Medi@education 2.21: A Global Positioning System for Human Rights

Edward
T. Hall proposed an analysis of cultures in which he suggested that
they could be set on a continuum between high context and low context
cultures. High context cultures function through implicit
communication: they assume that information is internalized by their
members through time and participation in social activities. They tend
to rely heavily on  schools and communities. Low context cultures develop explicit forms of communication:  information
is externalized in the coded messages that need to be transmitted via
performance and spectacle. 

They tend to rely heavily on media and
individual members’self-representation and expression. High context
cultures tend to be homogeneous, with low immigration levels, whereas
low context cultures are heterogeneous, with high immigration levels.

In
today’s European context, with ever expanding territories and lowered
barriers of entrance, Hall’s framework needs to be revisited: European
cultures are all becoming low context, because of enormous immigration
flows … and also because of enormous cross-border, intrusive media and
ICTs. The need for explicit forms of communication is being felt as
heterogeneous populations, with various historical backgrounds, migrate
and immigrate in diasporic online and offline flows.  The
need for explicitness is especially true for human rights as the body
of values promoted by the European Community. Human rights are like a
Global Positioning System for European people, but they are abstract
and difficult to internalize as such. They are not taught through time
and participatory activities. The historical events that brought them
about are waning and the generation who developed them is
disappearing,—their live memories significant only for a smaller and
smaller amount of European citizens. The younger ones, either coming
from immigration or from the territory itself, are illiterate about
their meaning and their value.  Human
rights need to be made explicit again, with the strategies of high and
low cultures within our nations, with a combination of school and
media, via communities and individuals alike. There is a need for a
global repositioning of values in our days of connectivity, —an
explicitly technical word, that means nothing without a human sense of
connectedness. Media education and human rights are about
connectedness. Hence, it is essential to identify some of the major
disconnects that undermine them.  

I. Making media education explicit

What
is most striking at the moment, when cursorily contemplating the
European landscape, is the amount of disconnects that appear. This is
most obvious when it comes to defining the various dimensions of media
and education. However, while considering the depth of the divides, it
is also necessary to look at the seams, at what these dimensions have
in common, taking what they don’t have in common as complementary forms
of learning.  There is a significant disconnect between media culture and school culture, with a curious reversal of objectives over time.  Back
to ground zero, media culture originally was about enlightened
citizenship (leading to opinion formation and voting) but it has
increasingly been dealing with commercial, service-oriented needs.
School culture originally was about producing a literate workforce in
the industrial and commercial age (away from farming) but it is more
and more construed as the last space where markets don’t penetrate.
What they have in common is the capacity for the transmission of values
and attitudes, as well as a tradition for the protection of minors,
usually implicit in their respective missions,—a characteristic of
high-context cultures.  There
is a significant disconnect between media and ICTs (including the new
communication services). Traditional media, especially broadcasting,
are framed within national policies in which they convey
representations, news and local entertainment. New media are mostly
international telecommunications platforms, for connexion, for
diffusion and for knowledge economies.  As such they enter
in competition with the schools as the industry provides more and more
material for learning and opportunities for tutorials and scholastic
activities, to the point that the inductive method, a long-standing
pedagogical strategy, is now attached to ICTs, as if learning was
technology-bound and not human-bound.  Additionally, the
discourse around ICTs carries an ideology that is injunctive,
performative, explicit,—in other words, low context.  The
use of ICTs is presented as the solution to all educational and
societal troubles: they will provide autonomy, socialization, even
European integration, to all children. What they have in common is that
digital convergence is bringing old and new media together on the
social networks and multimedia platforms. Also they are both subject to
spatial changes as schools and media institutions are increasingly
interacting, while the home is becoming an alternative locus of
leisure, learning and labour. They also both provide valid and valuable
options for lifelong learning and for long distance education.   

There
is a significant disconnect between media education and ICT education.
Media education tends to be content-oriented, with a determined strand
of critical thinking attached to it. ICT education tends to be process-
and project-oriented. Besides, it tends to be done via ICTs, which can
introduce a confusion with ICT use, whereby utilisation is equated with  education.
Additionally, media education tends to be done in a variety of subject
areas, whereas ICT education tends to be treated as a separate course
in the curriculum, often emphasizing the difference between arts and
sciences. Along the same lines, media education tends to be related to
implicit cultural objectives while ICT education is related to explicit
economic ones. Media education thus tends to be high context, while ICT
education tends to be low context. The stigma of high-brow, low-brow
cultural divides can hence be attached to any of the two, according to
the European country considered (high brow is not a stigma in France,
whereas it is in the UK, for instance).  What they have in
common is the need for structured pedagogical theories and
methodologies, the need for real visibility in curricula, inside and
outside schools, the need for their complementarities to be made
explicit in a complex world. Arguably, they also need to be clearly
united under a common umbrella word, that doesn’t set them in stale
binary oppositions. Such words as “sustainable education” or
“u-literacy” (in reference to u-biquitous networks and mobile
telephony) have been suggested. “medi@education 2.21” refers to the fact that old and new media are digitizing and allowing for yet unsuspected forms of education in the 21st[1]   century, owing to coming generations of web 2.0, 2.1, 2.2,…

