American Behavioral Scientist

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The Muse Pixeliope: Digitalization and Media Literacy Education Scott Robert Olson and Timothy Pollard American Behavioral Scientist 2004 48: 248 DOI: 10.1177/0002764204267272 The online version of this article can be found at: http://abs.sagepub.com/content/48/2/248

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The Muse Pixeliope Digitalization and Media Literacy Education

SCOTT ROBERT OLSON Minnesota State University

TIMOTHY POLLARD Ball State University

Most media literacy programs fail to take into account the dramatic nature of digitalization, focusing on analog-native media such as the newspaper or digital-native media such as computers and overlooking the process through which these forms are blending and converging. Those trends and ideas include new digital aesthetics and new social effects caused by digitalization, both of which need to be taken into account in media literacy programs. The aesthetics of digitalization include prepurposing and repurposing content, virtual experience, sampling, interactivity, and manipulation. The new social effects include nonlinearity and content on demand. Digitalization will not immediately replace analog- and digital-oriented programs but needs to be considered as a part of thorough media literacy education. Keywords: digital; analog; digitalization; media literacy education

There have never been enough muses to cover the media, let alone the changes that are needed in media literacy education. There is Euterpe for music, Calliope for epic storytelling, Clio for history, Erato for mimesis, Melpomene for tragedy, Polyhymnia for sacred poetry, Terpsichore for dancing, Thalia for comedy, and Urania for astronomy. Maybe that was sufficient for the analog arts, but the world is becoming digital now, and there seems to be one muse short of a full set. The digitalization of media both requires and enables new ways of looking at media literacy education. Most media literacy programs fail to take into account the dramatic nature of digitalization, however. More often still, media literacy programs do not define the current media environment well (Allen, 2004). Those trends and ideas include new digital aesthetics and new social effects caused by digitalization, both of which need to be taken into account in media literacy programs.

AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST, Vol. 48 No. 2, October 2004 248-255 DOI: 10.1177/0002764204267272 © 2004 Sage Publications

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Olson, Pollard / THE MUSE PIXELIOPE

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DIGITAL AESTHETICS There is little in the current media literacy literature about how the digitalization of media should be reflected in media education. The focus remains on analog or digital media, with little consideration given to the process through which media are converting from analog to digital. Bianculli’s (1992) Teleliteracy precedes the digital revolution per se but says nothing about polysemy and little about the role of digital media in the fragmentation of media audiences, both solid trends at the time. Potter’s (1998) Media Literacy uses the analog model of analyzing individual media (e.g., news or advertising) and institutions (e.g., the industry or the family). Tyner’s (1998) Literacy in a Digital World deals to some extent with divergence and convergence, but it is now out of date. Mammett and Barrell’s (2002) Digital Expressions considers the impact of computers in Canadian classrooms but has little on the conversion of media. Much of the media literacy literature that does make reference to digitalization focuses almost exclusively on computers and the Internet, media native to the digital environment, and not how the shift to digital affects media that were native to the analog environment. Another example of the native-to-digital approach is Exploring the Digital Domain (Abernathy & Allen, 2003), which deals almost exclusively with computers and the Internet. The Center for Media Literacy’s own Web site (http://www.medialit.org) continues to describe its mission as being focused on “print and electronic” media, but digitalization—which entails a hybridization of print and electronic media in binary code—is not a focus. The Center for Media Literacy’s (2003) Teacher’s/Leader’s Orientation Guide focuses on messages, values, lifestyles, and audiences but not on the cultural effects of technology. Digitalization has not been a key component of media literacy education. Therefore, although currently there is no muse for digital media, there can be little question that the media environment is being revolutionized by digitalization, which includes entirely different modes of production and distribution. The digitalization of media has significant effects on aesthetics and audience cognition that differ from analog media, and that need to be taken into account in media literacy. This is not to say that the new aesthetics are wholly different, just significantly different. The following attributes of digital aesthetics are distinct from analog media and need to be a part of contemporary media literacy: 1. The prepurposing and repurposing of content across media, which enable content gathered from one medium to be easily propagated across other media, such as news images that are used as motion video on television, as a still photo in print, and as a graphic online. Enabling the traversing of such content is a design function that affects aesthetics but is not a function native to analog or digital media. 2. Deliberate creation of virtual experience in which environments are designed to be immersive and sensations cut across sensing organs. 3. Sampling as a means of generating new content, a postmodern pastiche first noticed in the world of rap and hip-hop but now used on the Web and in video.


