Media Literacy, Absence, Invisibility and Criticality

Abstract

What makes media literacy a practice of critical thinking? This structural question is at the root of this paper. The need for media literacy to go beyond classrooms and address the immediacy of community needs is urgent. As awareness of the failings of media texts diffuses through our media prosumer societies, there are still no clear answers to what media illiteracy is. Moreover, for learner communities to transit from this presumed illiteracy to literacy, a methodological grounding must be made available, upon which delivery methods can be based. This paper explores how critical communication pedagogy may be applied in community-level delivery of media literacy. There is a need for media literacy to be reimagined as a liberating and empowering tool among communities, and the paper argues that co-construction of knowledge would be an effective method. Taking a non-Western approach and specifically grounding its context in India, it recommends that media literacy should be regarded as a form of demystification.

Keywords

Media Illiteracy, Absent Presence, Media Invisibility, Media Literacy for Communities, Co-construction of Knowledge, Media literacy in India, Critical Communication Pedagogy, Media Literacy as Demystification, Cornel West, Media Literacy

Can critical communication pedagogy be applied to media literacy programs, and in particular, can community training in media literacy specifically benefit from this approach? In this paper, that is the fundamental question with which I began. Criticality is embedded in both critical communication pedagogy, where it appears in the very name, and media literacy, whose definitions invariably entail the objective of critical thinking. Co-creation of knowledge, a basic tenet embedded in critical communication pedagogy, enables a collective and critical understanding of the world through shared individual identities. Through this approach, media literacy learners can use their identities to view their world through frameworks media construct, and through them, better understand the ideological contexts and read and write mediated texts meaningfully.

There is a need for media literacy to be reimagined as a liberating and empowering tool among communities, and I argue that co-construction of knowledge would be an effective method. Many of these communities, especially those in locations that are rural or far-flung from the media’s reach, may lack access to mainstream media but operate smartphones that provide easy access to a variety of content ranging from news to opinion and advertisements to promotional “influencer” messages. Media literacy programs can operate in locations where media representations are absent, making learning available at the cultural, physical, and ideological location of the learner. Thus, training programs take learning to the location where the learner experiences life and lives their identity. Community training is unlike learning at schools or colleges. Community members learn voluntarily; they share the same spaces and, often, personal information with one another. Geographically proximate communities may differ from online communities, which are often not based on social or geographic proximity. Delivery of training programs to small communities would also need to adjust to variables such as literacy levels; urbanity levels; proximity to physical, technological, and social infrastructure; and so on. Community media literacy training is nascent and fragmented—offering us the opportunity to examine which pedagogical approaches may work in media literacy programs for communities.

This paper builds a demystification methodology of media literacy. In order to do so, the paper first traces media literacy, problematizes current practices of media literacy, and introduces critical communication pedagogy, weaving the potential application of these concepts among communities.

Media truths, media representation, and media literacy

In early 2022, a mandate in India among some schools and a later court verdict endorsing a ban on the hijab led hijab-wearing women to fight legally for the freedom to wear the headscarf, but not religiously to fight the freedom not to wear it. The women preferred wearing visibly religious identity in an environment where making themselves invisible was a personal choice and not the choice of the media. By decontextualizing the story, national media platforms misrepresented all sides.

The assumption instructional media literacy must make is that a media-illiterate person cannot distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate sources of information, so first of all, let me explain the dichotomous situation that surrounds this assumption. The popular positivist claim that the news media offer realities while non-media entities do not is therefore fraught with problems. First, media do not reflect most local realities. Second, media often get things wrong. Third, news bias comes in various facets, such as inherent(Diddi, Fico, and Zeldes, 2014) and partisan(Shoemaker & Reese, 1996). In addition to bias, a more structural issue persists. This is what I call media truth, founded in “media logic.”

A panel discussion on a television news channel may perfunctorily follow the norms of “good” journalism, bringing in people of eclectic thought and differing ideas. The anchor of the show weaves them all together, summarizing and evaluating, uses their position as anchor to comment in certain ways as to further a point, and thus packaging a preferred reading of the text through media logic, the underpinning beneath the format of selection, organization, and production of issues—a communicative construction where “nonmedia actors have to conform to this ‘media logic’ if they want to be represented in the (mass) media” (Couldry and Hepp, 2013).

