At the Digital Frontiers: Extending Media Literacy through Media Ecology

Abstract

Media literacy is considered to be an integral skill for personal, professional, social, and political action in the 21^st century. However, what constitutes media literacy itself and the manner by which media literacy education is taught, received, and measured continues to be ardently debated amongst scholars and practitioners. Moreover, the new educational technologies that are employed both as teachers of and tools for media literacy complicate the understanding. As such, the present article sought to provide an alternate perspective on media literacy. The perspective, termed Media Ecology, an often unacknowledged approach to understanding the relationship between humans and technology, offers a way of understanding that privileges the form of communication as opposed to the content. Thus, media ecology, as presented in the article to follow, offered a unique and novel perspective that sought to enrich media literacy education at the student, instructor, and scholarly levels.

Keywords

Media Literacy, Media Ecology, Media and Technology Studies, Communication Pedagogy

Introduction

Media literacy is commonly defined as “the ability of a citizen to access, analyze, and produce information” (Aufderheide, 1993, p. 6). In an era dominated by digital consumption, students face the challenge of navigating overwhelming information across various devices daily. Studies indicate that individuals possess a misplaced confidence in their media literacy levels (Mitchell et al., 2020; Vogels & Anderson, 2019). This paradox is underscored by aptitude tests revealing significant gaps in foundational media literacy concepts among U.S. citizens (Vogels & Anderson, 2019).

As the urgency for media literacy skills grows, educators and citizens advocate for its inclusion as a critical educational element (“Why Media Literacy is Important,” 2025). The technological advancements of the late 20th and early 21st centuries further complicate media literacy education. The advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) adds another layer of complexity for students and educators engaging with media literacy. While AI systems like ChatGPT and Claude dominate headlines, their functionalities are aggressively marketed across various industries, raising concerns about reliability and the need for oversight (Grierson, 2025; Roose, 2025).

Education is a key sector transformed by digital tools and AI technologies. Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, the integration of AI in higher education has surged (Singer, 2026). This rush to adopt educational technology, often without robust efficacy evidence, highlights a growing alliance between higher education and digital innovations (Garcia, 2025; Vilcarino & Langreo, 2025). While some fear digital tools and AI will replace the need for genuine learning, others view it as a tool to enhance education (Khan, 2024). The prevailing perspective leans toward viewing AI as beneficial, prompting swift design and integration into academic frameworks.

However, media ecology cautions against a simplistic tool-centric view of technology (Strate, 2018). Instead, this field argues that new media create environments that fundamentally alter how knowledge is communicated. Media ecology extends the contours of media literacy by emphasizing the interrelationship between various media and their forms, environments, and contexts. This essay will thus explore how today’s educational media landscape shifts our access to, analysis of, and production of information in four sections: First, we will briefly outline traditional approaches to media literacy. Second, we spotlight a few areas where educational technology dominates the education process. Third, we present media ecology as media literacy, posing it as an alternative framework for analyzing shifts and trends in media literacy education. Finally, we provide a set of critical questions suggested by a media ecological approach to media literacy. Ultimately, our aim is to extend the nature and scope of media literacy to adapt to the swift current of changes in today’s media landscape. 

Common Contemporary Approaches in Media Literacy 

As noted above, media literacy broadly refers to one’s ability to access, analyze, and produce information in an accurate or prescribed manner. While it is tempting to consider media literacy an extension of literacy proper – examples of which can be found in cave paintings and Greek dialogues – the conceptualization of media literacy is relatively young, emerging with the inventions of the telegraph, telephone, radio, and (later on) television in the early to mid-twentieth century (Collins, 2020; Sibii, 2025). While literacy is solely concerned with reading and writing, contemporary media literacy involves a host of written, visual, computational, and even economic knowledges that are essential to understanding media (Silverblatt et. al, 2014). Due to the widespread scope and interdisciplinary topic, scholars have struggled to cleanly define, integrate, and operationalize the terms and fields included under the banner of media literacy (Wuyckens et. al, 2022).

Nonetheless, several scholars have put together extensive textbooks attempting to weave all the disparate concepts in media literacy together. Underlying these broad knowledge areas mentioned above are three essential building blocks: personal locus (i.e. identification of internal biases), knowledge structures (i.e. media forms and organizations), and skills (i.e. practical critical thinking and analytic tools for information analysis) (Potter, 2013). Extended study in media literacy thus includes the intensive knowledge of not only information, but also organizations and even one’s own identity and biases. While this is no small feat, in the field of media literacy it is from the above three building blocks that media literacy is built. 