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AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST

Analog Native Media

Digitalization (Examples)

Print -

eBooks NYT.com Slate

Book Newspaper Magazine

Electronic - Television - Radio - Recording

HDTV XM MP3

Chemical - Movies - Photography - Animation

Movielink Digital Imaging CG

Convergence (Example)

Digital Native Media

Computers Internet Video Games PDAs

Figure 1: The Transition From Analog to Digital 4. Interactivity, whereby users of a medium affect the textual experience, best seen in video games that are increasingly designed to give a cinematic narrative experience and in online news where audiences are increasingly being allowed to select, assemble, and interact with their own news content. 5. Manipulation, whereby creators of the media are able to shape and reform reality pixel by pixel, producing not only generated environments but also generated performances, as embodied by the character Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films.

Media literacy that focuses only on analog-native media such as newspapers or television, on digital-native media such as the computer, or even on both side by side will miss the profoundly different media environment that digitalization brings not only to those two media but also to others and to new media created in response to the digital world. An indication of how rich and complicated the process of digitalization is can be found in Figure 1. Convergence—the term used to describe how fewer and smaller devices are capable of performing more and more functions—is one of the most significant aspects of digital media aesthetics. The best example is the PDA, which is a hybrid of the book, the computer, the telephone, the MP3 player, a movie player, and a Web browser and for which original media content is being developed. Convergence is also the term used to describe the consolidation of ownership in the media industries, wherein fewer and fewer corporations own more and more media. Recent consolidation includes AOL and Time Warner, Viacom’s purchase of CBS, and Vivendi’s sale of its Universal division to General Electric. Duderstadt (2001) described this as a new industry that arises from



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a convergence in which computer, telecommunications, entertainment, and commerce are merging into a gigantic, $1 trillion “infotainment” marketplace. While technology has driven this convergence, the real beneficiaries will be those organizations capable of producing information content—whether they are entertainment companies like Disney, software companies like Microsoft, or educational organizations like the university. (p. 49)

According to The Economist, this transition from analog to digital convergence means that the economy is in for a jolt . . . a host of new digital gadgets with mass-market potential has arrived. These gizmos are . . . radically different from their predecessors. . . . This fabled convergence of the analog consumer-electronics world with the digital world of computing has been a long time in coming. (“Gadget Wars,” 2001, pp. 59-60)

Now it is possible to arrange sounds and images by pixels, regardless of the source, allowing communicators to create things never before seen or heard, unlimited by anything but their imaginations. This is not to say that analog media literacy programs have no place in a digital world. Although technology changes rapidly, aesthetics change very slowly with time. Looking closely, one can see that there is something classic behind the pixels of the new digital media (Miller, 2000). The operating principles governing how to produce programming for the multitude of media channels seldom change. The classical principle of the golden mean still guides design, and ancient myths, archetypes, and narrative structures are still embedded in popular culture narratives (Schatz, 1995). In use since communication began, these will no doubt remain important principles in the future. Students studying media literacy need to be steeped in this old and new context. But although the principles of media aesthetics seldom change, the theories we use to understand the interaction between humans and the media change considerably, and that is where media literacy programs must keep pace. These theories reflect new media technologies and explain increasingly sophisticated social science data and critical analyses of the media. It seems that the new communication media produce different modes of perception and reception (Tewksbury & Althaus, 2000). Necessary technical skills also change in keeping with new demands of the technology. DIGITAL EFFECTS There has never been a muse for cultural effects. In addition to these aesthetic effects, there are cognitive effects of digital media that differentiate them from analog media and need to be considered in media literacy education, including two fundamental differences:


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• Digital media are nonlinear, so the temporal nature of narrative experience is designed so that the user has control over the experience. In other words, rather than the analog experience of a theatrical movie taking a prescribed length of time and following a prescribed narrative structure, the digital experience of a DVD movie can be sped up, slowed down, stretched, rearranged, and reexperienced in different ways, even though the artifact was originally conceived as a linear analog experience; and • Digital media create expectations for content on demand. In the digital age, waiting is virtually unknown because all content can be stored and retrieved at will from almost anywhere. A trip to Napster can satisfy the most spontaneous demand to hear an obscure song, a trip to Movielink can satisfy the urge to see a particular film without a trip to Blockbuster, and a trip to Ask Jeeves might avoid a trip to the library. There is even a digital black market in bootlegged movies that have not yet been released.

