Newsletters

February 27, 2026

View the February 2026 Newsletter in A New Window Here, or read below.

February invites reflection. Here in the northern hemisphere, many of us are still wrapped in winter, holding fast to the promise of summer on the horizon. While the warmer days are not quite here, this is the season when we begin to imagine what we want to grow—new ideas, renewed partnerships, and meaningful gatherings in inspiring places.

In the months ahead, we’ll be sharing more about an ambitious three-year convening that will lead us to our 75th Anniversary. This initiative is designed not simply as a celebration, but as a collective journey. Together, we will craft an evolving, open-source action plan that clarifies what we value from our past and charts a direction for our future.

At its heart, this effort responds to a pressing need: to strengthen community among those who often work in isolation and across great distances; to create space to process the whirlwind of technological and cultural change shaping our field; and to offer hope, respite, and renewed purpose as we continue building what we collectively believe in.

Stay tuned. Summer may still be ahead, but the planning has begun—and we look forward to gathering, imagining, and moving forward together.

Join Us

Interdisciplinary Networking Opportunity

The ReDMIL 2026 doctoral summer school is an international training program that aims to contribute to the convergence between digital, media and information literacy research by bringing together researchers from all three communities, to foster the scientific debate and explore connections between them. The summer school alternates between framing presentations by senior researchers and the in-depth discussion of emerging research by participating PhD students. 

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A Legacy of Leadership, A Future of Possibility

An appeal to you, our network members, volunteers, and supporters as we look toward 2028: A Historic Milestone

In 2028, IC4ML will celebrate 75 years of evolution—from the American Council for Better Broadcasts (ACBB), to the National Telemedia Council (NTC), to IC4ML—an extraordinary arc shaped by visionaries who believed deeply in education, justice, and civic responsibility. As we approach this milestone, we are launching a three-year initiative to explore the future of media literacy. 

This work is possible only through the generosity of supporters who believe deeply in media literacy as a global public good. Every gift matters. Whether you give $25, $100, $250, $500—or at a leadership level—your generosity fuels accessible conversations, new research, and inclusive community-building across our network. We are standing on 75 years of history—and building the next 75 begins with us. Thank you for being part of this legacy. Your gift truly makes a difference.

Join Us in Shaping the Next 75 Years

Blogs

From the Archives

January 19, 2026

The choice of whether or not to use artificial intelligence (AI) in education can be seen as a challenge, but this viewpoint is deceptive in and of itself. In reality, artificial intelligence has already entered educational environments, often in openly, sometimes secretly and frequently without ethical or pedagogical guidance. Therefore, the most important question is not if AI should or should not be integrated, but rather how, by whom, and under what educational ideals. Just last month, while I was participating in a training about integration of AI in education, I noticed the great number of LLMs and the myriad of possibilities that most of the lecturers were not really aware of. It is common to many of us who work in media and information literacy that every significant technical change, from traditional to new media, was first met with excitement, anxiety, or outright rejection. This was also the experience with the training. Most of the teaching staff were hesitating to tell us that they were using AI for their work. Media literacy has long maintained that power, culture, and institutional decisions shape technology, which are neither neutral nor inevitable. This also applies to artificial intelligence.

AI is increasingly embedded in teaching and learning practices. I have been part of the teaching process for almost three decades now. Students learn academic terminology, do writings, and summarize readings applying generative technologies. Educators apply AI-assisted class preparation, evaluation, feedback, and research assistance. Universities investigate automated methods for administrative efficiency, tutoring, and grading. AI is already a part of the educational ecology, whether it is recognized or not.  Selecting “not to integrate” frequently entails letting these customs evolve unofficially without transparency, common standards, or critical thought. Because of this reality, literacy is more important than ever, especially media and AI literacy. Without literacy, integrating AI runs the risk of automating schooling. Most of the young adults today take the information for granted and fully believe in what they read. If AI is rejected or accepted without literacy, students may not be ready for the world they now live in, and navigating between these extremes is the difficult part.

AI needs to be seen as a socio-technical actor that distributes authority, modifies visibility, forms authorship, and mediates knowledge.  Who is the author of an article written by a student using an AI tool? Whose criteria are used when automated systems assess performance or offer feedback? Whose data and values do algorithms that customize learning paths utilize? These are not only technological difficulties but also deeply ethical and educational ones. The expanding field of educational AI tools serves as an example of both potential and concern. AI can promote inclusiveness by assisting students in overcoming language obstacles, gaining access to difficult content, and getting prompt feedback. It may relieve teachers of repetitive work and free them for critical engagement, mentorship, and discussion. Uncritical adoption can erode academic integrity, perpetuate inequality, and transfer accountability from organizations to people.

