Presentation of media literacy and global change. Updated and delivered to the Suffolk County Y JCC on June 7, 2013

1. Social Media & New Civic Voices
“When we change the way we communicate, we change
society. The tools that a society uses to create and maintain
itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life”
(Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, 17)

2. James Cohen
Hofstra University
Paul Mihailidis
Emerson College / Salzburg Academy

3. • 53 Hours Per Week with Media in US
(Kaiser, 2010)
• Over 8 Hours a day average engaged with
Screens (Ball State Study, 2009)
• 100 billion Google searches per month globally
over 30 trillion websites (Commscore, 2013)
• 700 Billion minutes per month are spent on
Facebook globally (Facebook, 2011)
• 2 Billion Tweets per month (Twitter, 2010)
Mediated lives…

4. • 72 hours per minute uploaded to YouTube
(Mashable 2012)
• 6 Major corporations control 90% of all media
• 364,000 years of video consumed online per
month online.
• Gangam Style alone represents 20,000 years.
Visual Consumption

7. digital/partic
ipatory
tools
mobile
platforms
spreadability
MEDIA
CITIZEN
information
chamber
information
chamber
The nexus of Media, Citizenship and Participation

8. CONNECTIONS:
re-visualizing civic voices online
• Building a civic “thruline”
• Helping students see the value of tools that
are inherently social
• Familiarity with active dialog in civic spaces
• Empowering use and reflection that is part of
the social media portfolio

9. – Good Consumer – by teaching how to understand,
analyze, evaluate, and produce media messages,
and;
– Good Citizens – by highlighting the role of media in
civil society, the importance of being engaged,
responsible, aware, and active in local, national,
and global communities

10. 1. Collaboration
• Leveraging the Community…
– Gather, Aggregate, Filter
– Distribute, Syndicate, Share
– Comment, Dialog, Dispersion
• Not just using, but understanding

11. 2. Convergence
1. Sharing
2. Cooperation (Production)
3. Action (Collective)
“Ridiculously easy group-forming matters because the
desire to be part of a group that shares, cooperates, or
acts in concert is a basic human instinct that has always
been constrained by transaction costs” (Shirky, 54).

12. “the ability of virtual
communities to leverage the
combined expertise of their
members…what holds a
collective intelligence together
is not the possession of
knowledge—which is
relatively static, but the social
process of acquiring
knowledge—which is dynamic
and participatory” (Jenkins,
54).
Collective Intelligence

13. Collective Action
“Collective Action, where a
group acts as a whole, is
even more complex that
collaborative production, but
here again new tools give life
to new forms of action. This
in turn challenges existing
institutions, by eroding the
institutional monopoly on
large-scale coordination”
(Shirky, 143)

14. 3. Curation
Digital curation, broadly interpreted, is
about maintaining and adding value to a
trusted body of digital information for
current and future use. Digital
Curation Center

15. Media Literacy & Empowerment
Consumers, Citizens, Communities…
– Gather, Aggregate, Filter
– Distribute, Syndicate, Share
– Comment, Dialog, Disperse

16. ACCESS to media as a basic right
AWARENESS of media’s power
ASSESSMENT of how media portray events and
issues
APPRECIATION for the role media play in creating
civil societies
ACTION to encourage better communication across
cultural, social and political divides.
Media Literacy & Frameworks

17. GOOD MEDIA EDUCATION ENABLES
VALUE-DRIVEN CONNECTIONS
• CONNECTING Skills to Citizenship
• CONNECTING Analysis to Production
• CONNECTING Culture to Creation
• CONNECTING Responsibility to Empowerment
• CONNECTING communities, media, and
citizenship

18. Occupy Gezi – Turkey Protests

19. Occupy Gezi – Turkey Protests

20. Occupy Gezi – The Power of Social Media
Turkish police arrest dozens
over protest tweets

21. Media Literacy and Global Change

22. PAUL MIHAILIDIS
Assistant Professor, Emerson College www.paulmihailidis.com
Director, Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change
www.salzburg.umd.edu
THANKS!
civic empowerment
media education
news literacyglobal media
social media
JAMES COHEN
Assistant Professor, Hofstra University
www.jamesncohen.com