Knowledge: A Conversation with Steve Connolly (Part 2)

This is the second part of our interview with author Steve Connolly. Read part one here.

HC: I think that the idea that media and Media Studies are ever-changing, responding to the contemporary moment, and flexible is really a central idea that you address in the book. In many ways, it challenges a lot of the ways we conceptualize knowledge within these studies. How are media and Media Studies subversive and transgressive? And how does Media Studies challenge a lot of the ways we consider theory and practice, the quantitative and the qualitative, the popular and the highbrow? What kind of possibilities does this transgression offer?

SC: When I was drafting the book, one of the series editors, he looked at a draft and said, I’m quite worried that you expect a lot of teachers because you expect them to keep up with ever-flowing media. I said I can accept that. I see that in what media teachers do. Any media educator is constantly thinking about the challenges that the changes in the media present. And I think that that’s sort of their job in some ways. I accept that that’s hard.

Yesterday, I was sitting on the tube and I was looking at the ads, and I didn’t know any products that were being advertised. I was completely bewildered. How would I even approach this? Now, as a teacher, I accept that this is a kind of constant challenge, but there’s two things that make it worth it. One is that, for me, the change was always the fun of it. That’s how I stayed engaged for a long time. That’s why I’m still engaged with it now because it’s fun to know those things and to see what has changed.

I think the other thing is that you realize that if you’re looking at something that’s changing all the time, you’re going to find things that transgress at various points. Because stuff that is new, stuff that is radical and novel, often transgresses. That’s a sort of historical truism in lots of ways. As a media educator, you’re always going to find yourself dealing with something that someone thinks is transgressive.

I give this example in the book about The Falling Man, the documentary. I used to use it to teach about media regulation because it’s about photos that were taken on 9/11, the decisions to publish them, and whether or not that was moral. It also addresses arguments about public interest and how we publish things. How do media producers consider the sensitivities around the people involved in the story? I remember being told off by the Vice Principal of my school for having shown the documentary. Parents and students had been upset by it. I was very sorry to see some of the students’ reactions. It clearly affected them. I said to the Vice Principal, I don’t regret showing that at all because I think that it’s a kind of thing that young people need to see if they’re thinking about the media. They need to think about who is making decisions about media and how they are making those decisions.

Now, you’d obviously use trigger warnings, and you’d risk-assess it. This was back in 2005 or 2006. We didn’t think about those things. But I would say that even with all those things, I would still want to show it to eighteen-year-olds now. Because in the age of new media, particularly where with the positive side of social media, there is less gatekeeping, the decisions about what we see and how we see it are still really important. There’s no doubt at the time that people saw that as a transgressive text. I say in the book that I see it as an occupational hazard that will happen sometimes.

I would be more cautious about showing some of those things and the way that I showed them, but I still would think really seriously about showing things that are transgressive. I mean things that are disruptive to young people’s thoughts. We used to have a lot of fun with Morgan Spurlock’s Super-Size Me. That’s a really transgressive text. You’re taking this thing that a lot of people love and enjoy, and you’re kind of picking it apart. You’re saying, okay, hang on, what’s really going on there? And of course, before you show it, you say, okay, how many of you have been at McDonald’s in the last week? 80% of the class raises their hands. What did you have? That sort of thing, right? So now we’re going to watch this documentary about a guy who just supersized everything for a month. Some kids go, I’d really love to do that. Let’s watch the documentary and see what you think.

And of course, the question you ask is about narrative. How does the documentary work? To what extent is the whole documentary like a super-sized meal? And, of course, the genius of it is he starts with this thing that’s going to be fun. And then, of course, by the end, he’s feeling physically sick every other day. That’s the point. He is making the narrative. The narrative is a point about the experience. It’s predicated on over-consumption. The kids think there’s a point here. Like how much of this stuff do we actually eat? That’s a really great example. It’s a transgressive text, not in that it’s showing anything that is not appropriate, but it disrupts kids’ views of the world in a nice, funny way that is quite valuable.