Concern about plagiarism and cheating has been one of the most typical outcomes of AI in education. Though these worries make sense, they frequently end in a limited priority for detection and control. Redesigning assessments, bolstering process-oriented learning, and outlining expectations are some of the alternative responses that media literacy calls for. Education has to put greater emphasis on questions, reasoning, introspection, and contextual knowledge if AI is able to generate answers. The appearance of neutrality is another danger. The majority of AI systems are trained in particular linguistic, cultural, and economic settings. Their integration can marginalize others and favor dominant knowledge systems if critical awareness is lacking. This poses issues of reliance, access, and epistemic fairness for areas and organizations functioning in transitional or resource-constrained circumstances. I implemented this part in my teaching with students, engaging them in critical examination of issues related to the war in Kosovo.

Therefore, more than just technical training is needed for the meaningful integration of AI in education. It calls for institutional accountability. Educators need time and resources to explore, think, and develop confidence in their ability to use AI critically. Students require instruction that presents AI as a tool for learning rather than a quick fix. Clear standards that safeguard academic principles while allowing for flexibility are essential for institutions. Importantly, AI should be pedagogy-driven, not tool-driven. “Which AI tool should we adopt?” should never be the question,  but rather, “How does this technology support our learning goals?” and “What educational problem are we trying to address?” Artificial intelligence (AI) may supplement human judgment, creativity, and ethical responsibility when it is in line with stated educational goals. From this perspective, educators themselves will not be replaced by technology, but educators who do not meaningfully engage with technological tools may be displaced. The current stage of AI development we find ourselves in poses an opportunity for the media and information literacy groups to guide the change in ways we interact with this new technology. AI literacy should begin with critical comprehension rather than coding or prompt engineering. It ought to entail finding out who creates systems, how they operate, what data they utilize, and what interests they support. It necessitates tying technology proficiency to democratic principles, social responsibility, and accountability. In terms of AI integration within our education systems, policy responses should neither be binary nor straightforward. Our educational reality already incorporates AI. The true decision is between reflective integration and reactive adoption between literacy-driven governance and fear-driven regulation, between acknowledging AI as a test of our educational values and seeing it as a danger to education. If education is to remain a space for critical thinking, autonomy, and democratic participation, AI must be integrated thoughtfully, ethically, and transparently. Media literacy provides not only the tools to understand this transformation, but also the values to guide it. 

A Legacy of Leadership, A Future of Possibility

An appeal to you, our network members, volunteers, and supporters as we look toward 2028: A Historic Milestone

In 2028, IC4ML will celebrate 75 years of evolution—from the American Council for Better Broadcasts (ACBB), to the National Telemedia Council (NTC), to IC4ML—an extraordinary arc shaped by visionaries who believed deeply in education, justice, and civic responsibility. As we approach this milestone, we are launching a three-year initiative to explore the future of media literacy. 

This work is possible only through the generosity of supporters who believe deeply in media literacy as a global public good. Every gift matters. Whether you give $25, $100, $250, $500—or at a leadership level—your generosity fuels accessible conversations, new research, and inclusive community-building across our network. We are standing on 75 years of history—and building the next 75 begins with us. Thank you for being part of this legacy. Your gift truly makes a difference.

Join Us in Shaping the Next 75 Years

Blogs

From the Archives

December 15, 2025

November 28, 2025

View the November 2025 Newsletter in A New Window Here, or read below.

Greetings from the great state of Illinois! This year I started my 27th year as a high school Science teacher and Critical Digital Literacy educator.  That’s what I’m calling media literacy these days. I’ll leave the debate about semantics to other people. I started providing professional development on Critical Digital Literacy with staff at my school. It has been a joy to be able to share with my colleagues something that has guided me throughout the entirety of my career. There has been much to contend with as a teacher recently. School field trips were cancelled due to concerns about ICE raids. I’ve chosen to have conversations with my students about their exposure to the video of Charlie Kirk’s murder. I’m also participating in another series of professional development through my district about Gen AI. Through all of this, my background in Critical Digital Literacy is my guide as I navigate this rocky terrain. There are many stories I could tell you but the one I want to focus on is my experience with Gen AI. 

This means I search out information about Gen AI from other sources. One source that has appealed to me is the Civics of Technology from Harvard University. Their goal is to provide research, curriculum, and professional development that encourages teachers and students to critically inquire into the effects of technology on our individual and collective lives. Through the website and newsletters, I have had an opportunity to read research and reflect on how I want to engage with this technology and approach it with my students. It led me to the stance of both technoskepticism and technocuriosity which “invites educators and researchers to explore with care, critique, and openness, (inter)acting with Gen AI without assuming closure”(Allen & Hicks 2025).  This stance resonates with me but is something that takes time, one thing classroom teachers are short on. It also requires a willingness to engage in these conversations. My experience with Gen AI professional development has been the exact opposite. It is a rushed affair with little conversation between participants and adopts a techno romantic stance. Gen AI tools like Chat GPT and Google Gemini are promoted for teachers to use as a time saver.  The focus is on helping people to become good “prompt engineers.” There is some research that suggest the notion of Gen AI as a time saver is not quite the truth. Teachers use Gen AI but then take what it provides and “set about editing, refining it or sometimes completely reworking it themselves”( Selwyn, Ljungqvist and Sonesson, 2025).  These researchers found that “teachers having to undertake considerable amounts of work for Gen AI – amending, rewriting, reworking and sometimes completely replacing Generative AI outputs in order to make these outputs usable and useful for the classroom”(2025). This was my personal experience with using Gen AI. When I did engage with Chat GPT by asking it to add information about the Mayan astronomers to a lecture I give about the history of astronomy, I found that it did not save me any time. While it compiled notes for me, I still had to do research and find images. I also felt like I was less knowledgeable about the topic since I didn’t do my own research. 