Failing to take these uses of media into account in media literacy is to ignore the way that students are using the media in question, because they have a profound effect on the way that media are consumed. And the conversion from analog to digital is accelerating: Digital and computer-based technologies will transform virtually all media segments. Digital technology, globalization, and the desire for cross-media efficiencies will drive mergers and acquisitions and joint venture projects. (Price Waterhouse Coopers, 2000, p. 3)

Analog media literacy programs run the risk of being severely out of step with industry trends. Perhaps the most significant of digital media effects is what is known as demassification, a concept not commonly used in traditional media literacy programs that focus on mass communication. Mass means designed for a huge and homogeneous audience that no longer exists, for so much of the media are no longer massive. Demassification is not unique to digitalization. Every newsstand is thick with highly specialized magazines such as Golden Retriever or Cigar Aficionado that have specific rather than mass appeal, and every cable system carries 70 or more channels that cater to highly specific tastes, such as Country Music Television or Bloomberg Television. Yet digitalization significantly accelerates demassification. Web news agencies, for example, now allow audience members to pick and choose what news they wish to read. Instead of news editors and producers making the decision about what is important, these new-wave news organizations provide the content, but the reader is in charge of selecting what is relevant and what is not. Demassification is especially clear on the Internet, where the experiences of individual users are personalized to a degree that approaches one-to-one communication. Such an environment, which is capable of adapting the media to specific individual consumer tastes, can scarcely be called mass communication. What remains is something new: media that appear to be mass media but



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act like personal media; they may look like a television show but respond to our personal needs like a telephone. Scholars and media professionals must consider what this unprecedented shift means for our culture, for our democracy, and for America’s place in the world. Digitalization enables media forms that can be tailored to minority and indigenous group needs in a way never before possible, addressing their needs in a way that mass media never could (Rodriguez, 2001). This form of media literacy raises questions about how citizenship takes form in a postmodern world (see, for example, Hartley, 2004). The number of venues for communication channels has been increasing exponentially, and there is not enough content to fill all the broadcast, cable, satellite, and Web channels now. Yet these channels are set for another hyperbolic explosion of availability as the Federal Communication Commission– mandated digitalization of broadcasting results in four concurrent channels for each frequency that exists currently. Burgeoning international demand for media accelerates the process, as does the future of the Internet, whose capabilities are proving to be a whole new medium for delivering high-quality, fullscreen media content on demand (Fischetti, 2000). The Internet is the most purely digital of media: nonlinear, on demand, convergent, and repurposeable. Yet its history reveals how it has reshaped itself to appear more analog. (Perhaps there is a simultaneous process of “analogization,” seen for example in the resurgence of the popularity of vacuum tubes among high-end audiophiles.) These combinations of interactivity and Web capabilities have led to an explosion in this burgeoning industry. That explosion is in the area of custom designing content for a smaller and smaller audience. This segmentation is allowing underserved audiences the ability to customize information to meet its needs and not those of a mass audience. News information and entertainment can reach a broader audience by segmenting the information being presented to a particular audience. Instead of certain groups being disenfranchised from information, they are now being tapped into that same market, but not in the same way. Web companies can segment the information that piques the interest of a particular group and filter out information the group deems irrelevant. By allowing audiences to pick and choose their information, more information is distributed, but the results are often polysemic, inchoate, and incoherent. DIGITAL LITERACY These changes in aesthetics and effects have implications for media literacy education. In terms of the aesthetics of digitalization, programs must take into account prepurposing and repurposing, virtuality, interactivity, sampling, and manipulation. How does the ability of a text to move from analog to convergent to digital affect its form and content? Students should be encouraged to follow a single narrative idea through its digital life, from original use to multiple uses, in


