Ben Boyington - The Media and Me: A Guide to Critical Media Literacy for Young People

We use clocks to know what time it is. Between the invention of hourglasses and digital clocks, there were analog watcheswatches with hands and faceswhich were the main devices we used to measure time.

Along with learning the ABCs and how to ride a bike, you probably learned to tell time using an old-fashioned clock. You might not have thought much about learning to tell time since then. Its easy to take a skill for granted once youve mastered it. It becomes second nature, which is good because that allows you to focus attention on other things. Instead of thinking, I can tell time!, you look at a clock and think, Only fifteen minutes until I am out of this class!

Back then, you had to learn how to interpret the clocks two armsthe little arm that measures hours, the big arm that measures minutesin relation to the numbers, from one to twelve, on the clocks circular background. You had to learn, for example, that when the big hand was on the twelve and the little hand was on the three, it was three oclock. Learning to tell time was all about understanding the relationship between the clocks hands and numbers. Once you understood that, you knew how to tell time.

In your lifetime, youve probably seen these types of clockfaces on wall clocks and on wristwatches. Youve also witnessed how digital technologies have made it easier to tell time. Instead of having to make sense of the hands on the clock, we just read the numbers from digital displays on our smartphones, or on our computers, or in our cars. You may even be able to call on digital assistants such as Alexa or Siri to tell you what time it is.

But what if the clock breaks and you want to fix it? Or what if you are just curious to know more about why the clock works the way it does? Then you need to know more than how to tell time; you need to learn how to look beneath the surface of the clocks face, to observe and understand the mechanisms that drive the motion of the clocks hands.

Telling time is one thing; understanding how the clock works is something else.

Wait a minute here, you may be thinking, I thought this was a book about media literacy (whatever that might be...). Whats all this about clocks and learning to tell time? Put another way: What can a clock teach us about media and media literacy?

You do not need to understand how a video is produced to enjoy YouTube, or how news is reported to read the New York Times, or how algorithms work in order to post content on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. Each of those activities is sort of like telling time: you can do them without much background knowledge. But if you want to understand why and how YouTube, the New York Times, or your favorite social media platform highlights some people, topics, and ideas while rendering others all but invisible, you need to know more. You need to look beneath the surface to understand the hidden but real mechanisms that shape media content and influence how we interpret it.

What interests us, the authors of this book, is a concept known as critical media literacy. Critical media literacy (or CML, for short) addresses these typically concealed, but always powerful, inner workings. Critical media literacy gets into the hidden mechanics that drive our mass media of news, information, and entertainment. CML education is a way to learn about the world, especially the world of media. According to statistical research, people around your

Given that you spend so much time with so much media, we believe you deserve to have a robust understanding of how that media works. Thats why we think this form of knowing is especially important today.

Critical media literacy is about asking questions more than it is about learning the right answers. Through CML, we not only explore what we know but also ask how we know it. We explore what we like, what we believe, and why. When practicing CML, we employ a collection of skills that help us move from being passive consumers of media to becoming engaged critics and creators.

Throughout The Media and Me, we will develop the themes of meaning, access and representation, and validity. These ideas are so important to understanding the media that we want to introduce them here. Reflecting back on the clock metaphor that opened this chapter, meaning, access and representation, and validity represent the inner workings, or gears, of media literacy. Examining them will help us understand how and why media institutions operate the way they do.

Meaning is the most slippery of the terms because it is so fundamental to everything we do. In an influential article from 1973, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz used the examples of blinking and winking to get at the idea of meaning. Both actions involve what we might describe as rapid movement of the eyelid over the eye, but you do not need to be some famous social scientist to know that winks are different from blinks. If you get a speck of dust in your eye and your eye twitches, you do not necessarily attach any meaning to that action. Youre just blinking. But when you wink at your friend, that same eyelid movement could mean anything from just kidding to I am flirting. Being able to tell blinks from winks depends on making sense of what we know and how we know it. And if that wink is going to work, all of this interpretation has to happen very quickly.