However, the most frequent manner in which media literacy is often presented – whether in K-12 education, google searches, or postsecondary education – as either a set of discrete steps and/or a set of specific questions centered narrowly on user access and skill, message meaning, and media operations. For instance, Media Literacy Week provides the acronym AAECA to stand for the media literacy process (“Media Literacy Basics,”2025). The acronym stands for Access (i.e. how to find sources), Analyze (i.e. how to break down the parts of messages), Evaluate (i.e. how to assess messages), Create (i.e. applying media literacy for your own messages), and Act (i.e. engaging in the public sphere) (“Media Literacy Basics,” 2025). The simple acronym is intended to be employed by individuals of all education levels in order to identify areas of inquiry for media. On the other hand, The National Association for Media Literacy Education provides key questions about authors and audiences, messages and meanings, and reflections and evaluations (“Key Questions,” 2025). Put together, most general approaches to media literacy for a layperson’s audience aim to provide clear and distinct areas for consideration as well as explicit questions. 

Unfortunately, such media literacy approaches do have several issues to consider. First, and foremost, such step-by-step and pre-prescribed question-oriented approaches tend to treat media literacy as a linear and static skill that can be acquired once and never approached again. Additionally, most skill-oriented approaches look primarily at the content of the messages and little else. While many upper-level texts now consider the multifaceted issues intertwined, the base approach is solely what can be immediately seen by the viewer (Potter, 2013). In doing so, the interconnectedness between different phenomena is ignored or glossed over. Consequently, current approaches to media literacy as a skill to be acquired relating to viewable content could potentially contribute to the gap between perceived and actual media literacy competency. 

While useful as guideposts in navigating media messages, extant approaches to media literacy bear two ironies. First, while “media” implies a focus on the properties and peculiarities of various media, attention has been directed primarily on either message content and/or user skills, neither of which attends to media affordances. Second, “literacy” originates from a print paradigm and is most typically counterposed with “orality.” The term privileges content over the medium through which the content was transmitted. The compound term “media literacy” is thus a contradiction in terms. A media ecological approach to media literacy, however, can resolve the contradiction and suggests itself as an especially timely perspective in light of explosions in digital technology.

Educational Technology in the Classroom: Mediating Education

With the next section of this article, we would like to highlight the most common areas in which educational technology is utilized in education today. We do so because, with the boom of educational technologies in the 21^st century, and now the continued development of AI-assisted educational technologies, it is increasingly important to investigate and analyze what might be required of meaningful media literacy. To accomplish this the following section will discuss how educational technology at the reading, classroom, homework, examination, and grading stages is altered. 

To exemplify the changes that educational technologies have on media literacy education we will start where most students start: the assigned reading. Until recently, to read for a class meant to purchase a physical book from the university bookstore and flip through the pages, making notes in the margins or marking important passages with sticky notes, or looking for summaries posted online. Today, most students – or at least those who do indeed actually buy the textbook – opt for an electronic or rental copy and their notes take quite a different form. Instead of physically marking notes, passages can be highlighted using tools connected to the web which can help immediately summarize while scanning the text. Additionally, LLMs – such as Chat GPT, Claude, Grok, and others – can be prompted for easily accessible and bulleted summaries of each chapter or passage. Here, we find that the literacy component of media literacy has been reduced to a few keystrokes compared to the laborious reading and searching of yesteryears (Xing et. al, 2025). While it is tempting to assume that these new tools are simply tools to be used to make us more media literate, it is important to take heed of the media ecological importance of the form of media. Moving learning materials online is not an inert act; it changes the educational environment. Thus, from the first step of a student’s media literacy journey they are encountering new forms of media. A media ecological perspective notes not merely what students are reading but also the medium through which they are reading it and the conditions it imposes on students on how they read it. Stated differently, a media ecologist looks at environmental influences of the online medium.

After students have read the materials, next comes class attendance – or so one would think. Traditionally, students would do the reading and come to class. Educational technology has made it possible (and largely preferrable) among students to take classes online. Instead of interrogating the materials and doing activities surrounding the text, students may simply watch the next recorded lecture. Today, Canva makes it possible for instructors to create AI lectures that are close-captioned and accessible to students requiring no interrogation of information. Other technologies, such as Otter.AI can be used to take notes on these lectures automatically thus largely removing the human element of media literacy education. Here, contemporary approaches to media literacy fail as critical thinking, especially in regards to media literacy, is not engendered nor required of students. Demonstrating media literacy under such circumstances requires technical computer knowledge, but not cognitive analytical skills traditionally required by media literacy education. Technology, and technical skill, is promoted over reflective thought and even over content, once the darling of media literacy.