Another source of information and inspiration is the Unpacking Machine Learning series from the Association for Media Literacy.  They have made their webinars available for everyone on Youtube. I am grateful to have access to these resources. I have sat in my freshman study hall watching them. This means that grading and lesson planning take a back seat but to me it has been time well spent.  

I feel left to my own devices to grapple with Gen AI.  While I can’t control the conversations had or not had in professional development, I do have control of what happens in my classroom. I can be intentional about the conversations I have with my students. I have begun this process by simply asking my students about how they are using Gen AI, both personally and for school. They shared with me that they are using it in a variety of ways.  They use it as a study aid to create review questions, to get definitions, to find recipes, to check their answers to math problems. Some use it instead of Google to answer questions they may have. Some refuse to use it because of the environmental impact. Some haven’t used it at all. One student introduced me to the term “Clanker,” a derogatory word for AI. Where we go from here is something we will figure out together but with help from the work of Neil Postman, The Civics of Technology and the Association for Media Literacy I know it will be an adventure. I am up for the challenge. 

References

Marieli Rowe Innovation in Media Literacy Education Award

This award is for a work in progress or in the planning stages that demonstrates innovative critical thinking and pushes the media literacy education field forward by putting ideas into action or connecting people and ideas in new ways. Experimentation and exploration (rather than guaranteed success) are strongly encouraged.

Blogs

From the Archives

October 20, 2025

View the October 2025 Newsletter in A New Window Here, or read below.

I have been teaching in public middle and high schools since 1999, beginning as an art teacher, then creating online classes, and now designing and running an alternative education program. The transformation of students’ interests, skills and abilities has been a storm of modern media changes. New tools, information, and trends: building, swelling, and crashing over and over to get us to this point. I see no evidence of it slowing down anytime soon. In just 26 years we went from one Apple IIE computer in a classroom to where we are now with a device or several devices in every student’s hands. Where once we celebrated dedicated ethernet labs, today it is anytime-anywhere wireless access. From analog video studios to YouTube streaming on a cell phone. Cutting edge tech courses we taught in 2000 are a nostalgic memory. What is more important, our students are in a whole new world with new needs and there is no time for educators to get ahead of the game. Everyone gets access at the same time. 

Students are submerged in media: through the Tik-Toks they absorb, streaming binges, non-stop Snap chatting, specialized Reddit communities, Insta-everything, X’s and iO’s – every network imaginable, participating, socializing, exploring interests, and championing social justice issues. They are living it- and I believe it is changing the way they learn. The first of the Association for Media Literacy’s 8 Key concepts states “Media constructs reality.” I see it manifesting daily. The construction of a reality that is completely disconnected from school and formal education is clear. The world is at our students’ fingertips, packaged and presented to them. They are jumping in. Unfortunately, often it is on their own, without adults to guide them. 

As an alternative education instructor, I help students restore previously failed credits- in a completely personalized way. I ask them to focus on something that interests them. More often than not, I am met with mistrust. Growing numbers of students reply that they don’t have interests (really? nothing?). How about video games? Sports? Some will concede they do like those, but don’t want to do school work about them. Some stand firm that nope, not even those. Why fight this? Why not jump at the chance to show your talents? Work on something you like? I have seen you record TikToks in the library, I know you and your friends have a YouTube channel. You clearly want to share your skills with the world at some point. When I finally get to the truth of it – they don’t see the point of school. It is something they have to get through and they only want to do what they need to do to get it over with. It is not that they don’t love learning. They find their joy outside of school- learning what they need online. Even the students who do well in school are too often compliant rather than excited. They save the thrill of a great presentation for the people who matter: the world wide web of strangers and trolls. After all, they can get paid for that content and those likes. 

It is no longer enough for students to sit quietly and listen to a teacher speak from one perspective. No qualified adult, no matter how dazzling, is going to keep the attention of someone who watches videos from across the globe, manages multiple group texts threads, chats with online communities, is in constant contact with family and friends, follows celebrities, watches games, vlogs, and streams, comments on everything, and more- between classes…wait, who am I kidding…during them. Especially when those students can use AI in seconds and sound like they were following along the whole time. What are we doing trying to dazzle a group of learners who access the same resources we do? We should be helping them push boundaries and test limits- within an understanding of what is right, true, and just. How do we get them to see school as a catalyst- not a chore, how do we get them to see us as compatriots in the quest for knowledge rather than wardens? 