By media truths, I mean the presumed truths founded on available facts that a media platform makes visible to its audiences. It may be argued that all the mediated truths are presumed, because of the nature and processes intrinsic to news. The practice of media literacy thus encounters a paradox in its underpinning that the media purport to pursue truth. The conflation of facts with truths is not new, but in the absence of all facts, we cannot arrive at our truths. The media must visibilize available facts and present them as truths.

The news media routinely invisibilize realities using perceptions of aesthetics, claims of representation, media’s participation in nationalism, and “common sense.” If a storyteller selects a city as a representative image, the representation of a village is deselected, and vice versa. So it is important to look behind visibility and shine the light on the invisibilized context. While television news stories are available for scrutiny of their visibilized products, they are not available for invisibilized (non-)products. As Herzog (2020) says, studying invisibility is to attempt to study “that which doesn’t exist.” Yet invisibilized objects are not absent, but merely suffer from absent presence.

This means communities that are unavailable to the media are also media-illiterate. A woman a) with limited education; b) who stays at home; c) lives in a family that is below the poverty line; d) in a hutment in a village in India that receives limited supply of electricity; and e) belongs to a Dalit^[1] family with access to a smartphone. Yet her access is challenged by the interconnectedness of the level of agency that various social structures determine for an individual or a group. In the above example, the woman’s access to news may be limited to a WhatsApp group set by influential male members of her family or village. In that sense, a critical pedagogical exercise may be two or more steps away from her. However, an underprivileged member of a community may have an experience of discrimination that is different from a more prominent member. Razzante, et al. (2021) term this the paradox of intersectionality—that there is no distinct hierarchical manifestation of marginalization. Overall, individuals are social beings who have unique experiences because of their intersectional existence, individuals who are bound by social structural barriers and constantly seek the agency to use the intersectionality to break those barriers. In India, caste-based political representation is common, and is an example of how groups organize themselves around their marginalized identities, empowering themselves, gaining voice, which, when amplified, catches media attention and media representation.

A challenge in the delivery of media literacy is representational. Media representations generate notions of the other through their discursive processes (Said, 1978) and are important in shaping audiences’ attitudes, both positive and negative, towards others (Berry, et al., 2015). The challenge for the media is that in mediated identity construction, local collective identities are too fragmented and diverse to be effectively represented. One of the problems particular to countries like India is that local media are largely absent, with the exception of local newspaper supplements or pages in large cities, and news media are largely national. This means that a central power can claim to provide agency and sideline more locally grounded, grassroots-level representations. For example, there are at least two national English-language news channels in India—Republic TV and Times Now—that claim that “the nation wants to know,” and thus routinely claim to represent a generalized national mass of audiences rather than segmented audiences. This “problem speaking for others” is based on two factors: a) the speaker’s social identity cannot be altered, and is salient, while representing other social identities, and b) depending on what that social location is, it can be “discursively dangerous” (Alcoff, 1992, p. 7). The spheres of public discourse are locations of oppressive and counter-oppressive forces, but these forces are not equal. The neoliberal operation of the news media are the biggest challenges in the path of representation.

Self-representation may appear to be an effective solution especially since social media has become available. In a social media world of self-representations, text production is a second but important step of media literacy, and in addition to consumption skills, the curricula also teach production of media messages. Communities can build local media texts through independent social media channels such as YouTube. Both the process and the value of voice^[2] can be powerful enablers in this process. Self-representation is at the heart of the philosophy of media literacy, and laws and policies are being framed around it. In Illinois state of the United States, a law in 2021 made media literacy a mandatory subject at public high schools, beginning 2022, to create “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and communicate using a variety of objective forms, including, but not limited to, print, visual, audio, interactive, and digital texts” (Media Literacy Act, Ill. Stat. S 99, 2021). Specifically, the media literacy unit of instruction aims to include topics that help learners in a) evaluating platforms to access information; b) analyzing media messages; c) creating media; d) assessing how media affects emotion and behavior; and e) having a socially responsible plan of action. These requirements relate to media consumption—promoting fluency, skills, and understanding choices, fulfilling cognitive and practical abilities.

