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Ecomedia Literacy:Green Design for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE-19)
1. Ecomedia Literacy:
Green Design for Media
Literacy Education
Antonio López, PhD
Chair & Associate Professor
John Cabot University
antonio-lopez.com
NAMLE 2019
Washington, DC
This work is licensed
under a Creative
Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-
ShareAlike 4.0
International License.
2. Standard media literacy (in North America)
• Critical discourse analysis of 7 North American media lit
organizations (teaching/instructional documents and
websites)
• Practitioner interviews
Conclusions
• Primarily based on 19th century paradigm
• Reinforces mechanism/progress
• Reflective practice
• Anthropocentric
• Visual and mass media
• Abundant use of container/conduit metaphors
• Media economics as disembedded from environment
• Focus on individual autonomy/individualism
• Apolitical
• Trying to mainstream (fit) into ed. standards
3. Excluded
Affect
Medium
Political economy
Systems approach
Ecology
Alternative media
Point of intervention
Spatial metaphors related to navigation enables introduction of ecosystem metaphors
Transition to ecological metaphors
To encourage systems, interdependence & ecological thinking, change metaphor from
mechanism to ecology
6. “We believe that your content should be the
focus of your experience. And everything
else should disappear. Even the device
itself… The most amazing thing about
holding it is that you forget you’re holding it.”
Apple iPad Air (16GB, Wi-Fi, 3G) 9.7-Inch Retina Display description
(apple.com/ipad-air/design)
13. Green cultural citizenship
Embodying sustainable behaviors and cultural practices
that shape and promote ecological values within the
interconnected realms of society, economy and
environment.
Ecomedia Literacy
Perceiving how everyday ecomedia practice impacts our
ability to live sustainably within earth’s ecological
parameters for the present and future.
14. 1. To develop an awareness of how ecomedia are physiologically
interconnection with living systems
2. To recognize ecomedia’s phenomenological influence on the
perception of time, space, place and cognition
3. To understand ecomedia’s interdependence with the global
economy, and how the current model of globalization impacts
livings systems and social justice
4. To analyze how ecomedia form symbolic associations and
discourses that promote environmental ideologies
5. To be conscious of how ecomedia impacts our ability to
engage in sustainable cultural practices and to encourage new
uses of media that promote sustainability
Ecomedia literacy design goals
15. (some) Ecomedia literacy themes
(inspired by ecocriticism)
Challenge growth and consumerism
Critically engage technological sublime
Promote cultural commons, connectivity
Highlight alternative ecomedia
Explore topics like food systems, gadget marketing, anthropocentric
vs. ecocentric ideologies
Explore discourses around nature, animals, climate change,
ecopsychology
Fake climate news
De-center humans
Incorporate material and affective turn
16. Ecomedia literacy skills
Research knowledge production (information literacy)
Analyze/deconstruct marketing or media texts (content
analysis, semiotics, discourse analysis)
Explore aesthetic language (visual, audio literacy)
Mindfully engage media environments (ecomedia mindfulness,
medium literacy)
Holistically inventory ecomediasphere (systems literacy)
17. Ecomedia Literacy Performance Indicators
Create narratives of connection with digital storytelling tools (video
essays, curated blogs, Prezi, etc.)
Translate concepts between media and ecology disciplines using
ecological metaphors to describe media phenomena
Perform crossovers with ways of knowing through participant observation
and social learning (students work in groups)
Develop an eco-ethical framework in order act upon these
understandings and to make wise choices
Based on MC Bateson’s (2007) education for global responsibility model
19. Necker cube
Image source: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/philosophy-of-technology/0/steps/26324
Don Ihde: “multistability”; technology are
only what they are in use
20. “Resource image” (Nadia Bozak)
Example: Gulf War, 1991
Image as cultural/political resource:
• Human domination/destruction of nature
• Ideology of oil dependence and war (oil politics)
Image as environmental resource:
• Technological infrastructure
• Supply chain that made image technology possible
• Material containing image (newspapers, TVs, computers,
etc.)
• Data file (exists on a server, its storage and use produces
CO2)
22. World
(mental model/ideology/world system)
Earth
(physical ecosystem/Earth system)
Political economyEcoculture
Selfworld Material systems
Media/sphere
Ecologies of
interconnected
networks
Mental ecology
Political/social ecologyCultural ecology
Physical ecology
23. Media/sphere
Four scapes
Ecoculture
Media-centric/qualitative
(text and meanings)
Text and discourse analysis of
media texts; mapping cultural
behaviors and attitudes
Political Eco/nomy
Socio-centric/quantitative
(social forces)
Ideological structure of
the global economics
system, political
economy of media
Material systems
Ecology and
environmental studies,
material infrastructure
The material conditions of
media, including
extraction, production, e-
waste, energy and
emissions; medium
properties
Selfworld
Phenomenology, media ecology
Media’s sensory affect and
impact on our perception of time,
space and place
24. Political
Eco/nomy
Ecoculture
Lifeworld Ecomaterialism
Gadget
Cognitive dispositions
Emotions
Medium properties
Material reality
Political and economic
forces
Social and cultural practices
Beliefs
Ideology/Cosmology
Affordances/constraints
Beliefs Platform design
Political economy
• Carbon-capitalism
• “Oilygarchy”
• “Deep media”
• Advertising
• Consumerism
• Attention economy (legacy
and social media)
• Surveillance capitalism
• Extractivism, externalization
• Platform capitalism
• Planned obsolescence
• Neocolonialism/globalization
• Amazon, Google, Apple,
Facebook, Microsoft
• “Appconn”/”Chimerica”
Ecoculture
(beliefs)
• Values/eco-ethics
• Anthropocentric vs. ecocentric
• Consumerism
• Racism, sexism
• Egalitarianism
• Language frames/discourses
• Green cultural citizenship
Ecomaterialism
(affordances/constraints)
• Shareability/spreadability
• Algorithms
• Interacive
• E-waste
• Emissions
• EMFs
Lifeworld
(cognitive dispositions)
• Selective exposure, confirmation bias, reality
maintenance, etc.
