The Media Education Manifesto

David Buckingham

• Editorial: Polity
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509535897
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Media Studies

In the age of social media, fake news and data-driven capitalism, the need for critical understanding is more urgent than ever. Half-baked ideas about 'media literacy' will lead us nowhere: we need a comprehensive and coherent educational approach. We all need to think critically about how media work, how they represent the world, and how they are produced and used.

In this manifesto, leading scholar David Buckingham makes a passionate case for media education. He outlines its key aims and principles, and explores how it can and should be updated to take account of the changing media environment.

Concise, authoritative and forcefully argued, The Media Education Manifesto is essential reading for anyone involved in media and education, from scholars and practitioners to students and their parents.

1
A Changing Media Environment

It’s a busy weekday morning and I am on my way to a meeting in the centre of town. The subway train is crowded with commuters, all absorbed in their own private worlds. Some read the free newspapers that are already being discarded on the floors of the carriage; a few even read books; but most are immersed in screens. Some read tablet computers or e-books, while others play games and watch videos on their smartphones. Many scroll through emails, texts, music tracks, photographs and tweets. Most wear headphones. Meanwhile, the walls of the train carriages and the stations are covered with advertisements, and many commuters advertise brands on their clothing, bags and digital devices themselves. As I make my way back up to street level, I pass large screens on platforms and smaller ones on escalators, promoting the latest movies, theatre shows, exhibitions and music releases. As soon as they exit the station, people turn on their phones once more, eager to catch the messages they have missed while underground.

Media are everywhere. They are like the air we breathe. Estimates suggest that young people now spend the equivalent of a day every week on their mobile phones, checking them at least 150 times daily.⁴ Taking account of mobile devices, computers, tablets and televisions, teenagers spend almost nine hours a day staring into screens. Yet even when we are off screen, media often dominate and pervade our visual field, especially in the form of advertising and marketing. And for much of the time, we accept this without question. The fact that so much of our communication is mediated barely attracts attention. Media are simply a fact of life, a mundane presence that most of us have no wish or ability to escape.

Of course, this has been increasingly the case with the advent of mobile devices, and especially smartphones. We can now access media of many kinds in almost any location, at any time, not simply when we happen to be sitting down in front of a large screen. Yet at the same time, these devices are also powerful means of surveillance: they are capable of gathering large amounts of data about us, which can then be sold on to third parties – not only to advertisers and marketers, but also to governments and political parties, employers or potential employers, and police and security agencies of various kinds.

There are several ways in which we might quantify the presence of media in our daily lives. If we confine our attention for a moment to the internet, the sheer volume of activity here is astonishing. For the last few years, the tech industry researchers Lori Lewis and Chadd Callahan have created an annual infographic showing ‘what happens in an internet minute’.⁵ In an average minute in 2018, for example, there were: 187 million emails; 18 million What’sApp messages; 3.7 million search queries on Google; almost a million Facebook logins; 4.3 million videos viewed on YouTube; almost half a million tweets; 2.4 million Snaps; 375,000 apps downloaded; and more than a quarter of a million hours watched on Netflix. Aside from anything else, the demands of this activity in terms of energy consumption are phenomenal: one recent estimate suggested that internet-connected devices could account for one-fifth of the world’s electricity usage by 2025.⁶

Another way of understanding this is to see it from the perspective of the individual user. The Pew Research Centre’s annual report on teens, social media and technology provides one reliable indication.⁷ In 2018, for example, it found that in the United States, 95 per cent of teenagers have a smartphone, and 45 per cent report that they are online ‘almost constantly’. The popularity of different platforms has changed over the years: among this age group, Facebook is now in decline – only half say they use it regularly, compared with 85 per cent who use YouTube and around 70 per cent who use Instagram and Snapchat. A similar picture emerges from the annual surveys conducted by Ofcom, the UK media regulator, although here there is also a focus on ‘older’ media. In 2017, 95 per cent of 12–15-year-olds were going online, for an average of 21 hours a week; 91 per cent watched television, for an average of 15 hours a week; while 83 per cent had their own smartphone.⁸ The survey identified a continuing migration away from broadcast television to newer devices (including tablet computers) and to YouTube, especially among older children; here too, some newer social media platforms such as Snapchat are gradually gaining ground on Facebook. There are inevitably differences here in terms of age, social class and gender. But overall, it’s clear that young people today spend more time engaging with media than they do on any other activity – including sleeping.