Let us also not forget that social media, too, decontextualizes not only in geographic, historical, or sociological terms. Indeed, a major strand of misinformation is this decontextualization of information. Cornel West (1990) views these representational strategies as responses to new and unseen circumstances or conditions. Including those conditions means that learning communities must have an understanding of ideological underpinnings. However, as Alcoff argues, self-representation is not an individual endeavor and must carry with it “participating in the creation and reproduction of discourses through which my own and other selves are constituted” (p. 21, emphasis added). Often, a local representative may be effective because they likely have more agency, influence, and impact.

Local representation, which connects local communities to the larger societies, is prone to politicization by vested interests. WhatsApp^[3] groups have been a matter of concern in recent years in India. Smartphones have penetrated the rural “markets,” and closed-groups social networks have insidiously been spreading selective information, misinformation, or messages that are manipulated to suit a political agenda. In the unavailability of hyperlocal media messages that may tell stories of, and be accessed by, local communities, these virtual messages can gain a foothold in a community as the framework of reality. Because the presence of local political representation is much more than that of local media representation, political representatives have the power to start or influence local WhatsApp groups and appropriate dominant political narrative through those groups.

Focusing on the text without paying attention to the context is setting media literacy up for failure. As Sonia Livingstone (2004) rightly suggested, “to focus solely on questions of skill or ability … unwittingly supports a universalist, cognitive framework, thereby neglecting in turn the historical and cultural contingency of both media and the social knowledge processes that interpret them” (p. 8). In short, to approach media literacy in sociologically relevant ways is to add the element of criticality not only to the learner, but also to the facilitator of that learning. Kellner and Share (2007) offer an approach to critical media literacy that aims to expand the notion of literacy to include different forms of media culture:

Critical media literacy expands the notion of literacy to include different forms of mass communication and popular culture as well as deepens the potential of education to critically analyze relationships between media and audiences, information and power. It involves cultivating skills in analyzing media codes and conventions, abilities to criticize stereotypes, dominant values, and ideologies, and competencies to interpret the multiple meanings and messages generated by media texts. (p. 4)

Enabling this critical learning remains tricky. The inherently flawed structure of pedagogy, a one-way flow of crystallized learning, will persist if the facilitator cannot fathom the sociological structures of a community in which learning must occur. Whether this community is highly visible or invisible to the media in particular makes a difference to what critical learning means to that community. In the following section, a more elaborate treatment of criticality is offered using critical pedagogy as a tool.

Media literacy and critical pedagogy

In Fassett and Warren’s (2007) description of critical communication pedagogy, education must problematize issues such as identity towards an understanding of the world that is free from structural trappings of the academy. The understanding of the intersectional nature of a learner—including the fact that they are embedded in communities—is important to the idea of critical pedagogy, first introduced by Paulo Freire (1970/2005), whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed is foundational to the study. Pedagogy refers to the principles and methods of the delivery of learning; critical pedagogy is the idea of looking at literacy as a liberating force for the oppressed. Freire urges us to recognize illiteracy as a material struggle embedded in a cultural/ideological struggle. In their social struggle, a “fear of freedom” (p. 36) engulfs communities that may prefer being absent, invisible, and unavailable. In order to be liberating, critical pedagogy must engage in dialogic, participatory co-creation of knowledge—a collaborative journey.

For example, while calling for a “media literacy for the oppressed,” Melki (2018) proposes the practice of critical pedagogy in a Middle Eastern context as a way for resistance to “counter fundamentalist, extremist, and radicalized rhetoric and provide alternative narratives that avoid plunging their communities back into civil strife” (p. 11). This struggle brings with it a “fear of freedom” (Freire, 1970/2005, p. 36): The oppressed are afraid to assume and exercise freedom, while the oppressors are afraid of losing the agency to oppress. For example, in India, the hijab controversy exemplifies the fear of freedom. The media routinely offer such deproblematized issues that fit media logic.

Adding to Freire, bell hooks (1994) views critical communication pedagogy as a form of sociocultural empowerment. hooks argues that pedagogy must promote, above all, well-being through empowerment. She urges teachers to be not only intellectually, but morally, emotionally, and ethically “superior.” That is the only way that a teacher can transfer education to a learner, hooks argues. Exploring new avenues of learning primarily through the experience of a diverse class of students is a form of holistic learning through inclusion of new ideas into not merely a body of knowledge, but into our lives. To hooks, engaged pedagogy is an instrument to create engagement as a tool to create knowledge that generates the practice of freedom. Participants in a group are likely to practice the new enlightenment.

hooks’s approach can be useful to a study of media literacy training. Firstly, in communities, deep-rooted practices of discrimination range from access to practices of economic or social, regional or linguistic segregation. This means learners in training may share similar identities—castes, gender, locations, and so on—and learn to decode mediated information for a greater benefit that improves their lives. On the other hand, and secondly, the vulnerability of revealing and sharing personal experiences in a public—even safe—environment is often seen as problematic. Social invisibility is common among communities that are hidden from media scrutiny. Critical communication pedagogy has the opportunity to build back the communicative action that can in turn create visibility and awareness.