I recently surveyed my classes, asking them “How do you feel about asking for help?” Most (>85%) said they don’t like to ask. They don’t want to be made to “feel stupid.” They don’t want a teacher to go on-and-on with an explanation that they probably won’t understand anyway. Certainly not when they can find the answer on their own- one they can understand. If students really feel like we are here to make them more confused, and they can find better answers, more efficiently, on their own, we need to rethink what our role is as educators. 

Our students are exploring the world outside the classroom walls. We must join them in their quests for knowledge – walk with them, side by side, learning together. Then we can be sure to teach them to be critical consumers, participants, and creators of information along the way. Media and information literacy has never been more crucial to a strong society. Equally, education reform has never been more crucial to our modern learning environment. Schools need to adapt to the changing learner and the changing face of knowledge, skills and creation and become the true guides on the side, rather than the sage on the stage. 

Kate Vannoy, Ph.D.

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Fall Network Meeting – November 19th 11am-12pm EST

Register to join us for a discussion on looking at AI through a McLuhan lens with our upcoming JML Guest Editorial Team, including Neil Andersen, Carol Arcus, Antonio Lopez, and Andrew McLuhan. Our Spring Journal of Media Literacy Issue, titled McLuhan Mosaic, will be published in April, 2026.

Marieli Rowe Innovation in Media Literacy Education Award

This award is for a work in progress or in the planning stages that demonstrates innovative critical thinking and pushes the media literacy education field forward by putting ideas into action or connecting people and ideas in new ways. Experimentation and exploration (rather than guaranteed success) are strongly encouraged.

Blogs

From the Archives

September 18, 2025

View the September 2025 Newsletter in A New Window Here, or read below.

Addressing the Environmental Crises with Critical Media Literacy

by Jeff Share

While our planet heats, glaciers melt, forests burn, oceans rise, storms intensify,  and extinction rates increase, we are also experiencing political attacks on science, increasing disinformation, and public relations campaigns designed to deny, delay, and distract us from addressing the environmental crises. This is a liminal moment in which educators can play an important role to empower students with the knowledge, skills, and disposition necessary to think critically and collectively take actions to alter our current trajectory. 

To change the destructive path we travel, it is essential to recognize its roots and the origins of the ideas that inform our Western modern worldview. The stories that have been told for centuries, have shaped the dominant ideologies and influence our current policies and actions. For over five centuries, humans have been encouraged to disconnect from each other and the natural world as part of a strategic project in which European empires have benefited enormously by exploiting and extracting people and resources around the world. Many of the ideologies that justified this project are still with us today as the basis of white supremacy, technological determinism, and global extractivism, making it ever more important to question our internalized assumptions about the worldviews and systems that shape what we consider “normal” or “natural.”

Climate change and ecological collapse are more than just scientific dilemmas, they are also political, epistemological, and social problems. The language, words, and images that are used to tell the stories about our environmental crises are the principal ways people are educated to think and respond. When storytellers hide the severity of the environmental crisis by underrepresenting the issue, over dramatize the impact with sensational media spectacles, and fail to connect the dots between the causes and effects, we lose the ability to critically understand and act. It is time for a paradigm shift in the way we teach about our relationship with the natural world. We need to recognize the harm that the colonial worldview of domination and exploitation has been causing, while also encouraging students to value nature and embrace our interdependence with the natural world.

To start this process, it is important to have a critical framework and inquiry process to make sense of the information and media that have shaped the historical processes and continue to influence our current moment. One helpful tool can be critical media literacy with its democratic pedagogy and critical framework. Based on decades of research from Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogy, critical media literacy guides students to question the social construction of information, to analyze language, codes, and conventions, to reflect on the role of audience positionality, to explore the politics of representation, to inquire into commercial and governmental motives, and ultimately to examine who benefits and who is harmed by the media ecosystem, representations, and messages. As students learn to critically analyze media, they should also be empowered to create their own alternative messages that challenge injustice and promote a more healthy, sustainable, and just world. For more information and resources, check out the Critical Media Literacy Research

 Guide: https://guides.library.ucla.edu/educ466

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The Journal of Media Literacy Upcoming Issue

Spring 2026 Issue: McLuhan Mosaic 

co-edited by Neil Andersen, Carol Arcus, Antonio Lopez, and Andrew McLuhan

In the spirit of honoring our multiple media literacy ancestors, this JML issue aims to explore ways that media literate thinking can respond to evolving communication environments – from the foundational insights of McLuhan, Neil Postman, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and others, to accelerating developments that are reshaping the field. This call is inclusive of the teachers, academics, researchers, media practitioners and community organizers that make up the media literacy community. We invite you to contribute to this special issue!

 Call for Proposals due September 29th

Blogs

From the Archives

August 24, 2025

View the August 2025 Newsletter in A New Window Here, or read below.

