media literacy in social media

Look forward: listening as new media literacy

New media connects as well as empowers individuals，which has the potential to fundamentally change organizations and the way individuals cooperate and communicate. It is a shift from the linking of information to the linking of people (Wesch, 2007). New technologies mandate us to open up and rethink what constitutes literacy (Goggin, 2008). Listening, as a skill has been added by some scholars to expand the notion of media literacy in online realm (Iandoli, Klein, and Zolla 2009; Klein 2007; Klein et al. 2006).

As the new media develops into a world of creation (Livingstone, 2004), the massive user generated contents require massive audiences. Generally, audiences are assumed to exist and to listen (Macnamara, 2012). However, unlike public speaking to physically assembled groups of people, media audiences cannot be seen or heard by speakers. Anderson (1991) suggests that they are “imagined communities”.

In the “first media age” as Poster (1995) put it, media was strictly controlled by monopolies and oligopolies, for the expensive and often patented technologies of production and distribution as well as the strict regulatory environment including licensing. For instance, Anderson (2006, 29) reported that, in 1954, 74% of Americans clustered around TV sets to watch “I Love Lucy” every Sunday night. By the end of the twentieth century, as Bagdikian (2004) reported, five corporations – Time Warner, Disney, News Corporation, Viacom and Bertelsmann – dominated the output of daily newspapers and magazines, broadcasting, books and movies worldwide, reaching ‘audiences’ totaling billions.

While Dewey, Williams and others were correct in challenging mass audiences as stable groups of liste...

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...ens’ inputs is imperative, or “there will be more public participation in government but it will count for less”. Couldry (2008b, 16) concluded that “the real issue about the . . . long-term decline in engagement in formal electoral politics in the UK and elsewhere . . . was not so much a ‘motivation crisis’ on the part of citizens . . . the real issue was a ‘recognition crisis’”.

To matter, voice must as a corollary have someone (an audience) who listens – that is, really listens as defined in the literature. In a democratic world, it is crucial for government to listen, but citizens as well should learn to listen to each other, instead of living in a fantasy with imagined audience creating chaos with their ears shut. Consequently, listening as new media literacy is called for, which stresses expressing as well as receiving, thus making it a real communication.