In specific contexts, therefore, the practice of critical media literacy must both provide an immediate frame of reference where community members are exposed to influential texts, and offer broader understanding of media texts. These issues can be addressed in two layers. First, rather than viewing the media as an empowering and emancipator force, we can evaluate how local media-learning communities can represent, empower, and emancipate themselves by producing and owning local texts. Second, media literacy programs can be vehicles of empowerment by providing learning both in enabling technologies and in understanding influences that shape media texts.

Demystification and media literacy

As media texts visibilize and invisibilize stories, they also build or destroy contexts. From a reading of Cornel West’s (1990 / 2010) essay, we realize why contexts are important as a  liberating framework. West’s position is that the “new cultural politics of difference” historicizes, particularizes, and contextualizes. He suspects Heidegger’s deconstruction method is devoid of a social rationale, “as if [history] were a Greek tragedy [held by] fate, heritage and destiny, [rather than to] institutions and structures.” He finds Derrida’s deconstruction too much “in binary opposition,” in the sense that “the second terms” in that opposition, that is, the devalued side of the hierarchy, suffer from “political impotence” and thereby is incapable of moral “action with purpose.”  West’s vote is for demystification as “the most illuminating mode of theoretical inquiry for those who promote the cultural politics of difference [because it accentuates] “the central role of human agency” (pp. 520-521).

Another useful concern for us is West’s problem with theories that either exclude or “distrust of social analytical explanation.” The problem with the binary opposition of structure and agency is resolved by Bourdieu’s habitus. The ability of an object for illumination and visibility is important for my study because it must take the position that invisibilization is a ‘default’ action because of the factors governing visibilization, and like the subaltern, an invisible object can articulate and become visible if the motivations behind the factors were to change. For example, if the mandates of nationalism were to include “showcasing the poor rural side of our country so as to attract attention and aid,” the factors would be reversed. The other way to change the dynamics of visibility is if the media do not follow a majoritarian pattern. These possibilities call for some fluidity in the way structure and agency interact with each other. While being sufficiently warned of those trappings, it is possible to examine those binary oppositions that help us with our switch between visibility and invisibility.

This position is already useful for evaluation of texts in postcolonial settings but adding spatiality to the discourse, whereby we may examine aesthetic factors of location, landscape, and contexts. Therefore, there is an opportunity for scholarly consideration of forms of invisibilization at the hands of the very norms and technology of media production, in addition to the forms that may be a consequence of more deliberate and purposeful forms. That is, invisibilization is a consequence not of one or the other, but of a combination of conscious and unconscious factors.

I will cite two related examples of the dialectical relationship between visibilization and invisibilization. The first is the media coverage of Modi’s inauguration on  December 13, 2021 of a corridor between a temple in Varanasi and neighboring ghats (holy-dip stations for Hindus) along the Ganges. The ceremony was marked by grandeur and performances. Although this was a state-funded event, the Prime Minister made many remarks from the podium that were politically expedient—striking, as has been the leitmotif, at a Hindu-Muslim divide as he invoked the thought that “Whenever an Aurangzeb attacks, a Shivaji rises from this land” (CNBC TV18, 2021). The government-funded but independent Doordarshan network deployed as many as 55 cameras to cover this event. The CEO of Prasar Bharati, the apex broadcasting body under which Doordarshan is a unit, tweeted: “Team Doordarshan has made elaborate preparations to cover LIVE PM @narendramodi’s upcoming visit to Kashi Vishwanath Dham tomorrow with 55 cameras, 7 satellite uplink vans, drone, RF camera, jimmy jibs.”

