digitally inclusive, eh?
