What We Talk About When We Talk About MIL education

Key outcomes/elements of MIL

As we navigate the so-called “post-truth” (note from your guide: you will find out more about it in other courses) age on the internet, riddled with potentially misleading content, it becomes more obvious with time that tackling online misinformation requires much more than detection.[2] However, media is not just the internet and critical thinking is not something we created in this digital era. The main reason for media and information literacy education is closely connected with the criticism of mass flow of information in different formats and it takes as back to 1920s. Lippmann[3] was an early and influential commentator on mass culture, notable not for criticizing or rejecting mass culture entirely but discussing how it could be worked with by a government licensed “propaganda machine” to keep democracy functioning. In his first book on the subject, Public Opinion (1922), Lippmann said that mass man functioned as a “bewildered herd” who must be governed by “a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality.” The élite class of intellectuals and experts were to be a machinery of knowledge to circumvent the primary defect of democracy, the impossible ideal of the “omnicompetent citizen”. This attitude was in line with contemporary capitalism, which was made stronger by greater consumption. But Lipman was just one of many thinkers and critics of mass (information) culture in a form of different medium. So when we talk about reasons for MIL education, we also talk about #technologies, #politics, #civic society, #public sphere and even the #philosohy of media. UNESCO defines media education as the priority field of the cultural educational development in the XXI century(Fedorov 2008). However the genesis and demand for understanding media and learning how to use it dates back to 1920. Further on this lesson is a story about the genesis of MIL and how it found its place in formal, informal education and how it became a MIL science on its own. As for why we talk about MIL education or why we need MIL education, lies in its outcomes[4] (figure 1)

Figure 1: Outcomes/Elements of Media and Information literacy

Information literacy

Media Literacy

Outcomes of MIL lies not just in understanding media or creating literate content, but at the center of MIL or the importance of MIL is democracy and good governance (figure 2)

The fundamental pillars of good governance – i.e., transparency, accountability and civic participation – are difficult to achieve without open media and information systems. These systems can serve to stimulate a vibrant civil society or ‘civic culture.’ These service functions include:

• Providing information and knowledge understandable and relevant to different groups of people;
• Inspiring loyalty and sustaining commitment to values and procedures that uphold democracy and good governance.[5]

When we talk about MIL, we talk about a wide context and about various actors that forms MIL discourse about institutions that puts MIL into practice and into our educational systems.

Questions and task

1. Why do we need to talk about MIL or MIL (in) education and where is the beginning of MIL?
2. Create a mind map or a timeline of MIL history?
3. Who was Walter Lipman and why he is important in MIL history?
4. Create a word cloud that represents outcomes/elements of Media and Information literacy.
5. What is at the center of MIL discourse?

References

Fedorov, A. (2001). Media Education: History, Theory and Methods. (in Russian). Rostov: CVVR, 708 p.

Fedorov, Alexander. 2008. “MEDIA EDUCATION AROUND THE WORLD: BRIEF HISTORY.” 1(2):55–62. doi: 10.1146/annurev.physiol.64.081601.142703.

[1] What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is a 1981 collection of short stories by American writer Raymond Carver, as well as the title of one of the stories in the collection.

[2] https://coinform.eu/media-and-information-literacy-why-does-it-matter/

[3] Walter Lippmann (September 23, 1889 – December 14, 1974)[1] was an American writer, reporter and political commentator. With a career spanning 60 years he is famous for being among the first to introduce the concept of Cold War, coining the term “stereotype” in the modern psychological meaning, as well as critiquing media and democracy in his newspaper column and several books, most notably his 1922 book Public Opinion.

[4] http://unesco.mil-for-teachers.unaoc.org/foreword/unifying-notions-of-media-and-information-literacy/

[5] http://unesco.mil-for-teachers.unaoc.org/media-discourse/