Coevolution of Media, Literacy, and Collective Action
Prof. Howard Rheingold
Recent technological changes have made much wider social changes possible: Until the end of the twentieth century, only a relatively small and wealthy fraction of the human race could broadcast television programs, publish newspapers, create encyclopedias; by the twenty first century, however, inexpensive digital computers and ubiquitous Internet access made the means of high quality media production and distribution accessible to a substantial portion of the world's population. In 2006, more than one billion people are connected to the Internet and close to three billion people carry mobile telephones. These technological changes in accessibility of production tools and distribution media have led to social, cultural, economic, political changes in the ways people communicate, a set of technologies, practices, and skills some call participatory media. Participatory media enable broad participation in the production of culture, power, community, and wealth. The transition from modernity — with its small number of metanarratives, print-based literacy, elite population of cultural producers — to a postmodern era of a distrust of metanarratives (and proliferation of narratives), proliferation of digital literacies, and vastly expanded population of cultural producers — has created a challenge for education. Critical thinking is essential now that the authority of the text is not guaranteed in any way by the authors and publishers. Understanding of how to evaluate the effects of media use is as essential as knowledge of how to use media.
The ways people use these new media will significantly influence and in some cases transform cultural production, citizenship, economic enterprise, and education. Like the early days of print, radio, and television, the present structure of the participatory media regime — the political, economic, social and cultural institutions that constrain and empower the way the new medium can be used — is still unsettled. As legislative and regulatory battles, business competition, and social institutions vie to put particular stamps on the new regime, one potentially decisive and presently unknown variable is the degree and kind of public participation. Of course, since the unique power of the new media regime is precisely its participatory potential, the number of people who participate in shaping it, and the skill with which they make the attempt, is particularly salient. The outcome of these unknown factors will likely determine whether participatory media will be enclosed economically and centrally controlled or coopted politically, or whether they will enable broad cultural production and authentically democratic political influence.
Participatory media include (but aren't limited to) blogs, wikis, RSS, tagging and social bookmarking, music-photo-video sharing, mashups, podcasts, and videoblogs. These distinctly different media share three common, interrelated characteristics:
- Many-to-many media now make it possible for every person connected to the network to broadcast and receive text, images, audio, video, software, data, discussions, transactions, computations, tags, or links to and from every other person. The asymmetry between broadcaster and audience that was dictated by the structure of pre-digital technologies has changed radically. This is a technical-structural characteristic.
- Participatory media are social media whose value and power derives from the active participation of many people. This is a psychological and social characteristic.
- Social networks amplified by information and communication networks enable broader, faster, and lower-cost coordination of activities. This is an economic and political characteristic.
The technical power of many-to-many communication networks amplifies human social networking capabilities [abstract][pdf]. The cognitive and social components of participatory media are important: Media production differs from other kinds of production because media have the power to persuade, inspire, educate, and direct human activity. Communities, movements, markets, societies, and civilizations are the products of the human talent for accomplishing complex tasks together — incited, organized, and coordinated through the use of communication media. The technical networks that carry bits from node to node and the media woven from those bits enable the humans at those nodes to learn, argue, deliberate, transact, and organize on scales and at paces that were never before possible.
At this stage, the focus of attention is shifting from the characteristics of the enabling media (digital, networked, etc.) to the ways people are using them — a matter of literacy, not just technology.
A particular kind of literacy is necessary for the potential power of communication networks to manifest. Unlike the operational knowledge needed to wield a lever or hammer, the skill sets that accompany media such as writing are complex and entail each individual tool-user's social involvement with a community of other people who have also mastered the skill. Like the alphabet and the printing press, the Internet grants new powers of collective action to those who master its literacy.