Disruption:continuity

AI governance, skepticism, and literacy

by Shashidhar Nanjundaiah

While preparing for a speaking session at an international business conclave recently in Bengaluru, the IT capital of India, I realized the problem with my well thought-through title of my panel, “Shaping AI for Society and Society for AI.” Like any public policy, its implementation needs empowerment of agencies, funding, capacity, and checks and balances. The conclave offered me an opportunity to articulate this key problem for our new literacies. I now believe the need for the return of pragmatic morality has never been greater. Pragmatic morality bridges the gap between rigid frameworks of behavior and practical realities, offering a flexible approach while also protecting the interests of the widest sections of societies.

One such issue is that the on-ground achievement of new literacies such as media literacy and AI literacy is often easier said than done in today’s political environment of neo-authoritarianism and what we may only term arbitrariness, in the sense that it is difficult to be prepared—such is the unpredictability and nimble-footedness of decisions among world leaderships. Rather than providing continuity, these governments only promote the spectacle of disruption and the arbitrariness of undemocratically taken decisions. They enable the invisibilization of issues. It seems our governments may be more trigger-happy to promote the technology in a form that is, at best, regulated in perfunctory ways. 

At the conclave, an Indian federal government official triggered a debate about the “need” for universities to change their function from classroom teaching to research to fit the AI agenda—except that the debate was in the form of disgruntled murmurs in the audience. Firstly, there is the well-known question of the government-technocrat nexus. Secondly, should governments participate in technological disruptions while not scaffolding their societies adequately? And thirdly, in disruptively shaping societies for artificial intelligence (AI), should the evolutionary role of our modern societies, driven by modern institutions, be forfeited? Since the first two questions are well-circulated in scholarly and public discourse, let me come to the third. Our neo-authoritarian governments are finding much utility in social engineering. Rumman Chowdhury, a former machine learning head of Twitter, spoke recently on CNN about how corporations are appropriating our right to our own data, and called data the “fundamental unit of exploitation” today. Governments may fix the surface by offering Band-Aid solutions like accelerated employment programs.

I recall my time on our U.S. campus when OpenAI introduced ChatGPT in 2022. Professors – and indeed the academia at large, it seemed – sat up startled, wondering how to assess assignments, what to do about the tool that would disrupt learning. When I relocated mid-2023 to India, I entered a far more settled-in environment. Here, AI is the new fascinating tool in many classrooms. AI literacy programs are often magnifications of tech-driven developmental agendas. Any tech-skepticism beyond basic ethical issues is fiercely questioned. Today, India tops ChatGPT usage—a milestone Open AI founder Sam Altman, unsurprisingly, hailed as “amazing.” Predictive analytics, ethics, and domain-specific applications including those in the environment, healthcare and financial management dominate the “human discourse” on AI in 2025. Younger generations are starting to talk more to AI companions, ‘digital personas’ that are supposed to exhibit the right emotional support and empathy. Not for them the chiding of the human parent—these personas provide much-needed relief and balance from all the familial negativity.

Doomsaying chatter around AI hides deeper implications for learning per se, and hence for our new literacies. Can we predict what effective learning methods might be for our new citizenry? How do we offer new literacies like AI literacy and media literacy in societies already flooded with AI? I think part of the answer lies in waiting for the technology to settle in. Human learning at the hands of other humans is in peril because of a kind of fatigue on the ground. Without speculating, we may observe a growing fatigue among learners. From that premise should arise new constructs of literacy learning.

A strand of the desirable pragmatic morality I alluded to is that we may argue that all this post structural distrust may manifest itself as skepticism and can help rebuild a scientific temper—the ability to think critically despite the emotional pull of technology. Proponents and practitioners of media literacy and other literacies could continue to invest in fortifying skepticism as the most enduring tool in a larger goal—learning.

Submit Here

The Journal of Media Literacy Upcoming Issue

Spring 2026 Issue: McLuhan Mosaic 

co-edited by Neil Andersen, Carol Arcus, Antonio Lopez, and Andrew McLuhan

In the spirit of honoring our multiple media literacy ancestors, this JML issue aims to explore ways that media literate thinking can respond to evolving communication environments – from the foundational insights of McLuhan, Neil Postman, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and others, to accelerating developments that are reshaping the field. This call is inclusive of the teachers, academics, researchers, media practitioners and community organizers that make up the media literacy community. We invite you to contribute to this special issue!

 Call for Proposals due September 29th

Blogs

From the Archives

July 23, 2025

View the July 2025 Newsletter in A New Window Here, or read below.

From “Hype” to “Agency”: Artificial Intelligence as a New Communicative Mediator.

By Alexandre Le Voci Sayad

Long before the current media “hype” surrounding artificial intelligence—often driven by marketing narratives crafted by major tech corporations—AI should already have been at the heart of ethical concerns among educators and communication. Beyond its direct impact on phenomena such as disinformation, AI introduces dynamics with the potential to reshape the critical canon of communication theory itself. This is due to its role in establishing a new form of mediation, one that assumes multiple functions within communicative systems and challenges traditional notions of agency, authorship, and meaning-making.