I think that they are an occupational hazard. It’s much more difficult now for media educators to do that sort of thing. With my colleague, Claire Pollard, we gave evidence to the government in the UK for their inquiry on digital literacy. She described the fact that lots of schools in the UK now will just shut down conversation about difficult topics. They’ll just shut kids. And Media Studies was a space where you could do that in quite a safe way. You could have those discussions, and you could address some quite difficult topics in that space. It was a really good space for that.

Now, with a lot of schools, that space is still there in some form, but it’s very prescriptive, and there’s certainly nothing transgressive in the curriculum. Whereas with the co-construction we talked about earlier, the students and the teachers were deciding what to look at. It was a good opportunity to talk about transgression. I think that’s part of media’s dynamism. The other thing that adds to that dynamism is the way you have to think about technology.

This comes back to production. When I started my career as a teacher, we were doing VHS-to-VHS video. We were getting kids to edit. Now a lot of teachers will have kids make films on iPhones and edit them on their phones or tablets. It’s very different in terms of production, but fundamentally, the principles are the same.

Why teach a kid to edit? Well, the reason why you teach a kid to edit is because it’s a way of representing the world. And when you watch something or edit something, you’re understanding something about representation. That’s why I teach it. Whether it’s VHS-to-VHS or an iPad, the thing you’re doing is representation. How are you going to cut this thing to tell the story that you want to tell or represent the thing that you want to represent? Media is very dynamic. The reason why you do it, and the intention behind it has, in some ways, not changed at all.

HC: You write Media Studies and Film Studies “reveal things about the human condition that other disciplines do not.” If I could underline that sentence anymore, I would. It really resonated with me. Would you say more about it?

SC: I actually wrote a book chapter about this a long time ago. I was director of the specialist visual and  media arts school. It was in a very, very economically-deprived area of London. It had a very low level of adult literacy, and the median household income was very low. It had a lot of unemployment and a lot of what we used to call multi-agency intervention. There were households where the police were involved, school was involved, social work was involved. It was a complex area. What I learned in my time there was that studying the media and making media texts provided young people from those backgrounds with very good opportunities to tell you about their world, to tell you about the things that were important to them and how they felt. That work revealed something about the world to me as an educator.

But perhaps what is just as important was involving students in education allowed them to see the world in particular ways. There’s a realization that they have about a couple of things. It’s a realization about power and where power lies. When you start to look at the media and you start to ask questions- where does this come from, why are you watching, how did you get to watch it, who made all those things. When you start to ask those questions, the best media literacy work will always do that. I think media education should focus on asking those questions.

Some of it is about realizing where power lies, the power of the media, and how it influences people. But it’s also about agency. It’s about the fact that you can make something, say something you know, or do something that brings your own personal view of the world to the fore. You realize you have a voice.

That girl who made a documentary about Muslim and Jewish kids, she realized that you can do something that showed complexity without making your family angry. She had a real realization. I can tell this story that I’ve got these friends from different backgrounds, and they have different views. They want to be peaceful. I could make this thing for school. I don’t even have to tell my dad that I’m making it. I can get a mark for it. Here look, I got an A without him going off the handle because I’m talking to the Jewish kids down the road.

That’s a powerful thing for that person. It’s a realization that they could express themselves in a way that they felt they could not previously. I’m not saying it’s like a universal thing. It’s the ability to make a student see the world and see themself in a different way. I think that is really valuable. There’s so much that you can do where people’s view of both their own lives and, more importantly, the lives of other people change.

This is one of the things that I think Media Studies does that lots of other bits of the curriculum, certainly in England, don’t do– it produces empathy. You have to think about audience, and you have to think about who that audience is, why you’re making this thing for them, or even yourself as an audience. Why are you the audience? Those kinds of questions, they generate a sense of empathy which I think is really important. And I think, I don’t want to say this, but we live in a particularly unempathetic age. Some of that is to do with opportunities that people have to explore and express themselves in an educational setting.

HC: I think that’s such a great observation. I’m going to slightly pivot our conversation towards discussing Media Studies and media literacy. I think your acknowledgement of power and agency and how media literacy also takes up that mantle can provide a transition. The penultimate chapter of your book examines the relationship between media education and media literacy, and you conclude that chapter by writing, “I would argue that young people get a fuller and richer understanding of the media through curricular Media Studies because the range of knowledge, skills, and experience they require is likely to be richer.” You do amend this, of course, by recognizing that the work of media literacy is often outside the school and also that available resources really do bear an impact.

