3Qs to Marlon Julian Nombrado
Of all the ideas for how to make the digital world better, educating the users may be the most popular of all. Except it is often a convenient excuse more than a real strategy. At World Expression Forum in Lillehammer this May, Netopia spoke with Marlon Julian Nombrado from the Philippines. For him, educating the users is the real deal.
You started Out of the Box – why is media literacy so important?
We recognize that there must be a shift in emphasis on educating future media professionals
When my friends and I started our media literacy project eight years ago, the media landscape in our country looked quite different from what it is today. As fresh Journalism graduates then, we simply wanted to share what we learned in school to a wider audience outside our university. We strongly believed that many of the things we were taught in j-school such as media bias, political economy of news, gender-sensitive reporting, etc., were meant to be taught not only to us young aspiring journos but to a wider public. As we witness the slow but steady crumbling of the gatekeeping power of legacy news media, we recognize that there must be a shift in emphasis on educating future media professionals to educating the broad masses of media consumers. This is the mission of media literacy — to place priority on upskilling and empowering the media consumer, now touted as media ‘prosumer‘ (combined producer and consumer of media products and experiences).
In the age of information disorder, data mining, affective polarization and the looming threats posed by artificial intelligence technologies, it is obvious to say that we cannot afford to keep on applying the same kind of education that we’ve administered to our youth for many decades. We need dynamic approaches to education that heed the immense influence of media, information, and communication technologies in our lives and in today’s societies. Only with a media literate public can we effectively push for and implement policies related to the regulation of modern and future digital technologies. Only with a media literate public can we thoroughly push out harmful, abusive, and hegemonic narratives that are seeded in our media streams in the guise of free expression. When we mainstream critical and civic media literacy education in our societies, we give democracy and sustainable development a chance to prevail and prosper in the future.
Is media literacy enough? Who should do what?
Multisectoral networks led by civil society are in a good position to build alliances with governments, private institutions, and international bodies to ensure cohesion of our interdependent efforts
We strongly campaign for the mainstreaming of media literacy but without the illusion that it is some magic pill for the many intersecting media anxieties that we are facing today. With its advantages, media literacy also comes with obvious limitations. For one, investing in education is a long-term solution, its impact might not be immediately apparent compared to that of journalistic interventions and policy or technological responses aimed at digital platforms. Others are doubtful of the impact of educational interventions as they presume the absolute power of manipulative media technologies over its users. But we should not be cancelling each other out. Instead, advocates of media literacy education should move in the similar direction as other stakeholders in the digital rights and internet freedom agenda. Meaning, we should learn to complement and support each other’s contributions. Multisectoral networks led by civil society are in a good position to build alliances with governments, private institutions, and international bodies to ensure cohesion of our interdependent efforts. Media literacy is a potent tool for all concerned actors not only to critique and create media, but to mobilize the public through and with media to act towards the common good.
