Media Literacy

New Agendas in Communication

Kathleen Tyner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781135269722
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume explores how educators can leverage student proficiency with new literacies for learning in formal and informal educational environments. It also investigates critical literacy practices that can best respond to the proliferation of new media in society. What sorts of media education are needed to deal with the rapid influx of intellectual and communication resources and how are media professionals, educational theorists, and literacy scholars helping youth understand the possibilities inherent in such an era?

Offering contributions from scholars on the forefront of media literacy scholarhip, this volume provides valuable insights into the issues of literacy and the new forms of digital communication now being utilized in schools. It is required reading for media literacy scholars and students in communication, education, and media.

Part I
Literacy in Action

Media Literacy in Community-Based Settings

Chapter 1
Young People, New Media, and Participatory Design

A Study of Cybermohalla from India¹

Sanjay Asthana

Although scholarship in cultural studies, critical media pedagogy, and youth studies developed a set of theoretical ideas in examining how globalization is reshaping youth participation in media, particularly in the context of the postcolonial world, a certain theoretical disquiet prevails in exploring young people’s media engagement through the inter-linked concepts of citizenship, civil society, and public sphere. To overcome the theoretical conundrums, some scholars pointed out that concepts such as citizenship, civil society, and public sphere do not explain the actually existing social realities in the postcolonial world (Chatterjee, 2004; Diouf, 2003; Obadare, 2004). The questions raised regarding the non-applicability of concepts, though important, do not explain how certain developments in globalization and media convergence enable young people to create “new politico-cultural spaces” and to refashion notions of participation, citizenship, and civil society in particularly important ways.

A primary purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how young people from the Cybermohalla (Cyber-Neighborhood)—an alternative education project designed to enable democratic access to information and communication technologies among poor young people in India— not only appropriate and reconfigure old and new media in the process of creating personal and social narratives but understand the refashioning of participation and citizenship and the possibilities for the emergence of youth public spheres. Drawing upon and combining a range of cultural materials—metaphors, symbols, local histories, global ideas—young people produce a range of narratives that are not only bracing critiques of adult-centered conceptions of citizenship, civil society, and public sphere but serve as pragmatic elaborations of the various notions. To these young people, citizenship is not so much a matter of contractual and legal obligations, marked by performative practices, and participation not as consensus but instead as “conflictual” engagement (Miessen, 2007; Mouffe, 2007). Pramod Nayar (2008, p. 2) situates the Cybermohalla Project as “a move towards a postcolonial appropriation of cyberspace, a move facilitated by and through the digitextual nature of the new media of information and communication technology (ICT).” Drawing upon Anna Everett’s (2003) formulation of “digitextuality,” which refers to “the collage of forms, registers and signifying systems visible in the new media,” Nayar examines how Cybermohalla enables the making of “a cyber-public sphere via an audio-visual economy.” Nancy Adajania (2006, p. 369) has suggested that Cybermohalla’s “young practitioners belonging to different social and educational backgrounds have been exploring the phenomenology of the technological act, as performed in the interstices between pedagogy and creativity.” I generally agree with Nayar’s overall arguments and find his characterization of Cybermohalla as a “postcolonializing” project quite useful. I propose, following Adajania, that a hermeneutic approach² to young people’s engagements at the Cybermohalla Project, and the digitextual collage of forms they create, may indeed point to particular elaborations of citizenship, participation, and public sphere and merit closer examination.

To this end, this chapter sketches a praxis-oriented³ analytic framework by bringing together the idea of a “hermeneutic self” from Paul Ricoeur’s (1996) work, the notion of “social imaginaries” developed by postcolonial theory (Gaonkar, 2002; Chakrabarty, 2000; Chatterjee, 2004), and new media studies concepts like participation, remediation, and bricolage (Lievrouw, 2006; Deuze, 2006; Bolter and Grusin, 1999). Within humanities and social sciences, and more particularly in the field of critical media pedagogy, Ricoeur’s hermeneutic philosophy had generally played a marginal role (Andrew, 2000; Leonardo, 2003; Nijman, 2007). The proposed chapter argues that Ricoeur’s hermeneutic philosophy offers a way forward in understanding the multiple modalities through which young people engage the media as they develop their imaginations and narratives. More important, it presents an understanding of the human subject in terms of an embodied subjectivity that takes us beyond singular conceptions of identity, whether in terms of the abstract Cartesian subject or various other discourse-centered theorizations of subject (Nijman, 2007). Ricoeur has argued that a person’s narrative identity can be approached via two interconnected and overlapping notions of identity: idem (sameness) and ipse (selfhood). Whereas idem-identity refers to “sameness of body and character, our stability illustrated by genetic code,” ipse-identity pertains to our “selfhood, the adjustable part of our identity,” and furthermore the two kinds of identities—of sameness and difference—offer coherence to the self and the possibility for change and reflexivity. Indeed, the notion of ipse-identity emerges in narrative. According to Ricoeur (1996),

hermeneutic philosophy has attempted to demonstrate the existence of an opaque subjectivity which expresses itself through the detour of countless mediations—signs, symbols, texts and human praxis itself. The hermeneutic idea of subjectivity as a dialectic between the self and mediated social meanings has deep moral and political implications.

