Democracy 2.0, Old and New Media, and the Quest for Engaged Participation

It is virtually impossible to imagine a society or world that is not already (re) presented through media forms. The popular imaginary/imagination is already inhabited by pre-packaged soundbites of common-sense wisdom derived from hegemonic sources, and the mainstream corporate media has long skillfully demonstrated its ability to incorporate, coopt and sublimate yesterday’s radical or alternative ideas into today’s slogans and products. Nonetheless, we have witnessed over the last decade a profound transformation in who shapes the media and how it is shaped. The emergence and consolidation of Web 2.0 has irrevocably transformed a number of media functions, particularly in relation to news reporting, advertising and music and film production, and it has opened and created spaces where anyone with a cell-phone, a computer and Internet access can, potentially, become a global change-maker (Fuchs, 2017). Activist media in the era of digital citizen participation has flourished, sometimes resulting in profound new alliances and social change, though often transforming into superficial forms of “clicktivism” that are feel-good but relatively ineffectual forms of social activism. With the exponential growth in technological platforms and social media, the need to understand, contextualize, and problematize the meaning of the media in and through Education, especially as it relates to democracy, is increasingly necessary (Ranson, 2017). The focus of our presentation involves this intertwined nexus of activity and inter-change, linking together media, democracy and education in their diverse, contested, nuanced and paradoxical forms. Democracy makes less and less sense to us without a thorough interrogation of how our sense of power, social justice, political literacy, transformative change and inequitable power relations pass through the sieve of the media, notably contemporary, internet-based, communicative forms of media. Democracy requires a functioning, engaged and literate populace, one that can participate and shape, in meaningful and critical ways, the discourses and forms of the society in which it exists (McChesney & Nichols, 2016). Education for democracy, therefore, requires not only political literacy but also media literacy, given the immersive ubiquity of media and their prolific consumption and use by students and citizens of all ages today. Media literacy combines the analysis of media texts, institutions, audiences and contexts, on the one hand, with the theory and hands-on production of media material on the other