In other words, artificial intelligence (AI) can no longer be understood solely as a technological advancement; it must also be seen as a new communicative mediation that reshapes how knowledge is produced, shared, and interpreted in contemporary society. Defined broadly as the science and engineering of creating intelligent machines—especially intelligent computer programs, as stated by John McCarthy—AI encompasses a wide array of fields, including computation, linguistics, philosophy, mathematics, and neuroscience. Its capacity to engage in tasks associated with language, reasoning, learning, and problem-solving positions it as a transformative force not only in technical domains but also in cultural and symbolic production.

From a multidisciplinary perspective, AI emerges as a system that enables a profound symbiosis between humans and machines. According to Kaufman, this relationship manifests both physically—through brain prostheses, bionic limbs, or smart implants—and cognitively, as humans interact with algorithmic agents in increasingly complex and interdependent ways. These interactions suggest the existence of hybrid communicative “species,” wherein human behavior and machine logic are entangled in new modes of knowledge creation and dissemination.

As such, AI plays a pivotal role as a communicative mediator. Unlike traditional forms of mediation, such as language or mass media, AI-mediated communication is marked by automation, algorithmic learning, and adaptive processing of meaning. It does not merely transmit messages; it modulates, filters, amplifies, and sometimes autonomously generates them. Platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram deploy recommendation algorithms that act as invisible epistemological filters, shaping public discourse and social relevance by curating what becomes visible. This form of automated curation—often opaque and driven by economic incentives—requires urgent critical scrutiny, as it redefines the dynamics of information access and symbolic power.

Some AI systems increasingly act as linguistic and social agents, communicating with users through natural language interfaces—such as virtual assistants and chatbots—that simulate empathy and intentionality. These systems blur the lines between human and machine interaction, fostering perceptions of agency in non-human entities. As Sherry Turkle notes, the simulation of presence and reciprocity in these interactions can alter human relational patterns and challenge long-held conceptions of communication and authenticity.

The rise of generative AI technologies further intensifies AI’s mediating role by autonomously producing textual, visual, and audiovisual content. In doing so, these systems displace human authorship and introduce new dynamics into cultural production. Communication is no longer solely human-driven; it is now co-produced by algorithmic systems trained on vast datasets that often encode social biases, exclusions, and inequalities. These systems, though technically innovative, inherit the limitations of the data on which they are trained, reinforcing the need for critical and ethical oversight. The personalized nature of AI-mediated communication adds another layer of complexity. By tailoring messages to individual behavioral patterns, preferences, and contexts, AI systems can increase communicative efficiency but also create informational silos that limit exposure to diverse perspectives. As Eli Pariser warns in his concept of the filter bubble, this individualized mediation can isolate users and erode the conditions necessary for democratic discourse and critical thinking.

Understanding AI as a new communicative mediation requires a reexamination of foundational concepts in communication theory—such as message, sender, receiver, and channel. AI now occupies multiple roles: it is at once a sender, a translator, a filter, and a co-creator of meaning. In this context, Marshall McLuhan’s media theory offers a foundational perspective when suggesting that the characteristics of a medium—not merely its content—fundamentally shape human perception and social structures. It is possible to conclude that AI is not just as a conduit of information but as a medium that actively reshapes communication itself.

On the other hand, Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT) further deepens this analysis by challenging the human-centered bias of traditional communication models and recognizing non-human entities—such as technologies, algorithms, and infrastructures—as active participants in networks of meaning-making. According to Latour, objects are not mere intermediaries but mediators that transform, translate, and reconfigure actions and relations. From this perspective, artificial intelligence is not simply a passive tool but an agent capable of shaping communicative processes, producing effects, and co-structuring social reality. According to him objects can also have agency, defined by several elements of the networks where systems are embedded.

By integrating McLuhan’s and Latours researches, it is possible to expand the understanding of AI as a communicative actor that both reflects and reconstructs cultural, cognitive, and relational paradigms. AI operates within hybrid networks that blur the boundaries between the technical and the social, the human and the non- human—demanding a profound reevaluation of what it means to communicate nowadays.

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The Journal of Media Literacy – Ecomedia Literacy

Ecomedia: The Metaphor that Makes a Difference

Book Review: Why Trust Science?

Blogs

From the Archives

June 19, 2025

If you’ve collected a few thousand of a given item, does it count as an obsession? What if you’ve added a few hundred more in electronic form—just to ensure you always have one on hand? And what if you secretly wished the Schomburg Center would call and ask you to curate these objects of joy?

Now, I’m not saying my collection rivals the Schomburg’s, but if you asked my family, they’d certainly say: “Denise adores children’s literature.” In fact, my partner—and my bank account—might say I have a bit of a problem.

But my collection is quite specific. It has purpose. Most of the books I’ve curated reflect what I longed for as a Black girl growing up in 1970s Virginia: to be enveloped in the verbal and visual poetics of picture books. The kind that, when opened, don’t just read—they sing like jazz in a juke joint. Books that activate a landscape of transformative dreams so one can, as Toni Morrison put it, “dream a little before you think.”

