Abstract
In twenty-five years of teaching theory to graduate students, it has been challenging to find materials that comfortably fit between the undergraduate and doctoral levels of instruction. Although I have advised thirty-one successful MA theses in those years, every textbook adopted for class seemed too simple or overly complex. My colleagues tend to agree that McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory 1 has good coverage, but it is very challenging for beginning graduate students. While the readings spark questions and good conversation, they also generate frustration and doubt.
I think McQuail’s structure and seminal discussion about normative and social science theories are more valuable than the full text for our foundation seminar. Another expensive option is Communication Yearbook 37, 2 which offers thirteen refreshing studies that advance theories on communication networks, communication models, engagement, entertainment, selective exposure, video game effects, and children and media.
For the foundations of our field, it is difficult to do better than the classic readings in The Process and Effects of Mass Communication. 3 Here we find the great names: DeFleur, Lasswell, McLuhan, Boorstin, Kurt and Gladys Lang, Lippmann, Hovland, Schramm, Cooley, Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and others. Another look at ideas from a half-century ago leads me to wonder where the depth and breadth can be found that will motivate the next generation of scholars. This semester in the classroom, I will collaborate with graduate students on curating and examining current significant studies, much as the late Vernon Stone did with my peers more than a quarter-century ago.
A group of smaller, focused books may be the best approach for offering students context on how to read the research. One interesting option is Media Literacy and the Emerging Citizen: Youth, Engagement and Participation in Digital Culture. Paul Mihailidis, an assistant professor in the School of Communication at Emerson College, offers a book extending earlier media literacy scholarship.
Digital media culture, value, and civil life provide a framework for exploring large questions. His “emerging citizen” conceptualizes the work of Schudson, Bennett, and Dalton: The emerging citizen has integrated digital media culture fully into her life and understands public involvement not primarily by duties (taxes, voting, military service) but equally by engagement (expression, activism, sharing, dialog). These new voices are facilitated largely through digital media, where interactive platforms and social tools are largely replacing traditional avenues for information and communication needs. (pp. 5-6)
The media literacy framework that focuses on authorship, format, audience, content, and purpose (p. 35) is an arc that also brings us back around to fundamental theory. Using Jenkins’s core skills, Mihailidis offers the reader more key concepts: play, performance, simulation, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, and negotiation (p. 38). Graduate students could be assigned the task of finding current theories and research that touch these points.
Mihailidis’s framework views the interaction of citizen and media as happening within a context of mobile platforms, participatory tools, and “spreadability” (p. 46). Much as early persuasion theory identified, crowds are important—especially when they spark “activism” (p. 56). Mihailidis identifies five “competencies” for a media literate crowd: curate, critique, create, collaborate, and contribute (p. 61). An Access → Awareness → Assessment → Appreciation → Action → continuum (p. 129) is most valuable for the connection it makes between awareness and values, ideologies, representations, and context (p. 132). Among the book’s five appendices, readers will find campaigns (such as Kickstarter), a study methodology, a survey instrument, small group discussion protocol, and a syllabus excerpt. Its media literacy emphasis is most apparent at the end of the book with a quotation from John Dewey on democracy and education.
Education in the twenty-first century is an increasingly complex navigation of technology, tools, and pedagogy. As José Antonio Bowen suggests, increased competition demands focus on values, learning outcomes, and critical thinking: “It is at best a paradox, at worst appalling, that although we say we want to develop critical thinking skills, we structure most of higher education around delivery and content.” 4 In the area of graduate media theory, we must fight the temptation to allow technological advancement to distract us from critically managing and thinking about how to best discuss and learn theory.
When Schramm and Roberts updated the original 1954 book in 1971, they decided to keep classic research for practical and other reasons: “most of the new research has advanced knowledge an inch at a time along previously set paths, and it is not always easy to find recent articles with the breadth and depth of some of the older ones.” 5 This may be even more the case today. Competition between “classical” mass communication theory and Mihailidis’s models offers an instructor the opportunity to enlighten graduate students through critical thinking and lively contemporary discussion.