After students complete several readings and attend classes they may be assigned homework and examinations to test their knowledge. Ed tech companies have increasingly made tools for disseminating exams via online platforms. These programs even often include security measures to ward off plagiarism that include browser locks and eye scanning. However, online exams remain an area rife with cheating. So much so that many instructors have reverted back to “blue book” examinations (Good, 2025). While reversion is not necessarily the ideal path forward for media literacy education, the employment of previous technologies demonstrates how important the process of education is, just as media ecologists have argued. Moreover, this reversion also demonstrates McLuhan and McLuhan’s (1988) tetradic idea that all new media retrieve something from old media. In this case, obsolesced media forms have returned as anti-environments in which students can learn the biases of their dominant media environments and ultimately become more media literate. Of course, for those online classes in which blue books are not possible, there still remains an exceptionally large hurdle as to how to instill the process in media literacy education.

In the final step we turn to the instructor’s role in the course: assessment and grading. As sometimes joked, professors teach for free and are paid to grade (Strate, 2024). However, ed tech has recently provided a host of new AI grading tools that accomplish this task exceptionally well. Presentations can now be analyzed in real time and precise metrics on disfluencies, content, and other emotional markers can be provided (“AI at Cengage,” 2025). For written assignments, instructors can simply run the paper through a grading AI agent – or a plug-in is installed in the browser or LMS – and be provided with a suggested grade based on pre-uploaded rubrics . Even written feedback by instructors can be instantaneously created and disseminated to students. Thus, at the feedback level, instructors are not required to poke and prod the students’ responses but instead provide pre-fabricated feedback based on specific data points encoded in the AI software. 

All of the above points to the need for a fundamental reworking of the process of media literacy education. While contemporary approaches and media ecology perspectives aid in understanding how to approach a media artifact and/or environment, the medium through which this education itself has scarcely been thoroughly touched upon. 

Media Ecology As Media Literacy

Though contemporary approaches to media literacy are typically skill and content based, the idea of media literacy itself was actually originally pioneered by a group of individuals with a substantially different approach to media literacy. Although early media literacy education attempts might be attributed to the first wave of communication scholars, it is the oft-forgotten intellectual tradition of media ecology which popularized studies of media – and in particular popular or “low” culture” – and brought the idea of media as important to the forefront of scholarly and popular thought (Kuhns, 1971). Such attention to what the medium communicates in education unfortunately has not yet been taken up as a major consideration of media literacy. The field of media ecology stands to extend the reach of media literacy. Thus, the short section to follow enumerates the guiding principles of a media ecology approach to media literacy. While an extensive review of the multiplicity of media ecology tools is beyond the scope of this essay, we sketch below some distinctive angles a media ecology perspective offers to the pursuit of media literacy.

Media as Extensions of Ourselves

Similar to contemporary approaches to media literacy, media ecology is united by several core building blocks from which the rest of the field and approach to media literacy is built. At the onset, media ecologists begin by defining a medium of communication fundamentally differently from traditional social scientific and humanistic approaches of the time. Instead of a medium of communication being limited to artifacts that seemed to be designed with the explicit goal of communicating (telegraph, tv, etc.), McLuhan (1964) popularized the conceptualization of media as any extension of humans from glasses to the internet. 

Media as Bias

Additionally, media ecologists rebuff the notion that a medium of communication is a neutral tool that is to be employed for the aims of humans (Lum, 2006; Postman, 1985). Instead, to media ecologists, each medium of communication has a specific set of  biases imbued in its form that privilege certain manners of communicating and understanding knowledge (Innis, 1951). 

Media as Environment

 The final, and perhaps most important, prong undergirding the media ecology approach is that the medium, conceived broadly, as a tool that impacts the information that can be communicated and types of knowledge privileged, should also be understood as an environment in and of itself (McLuhan, 1962; Logan, 2002). In other words, a medium once introduced into an environment reshapes the environment and in turn reshapes an individual’s sensibilities within the environment (McLuhan, 1967). In sum, a media ecology approach to media literacy begins with the broad conceptualization of a medium that is in and of itself an environment that has significant impact on the form of the information communicated as well as the knowledge that can come to be known and privileged within society (Strate, 2006). A media ecological approach to media literacy locates “literacy” principally in the psycho-social and cultural environment that dominant media generate.

Since the earliest roots of the field, media ecology has always been instructive as to how to make sense of the media environment. Neil Postman (1969/1979/1985) conceived the entire point of education was to give students the skills to be “crap detectors” to avoid “amusing ourselves to death”. Similarly, Ellul (1964) argued that by recognizing the logics of electronic media – i.e. efficiency and speed – individuals might be able to better understand the motivations behind technological developments and come up with more human assessments of and courses of action within our media environment. However, early articulations of a media ecology platform for education tended to be similar in orientation to contemporary approaches (i.e. a mere fact finding mission), including overly pedantic language, and lacked employable heuristic devices, and/or were considered, paradoxically, to afford too much agency to technology and be deterministic to the point of the perceived amelioration of human agency (Chandler, 2012). Thus, rash reliance on media ecological perspectives and even on canonical figures in media ecology for contemporary media literacy can often be lost in translation when attempted to be applied to the digital media sphere.  