I’m curious about how you distinguish Media Studies and media literacy. How can Media Studies enrich media literacy?

SC: That’s a great question, and I’m glad that I have the opportunity to talk about a bit more. I don’t want to in any way do down the work of media literacy education at all. They are two slightly different things. We had a marvelous opportunity in terms of putting Media Studies in the curriculum, and in England, that was taken out and excised from the curriculum. In its place you have a kind of extracurricular activity provided by charities and youth groups and which is characterized by policy as being sufficient.

There’s a national policy and national media literacy strategy in England which I just don’t think is very good. I don’t think it’s good and I don’t think it works for three main reasons. One, media literacy is every educator’s responsibility, right? Every educator has to see in terms of being media literate and think about how they teach young people to be media literate, even maths and science teachers. Everybody. There are some bits of it that are quite complicated, and you need specially trained teachers for those parts, but maths teachers, English teachers, history teachers, they should do media literacy work. No question. It’s an across the curriculum thing. If you encourage specialist teaching, if you put it in the curriculum, and you have a specialist teacher teaching it, the difficult stuff can be done. That’s the first thing. My argument is a question about having that opportunity to put media literacy in the curriculum and make sure that you have people teaching it, but it’s everybody’s responsibility alongside that.

The second thing is an observation more about media literacy. When it’s characterized as media literacy, it tends to focus on some very particular things. These things are important, but they are not the end-all-be-all of media education. Media literacy will tend to focus on things like misinformation, fake news, disinformation. Those are very important things, but the tendency to move towards those things actually limits the learning that you can do.

One of the things that I truly believe is the best way of exploring some of the issues around things like fake news, misinformation, disinformation, critical thinking, and critical analysis to make stuff which explores it. I’ve had this discussion with Belinha De Abreu (IC4ML President). She’ll say, we don’t exclude making stuff in America. But, for me, it’s about formalizing production in the curriculum. I think you need to have it be a formal thing. And again, that’s why you need a trained teacher.

Sometimes in media literacy, you get a tendency to over focus on outcomes. I’ll give a great example of this. I had a conversation with a colleague of mine who works in a school. We talked about how a lot of British schools see the influence of people like Andrew Tate and the manosphere, misogynist influences. There’s a lot of worry in schools about the influence of someone like Tate on boys, on teenage boys particularly. I think if I was teaching in a high school now, I can totally see how in my media studies classes, we would have dealt with Tate in about two or three weeks flat. We could point out all the things like why he’s getting in people’s heads, what the problem is with that is. We would have had the students be skeptical of him. I could have done it in about three weeks by looking at representation, the audience, the money-for-likes thing which is how he works. It could have been dealt with in short order, if you have a curriculum which is based around these concepts. That’s why I argue for a key concept curriculum where you can represent audience, language, institution, industry. These concepts will allow you to unpack a lot of the things that cause misinformation and disinformation in the beginning. My thing with a lot of the media literacy stuff, where it’s badged as media literacy and particularly where it’s connected to governments, is that it’s dealing with the symptom, not the cause. Really strong media curriculum will mean that you have a lot less issues with those things later in that respect.

Those are sort of the reasons why, as I describe it in the book, I think media literacy is a pragmatic thing. It’s a pragmatic shift. I talk about it as a pragmatic shift because really good media education takes time and money. And lots of people don’t have that so what you end up doing is the next best thing– let’s make people competent in this stuff because we can’t do a full-scale media curriculum. We don’t have that money. So let’s do this thing which is competency-based which we can test. We can assess it. We can say all these kids are media literate. I think for a lot of people that’s what they have to do. The UNESCO stuff. All those things are because in parts of the world, you can’t have the kind of thing that we had in England and in the UK. We forget that we were very privileged to have those things in the curriculum. Not everybody is in that situation. I think media literacy is generally a positive response to those circumstances.