These figures are drawn from countries with high levels of access to media and technology (although they might not be the very highest in the world). There are massive global inequalities in this respect, which should not be ignored. Nevertheless, the trends worldwide are inexorably upwards.⁹ The numbers of internet users in larger developing countries like South Africa, Brazil and India are growing rapidly, especially with the advent of smartphones. In 2018, for the first time, more than half the world’s population will be online.

A third way of looking at this, however, is from the perspective of the companies that own and provide these digital services and platforms. What we find here is a rapidly growing trend towards monopoly, among just four leading companies. Facebook claims to have 2.2 billion active users, about 30 per cent of the entire world population. No other social network comes close, and Facebook owns several of those that do, such as Instagram (with half a billion users), WhatsApp and Messenger. Despite several troubles during 2017, its profits continued to soar by around 60 per cent to $16 billion, on overall revenue of $41 billion. In 2016, the World Economic Forum claimed that if Facebook were a country, it would be larger than China.¹⁰

Similarly, Google dominates online search, with a market share of just over 90 per cent (3.5 billion searches every day). Once again, other platforms are utterly trivial by comparison. Google (or its parent company Alphabet) is by far the world’s biggest media company, generating more than twice as much revenue as its nearest competitor, Disney. Alphabet also owns YouTube, which is very much the market leader in video and music distribution: it has around 80 per cent of overall market share among multimedia sites. Between them, Facebook and Google account for almost 85 per cent of spending on online advertising, and one quarter of total media advertising worldwide.

Meanwhile, Amazon has come to dominate the online retail business: it is the fourth most valuable company in the world, with an annual revenue in 2017 of almost $180 billion. It now controls almost half of the market in the United States, as online shopping steadily replaces bricks and mortar shops. Its advertising revenue is growing at around 60 per cent per year, and it is also a producer, publisher and distributor of a whole range of media content. Amazon’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, is officially the world’s most wealthy individual. The fourth of these companies, Apple, is of course predominantly a hardware company, with a massively successful set of devices: in 2016, it announced the sale of its billionth iPhone. However, it is also a key player in competitive markets like music distribution, web services, online games and movie streaming. In 2018, Apple became the world’s first trillion-dollar company.

These four companies, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon – GAFA, as they are sometimes known – have different histories, market profiles and corporate strategies, but they have all grown at a phenomenal rate over the last decade or so.¹¹ If we add to the list a couple of more established companies, Microsoft and IBM, and one or two emerging companies, such as Netflix and Twitter, we can account for almost the entire global market in digital technology and services. These are among the most profitable companies of any kind in the world, and they are working hard to keep it that way.

I’ll be returning to these issues in due course, but my key point here is that these are not merely technology companies: they are also media companies. It is via the internet – and via these digital platforms and services in particular – that we are increasingly accessing media of all kinds. These companies are not merely supplying us with technical devices or tools, hardware or software. They are also increasingly providing the means of representation and communication that are indispensable to modern life. Many years ago, Raymond Williams insisted that television was not merely a technology, but also a cultural form, which provides meaning and pleasure.¹² In the same way, a service like Facebook or Twitter or Instagram is not merely a means of delivering content: it is also a cultural form, which shapes that content, and our relationship with it, in particular ways.

Thus far, I’ve been talking primarily about digital media, and especially about the internet. Yet it’s important to acknowledge the continuities as well as the differences between ‘new’ and ‘old’ media. Digital services and platforms are venues for new forms of representation and communication; but they are also being used to distribute ‘older’ media, such as television, film, music and written texts. Indeed, many of the companies I have mentioned are increasingly becoming producers – and not simply publishers or distributors – of ‘old’ media (such as movies and TV shows) in their own right. These media overlap and interrelate, and they need to be considered holistically as well as separately – not least in the cont...