Contemporary media ecologists have continued to build upon the notions articulated by Postman, Ellul, McLuhan, and others. In regards to education, Albrecht and Tabone (2020) insisted on the notion of paying attention to the process of education and, specifically, instituting classroom activities that employed the arts and varying forms of play. Conceiving of the “process” of a psycho-social cultural environment, Fry (2018) crafted a five part media ecology approach to media literacy that involved aspects of political, economic , and social construction of messages that focused on the process by which media are created, produced, and consumed. The focus on environment, context, or milieu would direct our attention to the various “media” that comprise it: The various elements of an educational environment—such as curriculum, assessment measures, norming standards, and reward systems—function like media that shape and influence student learning and development. Previous conceptualizations of media literacy lack the perspective that these components interact to create a comprehensive framework that guides educational experiences, impacting how knowledge is acquired and values are reinforced.

Media as Law-Governed

Perhaps the most employed media literacy tool developed by media ecologists was McLuhan and McLuhan’s (1988) laws of media. The tetrad, as it is colloquially known, is composed of four questions that can be asked of any medium to explore the effects. The questions include the following: What does a medium enhance? What does a medium obsolesce? What does a medium bring back that was previously discarded? What does a medium turn into when pushed to its extreme? McLuhan and McLuhan (1988) developed the laws of media in hopes of providing a useful heuristic for understanding the dominant medium of our times and the sensibilities and knowledges that are privileged by the environment that medium creates. However, the tetrad, despite its utility to analyzing media, was not a tool designed specifically for media literacy. 

The above suggests a few broad perspectives that a media ecology approach can bring to media literacy. They, and the myriad of heuristics that media ecology scholars have proffered (see Cali, 2017), offer a wide ranging set of tools to cultivate media literacy, or, put differently, to understand how “the medium is the message.” 

Applying Media Ecology Critical Questions

As indicated above, educational technologies make media literacy more accessible than ever while simultaneously reducing the need for the deep literacy skills that have traditionally accompanied media literacy. Of course, it is insufficient and irresponsible to simply point out the issues educational technologies create for media literacy. In this final section, we hope to provide some actionable solutions and courses of action for individuals who wish to employ a media ecology approach to media literacy.

We propose that a media ecology perspective can inform a new and more meaningful approach to contemporary media literacy in the digital age. Its orientation would be to promote an understanding, a media literacy, of how the various elements—or “media,” laden with biases—that make up an educational environment coalesce in “learning.” In that pursuit, we propose not a canon of media literacy based on a media ecological perspective but a set of questions that would engender it. In our example of an educational environment, a first task before deploying our proposed media ecological questions would be to identify which aspects of the educational environment (curriculum, assessment, etc.) act as media that influence learning outcomes?

1. Media as Extensions of Ourselves. In what ways are the various media comprising an environment extending, outstretching, contracting, limiting, compressing, human capabilities? In what ways are they enhancing or restricting communication? What behaviors and interactions are engendered by these media?
2. Media as Bias. What behaviors and modes of consciousness are inherent in the media comprising the environment? How do they condition the learner’s critical engagement with content? How do they affect the way information is presented and interpreted?
3. Media as Environment. How do the media comprising the environment reshape the surrounding environment? In turn, what effect does this have on individual and collective sensibilities? How has the introduction of new media altered the dynamics of existing educational practices and cultural values?
4. Media as Law-Governed. Finally, if what can be taken as a synthesis of the above considerations, we could apply media ecology’s “tetrad” by posing the following questions: 

1. What does this medium enhance in terms of communication or understanding?
2. What aspects of traditional communication does this medium obsolesce, and what are the consequences of this loss?
3. What elements does this medium revive that were previously forgotten or deemed irrelevant?
4. When pushed to its extreme, how does this medium transform, and what new challenges or opportunities arise from this transformation?

Conclusion

In brief, adopting a media ecology approach to media literacy education equips today’s media users—which is to say, all of us!—in navigating today’s complex technological landscape. This perspective shifts focus from mere content consumption or skill acquisition to understanding how various media environments influence learning processes and critical engagement. By examining media as extensions of ourselves, as biased instruments, and as environment influencers, educators can foster deeper cognitive skills, including especially media literacy. Ultimately, asking foundational questions empowers both students and educators to become more adept participants in an increasingly mediated world, enhancing their media literacy in a meaningful way.

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