In the second example, the day after the inauguration of the corridor in Varanasi, a Special Investigation Team (SIT) appointed by the Supreme Court of India charged a sitting union minister’s son with “well-planned conspiracy [for] premeditated murder.” Three months before, Ashish, the son of Ajay Mishra Teni, the Union Minister of State for Home (akin to the U.S. federal home secretary), allegedly ran his father’s car over farmers marching through a village road in the state of Uttar Pradesh on October 3, 2021. Both father and son firmly denied the allegations, and Union Minister Ajay Teni denied that his son was even present at the scene (Zee News, 2021). But an independent video emerged a week later, and appeared to show Teni and several others in vehicles that ran over people, killing eight people including seven farmers and a local journalist. After the Supreme Court constituted the SIT, which filed revised charges of conspiracy and murder on December 14, journalists tried to seek Ajay Teni’s reaction. A video showed Teni lunging at a journalist, abusing him and reporters at large. Ajay Teni’s position seemed further complicated after the media showed him seemingly threatening farmers at a public function, saying: “You should know what I was before I became a minister. Come out, and we will take care of you in two minutes” (NDTV India, 2021).

In both these incidents, the interplay of visibilization-invisibilization is evident. Firstly, the accessories in Modi’s event such as drone cameras and jimmy jibs help not only in better, excessive even, coverage area of an event. The news media platforms created special frames that would not normally be available to an attendee’s naked eye, and more specifically, in creating awe-inspiring spectacles that enabled hyper-visibility. In the case of the farmers’ alleged murder, there was assumed invisibility. The minister used that assumption and his access to the media to claim his son’s absence, and thereby his innocence. A video was offered as evidence of Ashish Teni’s presence at another location. Another video showed farmers surrounding the vehicles. The absence of the image as evidence of the truth emerged in the form of an independently shot video^[4]. The absence of such videos would have led to a different consequence: In the absence of visual evidence, credible witnesses’ accounts help in courts of law. Which side would have more credible witnesses in this case is a moot point—how would the court regard the testimony of a farmer as against a federal elected representative?

Absence/presence

Imagine a community that is far removed from media gaze and removed from media access. In its diametric opposition may be a community that is constantly in the glare of media lights and constantly consuming its own realities repackaged as media narratives. Most of us live between the two extremes. This varying visibility must be explored as factors of truth and reality. Firstly, visibilized and invisibilized realities may be responsible for controlling literacy and illiteracy levels. Althusser calls this the materialism of absence (Althusser, 1971). Secondly, material absence does not mean absence per se—it may mean its invisibility to our material senses. In its simplest form, absent presence has been described as a human phenomenon whereby “at times our presence may go completely unacknowledged” (Gergen, 2002). Thirdly, presence/absence is reified by visibility/invisibility. That is to say, when media visibilize an object, a community, or a reality, they in effect shine a light on something that had remained darkened, and enable their presence in the audience’s world.

One way to understand absence-presence is through visual and linguistic grammar. Writing about how suffering is rendered invisible, Herzog (2020) recognizes this practical problem. He argues that it is only possible to infer, not study, the invisible (p.153-154). So we resort to what he calls the “streetlight effect,” looking foran object where there is light, an object that is available to us for examination. If the object is unavailable, an object substitutes for it. Doing so further invisibilizes the hidden object. The streetlight thus deflects and distracts the observer’s visual attention away from objects that are hidden from it, making the object unavailable for any evaluation.

A second way to view absent presence is in ideological terms: Giroux (1997) emphasizes the need for pedagogy to recognize the absent presence of authority. He reiterates his rejection of positivism because it is “wedded to the celebration of facts and management of the ‘visible’” (p. 72). He premises his argument on his observation that the traditional education system either ignores “the significance of human agency and subjectivity” or only considers structural determinants that “lie outside of the immediate experiences of teachers, administrators, students, and other human actors” (p. 71). He argues for a reinterpretation of ideology as the construction of human agency and critique, and texts as “a process and a product” that can become the medium for critical communication pedagogy (p. 91).

The collision of information-as-truth and reality-as-truth may be viewed in terms of availability and visibility. Information that is invisibilized by the media but visible in material surroundings is both absent and present. Specifically in the case of media literacy, where mediated messages are the controlling factor, absent presence and illiteracy may be related in some ways. Visibilized and invisibilized realities correspond to absence and presence in the following ways:

1. Absent absence: Realities absent in the media and absent in an individual’s material surroundings.
2. Absent presence: Realities present in the media and absent in an individual’s material surroundings.
3. Present absence: Realities absent in the media and present in an individual’s material surroundings.
4. Present presence: Realities present in media and present in an individual’s material surroundings.