Generally, it’s a kind of pragmatic, positive response to the fact that there is a lot of misinformation and disinformation in the world. I do want to acknowledge and pay tribute to a lot of the people who are working in that media literacy space, because they keep really important things on the agenda. They produce great teaching, and they write about it really well. I love reading all that I’ve found and cite in that chapter. I use Renee Hobbs’s work. I use Paul Mihailidis’s work, Belinha De Abreu’s work. I think they have really important things to say, but, for me, the solution probably looks a bit different. And I think that’s probably because of where I come from in terms of the educational traditions of England and the UK. That’s why I end up concluding, sort of what I conclude in that chapter.

HC: I tend to see media literacy, like you said, as this pragmatic response to the contemporary moment, in the sense of the limited educational resources as well as the ways we interact with such pervasive media. And I think what I find to be really important is that, for me, media literacy is a way of being that is bolstered by media education. What is necessary in that is this dialogue between the two as well as the contextualizing of what both realms are trying to produce and achieve.

Speaking of the pragmatic and the contemporary, I’ll conclude our conversation by, in fact, parroting a question that you propose in the conclusion of the text which is where do we go next? I’m curious not only what your response to that question is, but on a more meta level, how do you foresee your response to that question changing?

SC: That is a really great question. Thank you. No one’s asked me that meta-level question before.

First thing, where do we go next? I’ll deal with both the UK and globally. In the UK, there is a move to, in some form, bring media literacy back into the curriculum. There’s a curriculum review going on at the moment. We just don’t know whether or not it means putting media literacy back in English or putting it somewhere. We’re sort of at a tipping point where politicians realize that media literacy and media education need to be back. That’s why me and Claire were at the House of Lords giving evidence a couple of weeks ago, because enough politicians think this is a problem. They actually want to do something about it. Media literacy will be there in some sort which is a good start. It may not look the way I want it to look, but it’ll be there. That’s a positive. Now the extent to which it can deal with some of the things that people might want it to do is up for debate. Media literacy is not a magic bullet to society’s ills. But I am an optimist, and I think that having it somewhere in the curriculum is important– in the elective space as well. Having it in media studies, in elective courses, having more teacher control will be good as well. Having some of the restrictions- the prescription- lifted, would be a really good start as well. I think that will happen. I’m optimistic.

For me, the first question is kind of how does the subject meet the challenge of things like AI? How do we counter that? How does AI affect views of the way the media gets made and distributed? That’s a challenge that we will have to deal with. It’s an opportunity as well.

I was in a webinar the other day with the great American media thinker Douglas Rushkoff. He said, we need to think about the AI solution as well as the AI problem. I think that’s a great way of thinking about it. What’s the opportunity in AI, in terms of media, but also teaching kids to be critical about the use of it. Who’s making it and all those questions which are institutional questions. 25 years ago, we were asking that about News Corporation. We need to ask that of the people who make ChatGPT.

The thing I really worry about is the prevalence of media, of media production and media texts, which openly seek to create a different reality. Will Merrin, who’s professor of Media at Swansea University, writes that social media is the “epistemology machine.” It completely creates knowledge, the extent of the knowledge, of the people who use it. If you occupy all your time on Facebook that becomes your knowledge. It’s a machine that creates the knowledge around you, and everything you know comes through it right. I really worry about the prevalence of people who want to use the media in order to create  knowledge which is dangerous or threatening.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the Senator Alex Padilla footage from the press conference in LA. That was really interesting. The cut of the footage that Fox put out and the cut of the footage that went up on The Guardian were completely different. The Fox bit was captioned something like Padilla lunges forward, not identifying himself, in an attempt to threaten the Secretary. The Guardian showed a bit before where he did identify himself. He said, “I’m Senator Alex Padilla, and I’ve got some questions to ask,” and then he was bundled to the floor. That was an attempt to present and manipulate reality through social media. The footage was cut for X in order to promote particular views.

Newspapers and TV have always done things like this, but now there is a propensity for people to do this at scale and then for that to be distributed very, very quickly. The question for me, and this is the media literacy question, is how do you get people to recognize that the manipulation process is happening? Both of those news outlets are manipulating that video, cutting it and showing various things. How do you get young people to recognize that this process is happening? That’s always what media teachers have done. They’ve always highlighted the way that the thing is represented or constructed. But now, the thing is all-encompassing and it’s all on all the time. Now, the danger is of overwhelm and all the mental health things that go with that. How do you get young people to recognize that this thing is being manipulated at scale?