(p. 140, emphasis in original)

The notion of embodied subjectivity developed by Ricoeur offers analytic insights in the study of youth media pedagogies and experimentation, particularly as young people are involved in constructing personal and social narratives through creative and critical imaginaries. The chapter also considers the contributions of John Dewey and Paulo Freire—two original thinkers of education, democracy, and human development—to sketch relevant models of learning and pedagogy for community-based, youth media efforts. Dewey’s (1966) theory of education, with its emphasis on interaction, reflection, and experience, and Freire’s (1972) insights on dialogical education (and developing consciousness) have shaped contemporary discussions of media education, learning, and literacy. Consequently, it becomes important to pursue the field of media education and pedagogy as a broad rubric where principles and practices are interlinked in terms of a “constellation” that is dynamic and open-ended. Obviously, new information and communication technologies (ICTs) play a significant role in enhancing youth participation and involvement in media and drive discussions about the potential directions for the field.⁴

Although young people of the Cybermohalla Project share common legacies, of socioeconomic inequity, such as poverty, lack of education and health, and political disenfranchisement, their imagination is shaped not by despair but, to borrow Raymond Williams’s (1989) felicitous phrase, by “resources of hope.” As Mamadou Diouf (2003, p. 6) points out, youth in African societies—and much of the postcolonial world— are uniquely positioned to mediate across the local and global contexts, particularly in light of the failures of national political enterprises. Diouf remarks that “looking beyond national borders, young people appropriate new technologies (digital and audiovisual),” to produce new narratives of democratic engagement. Appadurai (2002, p. 24) specifically articulates the idea of “deep democracy” in his explanation of the way that poor people in the city of Mumbai, India, mobilize and rework citizenship and “seek new ways to claim space and voice.” In a similar fashion, this chapter argues that youth from the Cybermohalla Project not only raise crucial questions about power modalities around gender, poverty, and other generational and socioeconomic inequities but sketch out creative and critical ideas about democracy, citizenship, and participation.

Cybermohalla Project as Participatory Design

Cybermohalla is an experimental project designed to enable democratic access to information and communication technologies among poor young women and men in Delhi, India. The initiative began in 2001 through an experimental collaborative project between Sarai project of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and Ankur, a nongovernmental organization involving young people living is slums settlements and working class neighborhoods in Delhi. The main aim is to give a forum where young people not only explore their creativity but comment on the social and moral topics that impact their lives. The media labs of Cybermohalla are located in different parts of Delhi—four informal working-class settlements: LNJP, Dakshinpuri, Nangla Maanchi, and Ghevra—and provide opportunities to young people to work individually and collectively. The four settlements of Delhi, with around 60,000 to 400,000 inhabitants, have had a troubled existence and frequently faced governmental threats of demolitions and evictions. A significant number of inhabitants of the settlements are immigrants from other parts of India in search of work and a better life. In 2006, India’s court ordered the demolition of the Nangla Maanchi settlement to pave the way for the construction of several shopping arcades and apartment complexes. The lab and the young practitioners from here have since relocated to the Ghevra settlement. When the Nangla Maanchi settlement was being demolished, several Cybermohalla practitioners wrote and recorded their poignant expressions in the form of booklets and blogs (Nangla, 2008). These printed and online narratives caught the attention of national media and have been quoted as instances of a specific genre of journalistic reporting combined with nuanced political critiques. Since its inception in 2001, around 450 young women and men from the settlements have been involved with the Cybermohalla Project. Their participation spanned a few weeks to a year or two. Some of these young participants continued their involvement serving as peers and mentors to the new practitioners.

The idea of a “mohalla,” as a locality and neighborhood, exceeds the semantic connotations implied by the English term. As a social space, mohalla, with “its sense of alleys and corners,” can be conceived as “dense nodes” where young people from economically deprived and marginalized communities carry out their everyday activities. Formal schooling is out of reach or unaffordable for the youth. They visit the lab out of curiosity but soon get absorbed in the creative possibilities offered by computers and other media. These young participants, mostly school dropouts ages 15 to 20, visit the Compughar (in Hindi, an abode of computers), a media lab with several low-cost desktop computers and free software, dictaphones (portable audio recorders), and digital and bromide print cameras to freely express their ideas and imaginations from the mundane to the serious. Working at the media lab, these participants write, draw, and sketch a range of interesting verbal and visual narratives and texts published as books, diaries, magazines, and wallpaper that become available in print and digitized formats.

Cybermohalla can be considered a participatory design project if we understand the concept of participatory design as adaptation and reconfiguration of distinct communication modalities to support the resistance of centralized power and capitalization. Participatory design also implies a “remediation” of existing media content, whether we take this to mean refashioning of collages of found objects or digitextual materials (Lievrouw, 2006). The following account (Cybermohalla) describes the philosophy of the project:

One can approach the Cybermohalla project from many directions. One can begin with a critique of the technological imagination and the excessive universe of the dominant mediascape, and then go on to map a counter strategy which grounds itself on access, sharing and democratic extensibility. One can see it as an experiment to engage with media technologies and software ‘tactically’, and create multiple local media contexts emerging within the larger media network that the Internet seems to engender. Still one can see it as an engagement with local history, experiences, modes of expressions and creativity.

From this description, it is clear that Cybermohalla is about adopting alternative strategies to explore and engage the ICTs so as to provide young people opportunities for learning and education. The Hindi-Urdu words that are combined with English to produce t...

Table of contents

• New Agendas in Communication
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Literacy in Action
• Part II Views from the K-12 Classroom
• Part III The Next Generation
• Part IV Beyond the Classroom
• Index