In this framework, we may argue that 1, absent absence, signifies illiteracy and 4, present presence, signifies literacy, while 2 and 3 are liminal levels of literacy/illiteracy on a scale of learning. Absent presence, as in 2, may indicate an individual’s inability to relate a text available in the media to personal realities, while present absence, as in 3, may indicate that an individual’s realities are not available in the media. Absent absence indicates unavailability and invisibility. Absent presence indicates that media-represented realities are unavailable. Present absence indicates unavailable media texts and available but unrepresented material realities.

Absence and presence here must be viewed in representations through media texts—neither some abstraction nor a mental process, but a material reality may be invisibilized, or otherwise hidden. That is to say, the absence of material presence is not the absence of material, and therefore invisibilization is not absence, but a form of absent presence. For example, as an institution that is absent in physical terms but present in influence, news media are arguably organized in larger circles of influence than communities. In countries like India and elsewhere especially in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, enormous cultural and economic disparities exist between city-centric media and the rural hinterlands where the vast majority of the population lives. In those contexts, communities and media may be mutually invisible to each other. Communities may be invisible to the media but the media may be visible to the communities. Media may be unavailable for representation, whereby communities are invisible to the majority of media audiences. Yet media texts are available to those communities.

While absence/presence and visibility/invisibility go hand-in-hand, they do not adequately address availability/unavailability, that is, whether an individual, object, or text is available. regardless of their absence or presence, articulation or silence, visibility or invisibility. Marder’s (2016) book Dust describes impressionist art as being more “interested in how landscapes, objects, and people appear than in what is to be represented of the real” (p. 95). We may illuminate an object by switching on a light bulb. By doing so, we produce its aesthetic value. This value is based on the availability of a visual to the viewer, and vice versa. Thereby, unavailability of a community to the mass media means unavailability of mediated messages to the community. This binary sets us up for the available unavailability of an individual, object, or text.

Co-creation in media literacy programs can only be contextual to nations and geographies that often live in clusters with high levels of sharing. For example, about 65 percent of Indians live in villages, which are structured with huts and houses in close proximity. There are few secrets, and families get together to group-solve one another’s problems. Yet local governance is in the hands of democratically elected panchayats. Habitually, panchayats take moralistic, mostly conservative decisions. Importantly, political decisions are often made collectively—there are instances of whole villages voting for one party. Caste and religious divides are visible. People of the same caste and religion live in clusters within a village. News consumption habits often depend on how they are represented in politics—the upper castes have conventionally voted for the ruling, majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), while the lower castes have voted for other parties.

Absence, presence, and pedagogy

Let us also consider the cultural dimension of absence/presence in terms of cultural location of a community and its tension with pedagogy. Macedo (2005) approaches critical pedagogy from his personal identity, as an immigrant who felt “culturally schizophrenic: being present and yet not visible, being visible and yet not present” (p. 11). Even without overt hierarchies, classes (and races, and castes) may often find better expressions and agency within their groups rather than between groups. But the visibility/invisibility struggle is linked both to struggles of intersectionality to the “prototypicality” of an individual’s membership in a community—a paradox of intersectionality, as Razzante, et al. (2021) call it. Further, this linkage is mutually consequential: Suppose a learner from a small village is found reading in a public building in a bigger village surrounded by noise and distraction rather than more conveniently at home. We may ask her why. Her response indicates no struggle: “Because our street doesn’t have electricity.” And why is that? “Our portion of the village is not connected so we can’t draw it.” And why is that? “Because we are dalits.” Only after we indulge in a back-and-forth probe might she begin to understand and unpack the oppression from an interlinkage of caste and poverty, and within the inner circle, of gender and familial structures.

This paradox of intersectionality may also index a complementarity in the relationship between a teacher and a learner. A media literacy training program may be delivered to a rural Indian community, but both its curricula and the very media texts they examine are formed in cities. Between the curricula-framer and their audience, there is relative ignorance—one may not fully recognize the experiences of the other. A local trainer may recognize that disparity, and in that sense, the trainer is the interpreter of meanings. Yet both the learner and the trainer enjoy and suffer individual consequences of their intersectionality. Let us now suppose that the trainer for our learner from the previous example is a Dalit man belonging to the bigger village, delivering a media literacy program to communities of women in that and neighboring villages. It is possible that the dalit learner shares similar experiences of oppression with the trainer, but may not share with him because he is a man. It is also possible that she expresses only “shared experiences” in the presence of women from the “upper” castes. Therefore, beyond issues of visibility of a community, the paradox of intersectionality is also about what and how much of sharing actually surfaces. This will remain an issue.