That, I think, is the real challenge for media education. It’s dealing with this kind of tidal wave of potential manipulation, but also having agency, the feeling that you’re in control of it. Plenty of people recognize that this is manipulation. Plenty of people, even kids, will kind of recognize that, but it’s really about making sure that they have the right tools to be critical. And for me, that is where the classroom becomes really important– that safe environment for showing what’s going on and asking those difficult questions in a sustained way for a long period of time. To build those tools, that resilience, those skills and that knowledge in a sustained way, a sustained educational way, that’s the challenge.

How do we do that around the world? How do we support media education in countries where there is an active attempt to suppress that kind of education? How do you do that where being a media educator is dangerous?

This is a tangent, but it demonstrates this point. One of the most interesting experiences I had last year was when I went to the Azores for the International Media Literacy Research Symposium. It was the first time I had met Michael RobGrieco, who’s another Connecticut native like Belinha, and he did this great presentation about how the origins of the American media literacy movement began in the liberation theology movement with these two American nuns down in South America. They were challenging the fascist dictatorships of South America, and then they were ordered back to America by Cardinal Ratzinger where they set up a media literacy center in Los Angeles.

This was a moment of clarity for me because it was a reminder that some of this stuff has happened before. There have been fascist states, and people have done media education that then becomes the enemy of the fascist state. These two nuns were expelled from South America for promoting media literacy. How do you help with that? There’s more and more of that, the rise of populism, the rise of the right. How do you help people in those countries? How does media literacy do that? When social media is being weaponized by the right and then by populist dictators how do you equip people for that? That’s the challenge globally for the next 25 years, probably.

HC: What I’m hearing is that the complexity and these foundational theories that we encounter in media, those will endure. Surely, they’ll kind of reify in certain ways as well, but as we encounter what feel like new contexts, we can stay grounded and take the historical precedence as means to solidify the agency that education offers.

SC: That’s where the conceptual frameworks become really important. Audience is still audience however it’s fragmented. Representations are still representations, right? Even in an age of artificial intelligence, representation is still a really important concept. What is being represented and how has it been generated? Who wants to make that sort of representation? Those are still really important questions.

HC: Thank you so much. I have really enjoyed this conversation. Are there any lingering thought’s you’d like to address?

SC: I was really clear that I wanted my book to be open access so that as many people can read it as possible so it’s freely available. I really enjoy interaction and engagement from anyone who reads my work. I put my email on all the things that I do, and I invite people to get in touch if they want to have a chat about my work or if they want to object to anything about it. I think that’s how we develop ideas. I really invite conversation.

I’ve been very lucky to talk to a lot of American colleagues and Canadian colleagues, all the people who are involved with the International Council for Media Literacy, and I’ve been really lucky to have their perspective. I would want to emphasize that there’s historically been a view of a sort of divide between the European tradition and the American tradition, but I would be in debt to all the guys in America and the rest of the world because they made me think about why I think the things that I think. I don’t always agree with them, but I like the fact that the things they say make me think about why I think the way that I think. It’s really important to acknowledge that, and I’ve always found a great welcome from those people even though some of my ideas may be a little bit at odds with what they’re doing and sometimes a little bit peculiarly English or peculiarly European in that sense. I’ve always had a great welcome from them which I really appreciate.

Finally, I wrote the book because I think that people don’t think about this question enough. What do we want people to know? I said this to Doug Rushkoff the other day. The questions that he raises, they’re epistemological questions. What do we need to know? What do we want students to know? What do we want teachers to know? What do we need to know to do the stuff that we want to do? They’re all questions of knowledge. I wrote the book because I thought no one was addressing that question now. Now the way I’ve answered it is, my own, kind of unique way.

I invite people to tell me that it looks different or even that it doesn’t matter in the way that I think it does. I’m perfectly prepared to accept that as well. Someone might say, this knowledge stuff is much less important than Steve Connolly says it is. I’m totally fine with that. I would actually be really interested to read an account like that. I invite people to think about the question and if they think that it’s the wrong question or that there’s a different answer. I really want to have a discussion with them about that.