• Addiction, attention
• Emotional response, alienation, sense of
place
• Affect
• EMFs impacts
Labor practices
25. World
(mental model/ideology/world system)
Earth
(physical ecosystem/Earth system)
Political economyEcoculture
Lifeworld Ecomaterialism
Ecomediasphere
Boundary work
Ecomediatones
(ecotone, edge
ecology)
Cultural productionSymbolic order
Materials extraction,
manufacture, production
Physical ecosystems
EmbodiednessAffect/ Sensory
exp.
Bioculture/languaculture
Time/space
Affective pop culture
Medium properties
Ideology
Anthrop. vs Eco
discourses
26. Political eco/nomyEcoculture
Selfworld Material systems
Ecomediasphere:
Example analysis
Mad Max:
Fury Road
(2015)
Ecofeminist themes
Biopolitics
Ecoapocolypse
Genre (car chase,
post-apocalypse)
Identities (gender)
Affect of spectacle,
Violence
Firstness
Film as a global commodity
Industrial characteristics of film production
Film as a material object
Environmental problems
related to production
Ideology
Response of audience
Film language
Film critics, Rotten Tomatoes
Ideology
Sound, image
Welcome and thanks for your interest in the pedagogical aspects of ecomedia. I’m Antonio Lopez and I’m recording this from my office in Rome, Italy.
I’m suffering a bit from current environmental conditions, so please forgive me for sounding a bit stuffed up.
Subsequently I did a deep dive into the media literacy practices of North American media literacy organizations, which is covered extensively in my last book, Greening Media Education.
My conclusions can be summarized as follows (read slide)
As it relates to teaching ecomedia, my study showed that many important modes of inquiry are excluded, including (read)
But I found a point of intervention, which is the use of spatial metaphors, such as navigation, which can support the introduction of ecosystem metaphors to map media
Thus, in my re-design efforts to encourage ecological thinking, I’m trying to use ecological metaphors whenever appropriate in order to reframe our thinking about media.
Which brings us to the ecomediasphere. In Greening Media Education I started to model this as the “media wheel” but I’m revising it to reflect a more holistic perspective that a sphere metaphor implies.
Public policy is impacted by how environmental issues are framed in the media; and consumerism promoted by marketing drives environmental destruction.
I’m drawing inspiration for my design from the iceberg model of systems thinking.
On a daily basis we react to events without examining the patterns, systemic structures or mental models that create events.
Basic media literacy tends to focus on events that are in the form of texts and then perhaps identify patterns, such as gender or racial stereotyping.
Sometimes it will go into systemic structures, such as the political economy of meeting, but rarely will it explore the mental model that leads to media problems.
From an environmental perspective, if we examine mental models we can see how issues like environmental degradation, patriarchy, racism and colonialism are intersection and connected to a common world view.
To work on the level of transforming mental models, we can guide curriculum design with an essential question: What mental models and practices will lead to a healthy media ecosystem?
Backwards design starts with the essential question and then formulates approaches to answer the question.
These are working definitions of some key concepts that will help our approach to teaching ecomedia.
First is the concept of green cultural citizenship (read)
Second is the concept of ecomedia literacy (read)
Ecomedia literacy currently has five intentions, although this can be revised and expanded. (read)
This kind of analysis can promote a variety of literacy skills, such as (read)
Doing a mediasphere analsysis corrolates to MC Bateson’s global responsibility model for education.
Here I translate them as they correspond with the ecomediasphere (read)
Th way it works is we start with the concept of a media object, which is like a boundary object.
A boundary object is something that has commonly agreed upon characteristics but its meaning and purpose changes according to context.
For example, a smartphone will have different purposes according to designers, manufacturers, users, app developers, experts, workers, and users.
This is somewhat similar to the circuit of culture approach developed in cultural studies.
A media object can be a media text, gadget or platform as exemplified on the right side of the slide.
Here I’m mapping how the mediasphere roughly corresponds with the concept of different ecologies as identified by Guattari in his Three Ecologies,
although I have taken the liberty to transform them into four ecologies.
The sphere is divided into four lenses, inspired by Appadurai’s concept of scapes.
Here I identify the four main scapes and their focus (read)
Th way it works is we start with the concept of a media object, which is like a boundary object.
A boundary object is something that has commonly agreed upon characteristics but its meaning and purpose changes according to context.
For example, a smartphone will have different purposes according to designers, manufacturers, users, app developers, experts, workers, and users.
This is somewhat similar to the circuit of culture approach developed in cultural studies.
A media object can be a media text, gadget or platform as exemplified on the right side of the slide.
Finally, I want to introduce the idea of doing boundary work between the different scapes.
In landscape ecology, a transition zone between two biomes is an ecotone such as the between a field and a forest.
In the mediasphere, an ecomediatone is a transition area between two scapes.
So if you look at the space between dotted lines, you will see there are various different transition zones that combine elements of the adjacent scapes (read)
As a class discussion you could debate whether or not these boundaries make sense.
So how does this come together as an analytical project?
If we take the media object of Mad Max: Fury Road, we can examine it from the perspective of the different scapes. (read)
OK, that’s all folks. Please send any comments or ideas to help make the ecomediasphere better. I leave you with some of the inspiration I’m drawing from.
Ciao!