January 2, 2004

Media Literacy Goes to School

Continued from page 1

By Henry Jenkins

Last month, a reader questioned my use of the term, "media culture," contending that most media content has little or no cultural value. I am using culture here not in an evaluative sense, but rather to refer to a shared way of life. "Media culture" refers to the way that we use media technologies to achieve everyday goals. It also refers to the way we draw on media content as a resource for making sense of the world and the way we choose which channels to use to communicate with important people in our lives. In that sense, the media culture that emerged from the Gutenberg Revolution was very different from the media culture in the Edison era or from our own digital age.

This concept of media culture needs to be built into our arts, social sciences, and humanities curriculum-not as something extra that teachers have to cover but rather as a paradigm shift that changes how we teach traditional materials. The study of the American Revolution, for example, might consider the multiple means by which revolutionaries and loyalists gained access to information (oral networks, committees of correspondence, royal decrees, official newspapers, political pamphlets, stump speaking, etc.). Students might consider who controlled each of these channels. They might learn about the speed by which information moved up and down the Eastern seaboard, or from America to Europe, and how this influenced the struggle for independence. Students might then apply this framework comparatively to think about what would have happened if these same events and debates had played themselves out in our current environment-one where information flows globally in microseconds. Such discussions are not a distraction from learning American history. They provide students with powerful new tools for connecting the past to the present.