I believe picture books aren’t just for young children. They are powerful creations for all of us. Yes—adults, too, can learn something from swaddling themselves in a picture book. Like an unstruck match, a picture book can ignite imagination, stretch the boundaries of metaphor, deepen and diversify our connections, and become a gift that lodges itself in the mind—reminding, re-membering us with landscapes of hope.

Not long ago, I was invited to serve as a judge for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. I was reviewing entries in the Children’s Literature category, but for the first time in the prize’s history, the winning children’s book went on to claim the overall Victorian Prize for Literature.

Yes, y’all! A picture book took out the top literary prize.

Here’s what I wrote as part of my judge’s notes:

Three Dressesis a real-life history, a truth-telling woven with words. Wanda Gibson invites the reader to join a little girl and her family—members of the Stolen Generations—on a rare two-week holiday. Away from the Mission, the family feels “so happy,” and the little girl celebrates the gift of three dresses: “one to wash, one to wear, and one spare.” Each page offers a visual feast, paired with rhythmic language that mirrors the tides of the beach. The book shares a family’s relationship with place and offers a sense that family is a verb—to experience freedom with glee.

I currently own two copies of Three Dresses: one to read, and one to share. But you might be wondering—why am I telling you this?

Well, it’s my hope that my words here make you wonder:

• What might Three Dresses, written and illustrated by Nukgal Wurra artist Wanda Gibson, activate in me?
• How might this picture book—this snippet of memoir from an 80-year-old woman recalling a rare family beach holiday in Far North Queensland—invite me to flex my critical media literacy muscles?
• And why is this African American woman, now living in Australia, urging me to read this combination of painted images and woven words, lined with moments of opacity and what Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor called “survivance”—Indigenous presence marked by endurance and resistance?

Well, as they say here in Australia: Have a go. Get a hold of Three Dresses, and discover how this story might be a gift to you—in these very times.

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May 18, 2025

It was nice to have three 2024 Marieli Rowe Award recipients share their excellent work in the Spring Network Meeting in May. I always keep Marieli’s encouraging words in mind. She told us that as media literacy educators, we should climb mountains, have a foresight vision, and move forward passionately. 

In the past half-century, media literacy pioneers, such as Barry Duncan, Marieli Rowe, Tessa Jolls, and others, led us to climb over various mountains through the ages of print, television, and the Internet. Now, we are moving into a new digital media era with powerful AI technologies. As the next round of the Marieli Rowe Award will be launched soon, I hope there will be more innovative submissions to show how the field of media literacy responds to the brave new world.

AI will likely dominate all walks of life in the coming years. AI is different from the technologies of the past in many ways. It is developing at an extremely fast pace and is disruptive. ChatGPT and other chatbots are now everywhere. Moreover, AI is not just a technological tool that transmits content. It is able to create content, and it will even act on its own very soon. Several IT companies are promoting AI agent creation so these smart agents can be individuals’ co-workers and co-companions, telling people how to act and feel. As Yuval Noah Harari said, the era of artificial intelligence is no longer simply an era where humans monopolize information production. 

Since the 1960s, media literacy education has been a response to communication technologies (films, TV, Internet, and AI). One of its basic tasks is to help people better cope with media technologies and make critical and constructive use of them. In the emerging AI age, media literacy educators are working hard to guide teachers and students to make beneficial use of this technology. AI literacy has become a key component of media literacy education. Yet, as mentioned above, the challenges are unprecedentedly huge, due to the unique characteristics of AI.

AI facilitates our study, work, and everyday life. Yet, media literacy practitioners are aware of its challenges to education. Our students are now engaging in a new technology that can think and act. Apart from drawing young people’s attention to avoid misuse of generative AI tools and alert them to deepfakes, there is a reminder that being overly dependent on AI may lead to a decline in critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Cultivating critical thinking skills is the essential goal of media literacy education. There is also a vital issue of how to be a human in the AI era. AI cannot easily replace human soft skills, such as imaginative creativity, teamwork, personal communication, critical thinking, emotional intelligence, ethical reasoning, adaptability, and commitment to the welfare of others. Future generations need to preserve the distinct qualities that make them human. Otherwise, humans may lose their competitive edge. 

In a recent article on Medium, Pedro Franklin says that there may be two types of people in the future: (1) those who use AI as a thinking partner and become smarter, faster, and more creative, and (2) those who let AI think for them and become mentally passive. So, in the coming years, media literacy educators had better cultivate media-and-AI-literate young people and citizens with independent critical thinking skills and good human qualities. 

The challenge ahead is enormous. There is an urgent need for further collaboration among media literacy researchers and educators worldwide. Let us follow in our pioneers’ footsteps and enthusiastic spirit to climb the mountains together. 

Alice Y. L. LEE Board Member, IC4ML

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From the Archives

April 18, 2025

As we were contemplating our tribute to the late Bob McChesney earlier this month, and then, sadly, not long after, for Tessa Jolls, we decided to look back in past issues of The Journal of Media Literacy to find relevant articles they wrote for us. We found both of them prominently featured in the 2015 issue titled “Toward a 4.0 Media Literacy: Contemporary Voices” edited by Martin Rayala. I decided to take a stroll through the issue to capture a sense of where we were ten years ago, and where we thought media literacy education needed to go into the future…which is today. 