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the many ways in which it might provide an immersive and interactive environment, through the extent to which sampled sounds and images are folded into the ur-narrative, and the extent of digital artifice used in producing it. For example, The Lord of the Rings might be explored for the way a single ur-narrative concept expresses itself in numerous editions of books, radio narratives, films, extended edition films, Web sites, affiliated documentaries, animated cartoons, comic books, video games, and merchandise such as action figures, plush dolls, fashion dolls, board games, card games, and so on. Not all of these manifestations are digital, of course, but most of them are essentially digital, wherein the same content is simply rerendered as a new film, new video game, and similar representations. This has implications for new ways of looking at genre and the auteur theory as content leaps across formats. In many cases, a single iteration of the text is merely a partial iteration of the text, and to be fully understood the text needs to be consumed in multiple formats. An excellent example of the multiple iteration phenomenon, although it is one inappropriate for young children, is the Blair Witch Project. The Blair Witch film was scarcely a complete text on its own, following none of the normal conventional rules of narrative to which horror films would normally adhere. Taken in conjunction with considerable additional narrative found at the Blair Witch Web site, the film is seen as a single artifact in a much bigger, much more compelling, and much richer narrative. The Blair Witch Project exists simultaneously and intertextually in analog and digital forms that must be consumed together for the narrative to cohere. Social effects are another aspect of digitalization that need to be considered in media literacy education. The ability of content to be available on demand is a considerable democratizing phenomenon without precedence in history, with both positive and negative aspects. On one hand, the ability to access the databases of the world is an invaluable tool in student research. On the other hand, this has led to poor skills at assessing the credibility of information and (worse still) copy-and-paste plagiarism that many students assume to be scholarship. The process of demassification has created a world in which the media do not provide common, unifying cultural experiences as they did in the era of analog media. The first walk on the moon, the Kennedy assassination, and the annual broadcasting of The Wizard of Oz defined and unified a generation, but digital media push us apart rather than bind us together. These different effects are functions of a digital world. So, it appears that Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia, and Urania are not enough. It is time to welcome the digital muse, Pixeliope, into the academy. She looks like each one of her sisters because in fact, she is a technical progression from them and a convergence of them. Increasingly, she binds the muses together, so that only when Pixeliope is in the room do the others inspire.



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REFERENCES Abernathy, K., & Allen, T. (2003). Exploring the digital domain: An introduction to digital information fluency. New York: PWS Publishing. Allen, R. (2004). Frequently asked questions. In R. Allen & A. Hill (Eds.), The television studies reader (pp. 1-26). New York: Routledge. Bianculli, D. (1992). Teleliteracy: Taking television seriously. New York: Continuum. Center for Media Literacy. (2003). Teacher’s/leader’s orientation guide. Santa Monica, CA: Author. Duderstadt, J. (2001, January/February). A university for the 21st century. Educause Review, 36(1), 49. Fischetti, N. (2000, November). The future of digital entertainment. Scientific American, 283(5), 47-49. Gadget wars. (2001, March 10). The Economist, 358(8212), 59-60. Hartley, J. (2004). Democrotainment. In R. Allen & A. Hill (Eds.), The television studies reader (pp. 524-533). New York: Routledge. Mammett, R., & Barrell, B. (2002). Digital expressions: Media literacy and English language arts. Calgary, Alberta, Canada: Detselig Enterprises. Miller, T. (2000). The economy’s new clothes. Journal of Television and New Media, 1(4), 371-373. Potter, J. (1998). Media literacy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Price Waterhouse Coopers. (2000). Global entertainment and media outlook: 2000-2004. New York: Author. Rodriguez, A. (2001). Reinventing minority media for the 21st century. Washington, DC: Aspen Institute. Schatz, T. (1995). The structural influence: New directions in film genre study. In B. Grant (Ed.), Film genre reader II (pp. 91-101). Austin: University of Texas Press. Tewksbury, D., & Althaus, S. (2000). Differences in knowledge acquisition among readers of the paper and online users of national newspapers. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 77(3), 457-479. Tyner, K. (1998). Literacy in a digital world: Teaching and learning in the age of information. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. SCOTT ROBERT OLSON is a professor of speech communication and vice president for academic affairs at Minnesota State University, Mankato. He is the author of Hollywood Planet (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999). TIMOTHY POLLARD is an associate professor of telecommunications at Ball State University, where he helped create a new convergent news operation called NewsLink. Prior to being an academic, he was operations manager for CNN in Washington, D.C.