We must be careful not to extend the metaphor of absence and invisibility as, say, indexes of darkness, thereby of illiteracy. Indeed, it should be beyond dispute that visibility and invisibility are factors of perceived presence and absence of something—and are thus realities that are material and tangible. Giroux (1997) urges us to interpret texts as tools of emancipation—and decode, for example, how media visibilize texts by relying on the audience’s “common sense.” Yet it would be fallacious to presume that illiteracy is the reason media literacy should exist. Articulation and silence are both performative and real, both material and symbolic. Hao’s (2011) narration of his experience as a transnational student in a classroom exemplifies a self-preferred form of silence that may problematize articulation in a situation where identity is the key factor. While learners may use silence as a performance, they may exploit it as a strategy for social survival.

Conceptualizing media literacy in this framework may be helpful in exploring how it can be put to pedagogical, normative, and practical uses. Further, if media literacy should be a project of co-creation of learning, the trainer and the learner share and represent their realities to negotiate absences and presences of stories in communities and communities in stories. The trainer may approach the space from a larger media-represented world. The learner may arrive at it from their local circumstances and locus. In adopting a critical method, the trainer strategizes to move the two representations closer on their shared platform. In other words, sharing in community media literacy learning is goal-oriented, strategic, and temporary. Temporarily sharing a narrative context challenges the prescriptive model and adopts one that collaboratively moves toward an emancipated presence. Conceptualizing media literacy in this framework may be helpful in exploring how it can be put to pedagogical, normative, and practical uses. The trainer and the learner share and negotiate absences and presences of media texts and community stories. Temporarily sharing a narrative context challenges the prescriptive model and adopts one that collaboratively moves toward an emancipated presence.

Conclusion

Media literacy programs’ unproven effectiveness at community levels, perhaps beyond awareness, is an issue that confronts us. If an attitudinal change towards media texts is the desired goal, media literacy training programs at community levels seem to be a step in the right direction. Participatory programs with the help of critical communication pedagogy can be helpful in providing the necessary framework. This paper has tried to critically examine critical communication pedagogy’s application to media literacy programs, and offered participatory media literacy training as a possible model of application at community levels. If such programs at community levels can result in participatory community media, the method could pave the path to local empowerment, from an “absent absence” level of media awareness to a “present presence”—from invisibility and unawareness to visibility and awareness, and from oppression to emancipation.

Perhaps the biggest of the ethical pushbacks to this methodology of media literacy is that a visibilized-presence condition need not be regarded as the ideal position. That pushback must be acknowledged heartily. Whether communities or individuals, the right to invisibility needs consideration in our age of surveillance that is both panopticon-like and omnopticon-like. A spotlight can be thrust in our faces at any time, but a more general floodlight ensures that we are aware of a constancy in surveillance. In recognition, the transition from absence to presence must be seen as a transition in awareness. A high level of abstraction is recommended when we adopt the demystification model into a method of delivery.

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[1] Although modern literature terms Dalits as belonging to the lowest rung of the Hindu caste system, they were traditionally excluded from the caste system, treated as untouchables, and performed scavenging and other cleaning tasks. Untouchability was abolished by law in 1955.

[2] Nick Couldry’s terms. See Couldry (2010).

[3] WhatsApp is a smart phone application owned by Meta, which also owns popular social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. WhatsApp has become highly popular among users in India. It allows people to organize themselves into “groups” managed by administrators. WhatsApp groups are frequently accused of spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories (Chauchard, 2021). Thousands of WhatsApp groups routinely campaign during elections for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and routinely for its ideological parent, the extreme-right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). WhatsApp officials are themselves “concerned” about rampant hate speech, threats of violence, and false statements  (Goel, 2018). This closed, peer-to-peer app is unmonitored and fully encrypted, and is both more insidious (Goel, 2018) and more trusted (Nanjundaiah, 2018) than its counterparts like Facebook, whose texts are open to the public.

[4] See video embed in the article: Mirror Now (2021).