I was struck by my sense of nostalgia for a simpler time while looking back only ten years! Marty Rayala was positing that we were on the cusp of a “4.0” version of media literacy, noting the shift in television and film from streaming services like Netflix and HBO becoming powerful producers of new kinds of storytelling. Alex McDowell and Henry Jenkins were talking about the power of world building to imagine what could be in the future, the beginnings of Jenkins’ Civic Imagination work. While we worried about the impact of games like Grand Theft Auto and social media apps like SnapChat, we thought about the power of incorporating Minecraft into education. Only one author, Paul Mihailidis, mentioned mis- and disinformation in this issue! These articles were written months before Donald Trump had declared his candidacy for president and the prevalence of “fake news” was well over a year away.

The emphasis was still on the need to bring media literacy forward as a necessary part of education. Debating the many new media literacies, all agreed that we needed to work together to achieve that goal. Tessa Jolls summed it up very well in her article “Contemporary Voices in Media Literacy: A Personal Credo for a Literate Global Society” when she said, “We are moving from a flat world of education, with content silos supporting a linear plane of literacy with graduation as a finite goal, to a many-dimensioned world in which infinite content revolves around and enhances an evolving core of process skills and habits of mind that enrich a lifetime and impact others, that we call media literacy. Bring it on!!” 

Her passion for using the ever evolving frameworks of media literacy to reform education comes through loud and clear. Later in this issue, Tessa and Henry Jenkins published a public conversation they had about the core assumptions of their research, pedagogies and practice, and how media literacy principles do or do not change as they confront new technologies and new environments. 

There are many great authors in this issue who weighed in on what Media Literacy 4.0 should look like: Neil Andersen, Kathleen Tyner, Renee Hobbs, Sherri Hope Carver, Dain Olsen, Bobbie Eisenstock, Art Silverblatt, Frank Baker, Paul Mihailidis, and our very own Belinha De Abreu. Some offered research and pedagogical frameworks, while others offered practices and approaches.  

Bob McChesney, a self-proclaimed outsider in the field, issued a strong challenge to media literacy educators in his article, “Demystifying Media Literacy,” asserting that traditional media literacy approaches that teach students to be better consumers in the current state of affairs are “… the proverbial piss in the ocean,and in this case going against a 100 mile-an-hour headwind…It is not about making better media consumers, but better and effective media citizens.” He calls for a more humane, sustainable and democratic political economy and media systems and structures are central to that. “The need for media literacy as a democratic force has never been greater.” Ten years later, Bob McChesney’s words still ring true.

There is value in looking back. It provides perspective and can help us move forward more wisely. Looking back ensures that we’re making the right kind of progress and not losing what is valuable in the process. 

I invite you to spend a little time looking back to 2015 and reading the contemporary voices of that time that still speak to us today. We will feature more treasures from our archives each month in our newsletter as a way to bring the past to life and help us chart a strong solid course for the future.

Karen Ambrosh
Executive Director, IC4ML

Honoring the Life and Legacy of:

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March 18, 2025

Welcome to the International Council for Media Literacy (IC4ML) inaugural newsletter!

Over the last three years, we have heard from all of you, as well as our board members, about the need to stay connected with our network beyond our website, network meetings, blogs, and journals. With this in mind, we have created a newsletter to connect you to our work throughout the year.

The newsletter will include information on items that we are planning, writings and contributions from those who author our blogs and journal articles, conference information, and much more. As the document evolves, so will the items contained within it, with the goal of growing the network of information that we can provide to all of you.

We also hope to inspire you with our awards programs: The Marieli Rowe Media Literacy Education Innovation Award and The Jessie McCanse Award for Significant Contributions to the Field of Media Literacy Education. Our awards are given every two years. 

More importantly, those people who are given awards also become a part of our community whether through their work or by participating in other projects as well. Perhaps you can also be one of our award winners?

The evolution of media and our mediated lives is changing daily and we are seeing it globally whether it is through or because of technology, culture, geopolitics, and human rights. As such, media literacy education is valuable and even more important as there is so much happening that is changing daily. As an organization, we welcome worldwide contributions from people who are invested in the work of media and information literacy. It is an opportunity to engage with each other further on ideas and possibilities. All of which make this community grow in the work that we do.

We offer an opportunity as well in particular to bridge the work of practitioners with the work of researchers –something which is often missing, but needed. We also want to ensure that it is an opportunity for those of you who receive the newsletter to feel welcome to respond to us. Send us your thoughts, a blog, and consider asking us to engage with you as presenters, whether it is at a conference, a school setting, or in any other way that you feel our work would add value to yours.

We welcome you to this network and hope you will share the information widely.

Enjoy!

Belinha De Abreu, PhD President, IC4ML

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