So,
establishing connectedness implies a number of positive actions and the
abolition of antiquated binary oppositions to accommodate for today’s
complexity. This can be done within complexity theory, together with
the support of cognitive sciences as applied to media. Seaming the
ridges of the divide supposes a variety of explicit activities: -Creating a continuum between media, old and new media, high tech and low tech ones alike;-Adjusting the cursor between high and low context cultures, and high-brow and low-brow attitudes and values;-Accepting the idea that there can be many literacies, old and new, within an all-encompassing media education framework;-Spelling
out the complementarities between media education and ICT education,
and adjusting incrementally the skills and competences required for
both;-Using convergence to stress diversity and plurality;-Referring
to the “Paris agenda,” itself an outcome of an international
consultation of experts conducted jointly by Unesco and the Council of
Europe, in June 2007, as an empowering tool that proposes a definition
of media education by scope, by skills and practices and by objectives
in its very first recommendation: “Media
education applies to all media whatever their nature and the
technologies used. (….) These changes enrich media education practices
with new skills, regarding information, knowledge and interactive
communication., including the social, legal and ethical dimensions
involved. (…) The main objectives are: to give access to all kinds of
media that are potential tools to understand society and to participate
in democratic life; to develop skills fro the critical analysis of
messages, whether in news or entertainment, in order to strengthen the
capacities of autonomous individuals and active users; to encourage
production, creativity and interactivity in the different fields of
media communication”.  

The
next two recommendations stress the link between media education,
cultural diversity and respect for human rights as well as the need to
define basic skills and evaluation systems. Such a document, added to
the European Convention on Human Rights and a number of recommendations
by the Council of Europe on young people’s empowerment in cyberspace
and public service in information society, provide a political and
legal compass to guide our steps when elaborating media education
frameworks in relation to human rights. 

 II. Explicitly connecting media education to human rights 

Education
to human rights exists in various forms, but it is not often connected
to media and even less to media education, except where freedom of
expression is concerned.[2]  Human
rights tend also to be disconnected from children’s rights and it is
not always clear which version of the human rights doctrine or
principles people are referring to (the Universal Declaration, the
European Convention,…?).  No
research has been conducted on the connection between media education
and human rights education, so this cursory presentation is based on a
rapid overview of existing manuals and recent research done about media
uses in Europe.[3]
There is an urgent need for research in this specific area, as media
education, to be considered seriously by decision-makers and experts
alike, needs to be research-based. Some in-depth studies should be done
on children and their awareness of human rights, taking into account
their age differences as they will not perceive rights in the same way
if they are below 8 (the least studied group) or between 12 and 17 (the
most studied group).  

There
is a significant gap in the frequency of topics dealt with in media use
and media education. The least frequent topics mentioned are: civic
involvement, interpretation and evaluation of content, content creation
(as a form of freedom of expression and a means of identity
construction) and certain kinds of search, as search for fun
predominates by far search for advice, for help, for information on
rights. These topics relate to issues closely connected to media
education tenets on creativity and participation. Such tenets have a
strong relation to human rights education and their weakness is
preoccupying. There
is a significant gap in the treatment of exposure to risk and to
harmful content (online and offline). If contact and context risks are
fairly well identified (sexual, violent, racist materials in such
spaces as chat-rooms, online games, etc.), it is less the case with
commercial risk (manipulation by product placement, cookies, …) and
risks related to user-generated content (hazing, damaging reputation or
privacy of others, damaging one’s self-image, …). The least identified
of all risks seems to be the risks to privacy (hacking, physing,
personal data gathering for commercial use, traceable identity and
identity checks, …), as it is offset by the quasi monopoly of freedom
of expression, turned into a permissive mantra and emptied of most of
its meaning (permissivity is good for business). Often the perspective
of the child is neglected, in his/her own perception of risk (bullying,  abuse, spam, exposure to challenging content such as suicide, anorexia/bulimia, drugs, addictive practices,…). 

These are  all
issues closely related to media education, in its tenets about critical
thinking and self-protection from such contents. Such tenets also tend
to have a strong connection, if not the strongest, to human rights, as
they can refer to issues such as intolerance, hatred, loss of dignity,
…  There
is a significant gap in the conception of the role of the various
care-takers (parents, educators, media professionals, …). Very little
is known about children’s relation to regulation (in contrast with
their parents), about the effectiveness of safety measures and
practices (such as filtering, ranking, black-listing, peer-to-peer
monitoring, …), about the position of the industry (beyond its
self-regulatory stance). The parents’ role in effective education to
risk and to rights is not well evaluated, and neither is the teachers’
part in promoting awareness of risk and solutions for safety.   The
consequences of online access to real life activities and learning are
also a blind spot, that is detrimental to the development of coherent
policies, as decision-makers will protect themselves under the lack of
data to continue paying lip-service to media education and human rights
without further ado.  

So,
bridging the gaps implies a number of positive actions, that can also
use complexity theory, together with the support of cognitive sciences
as applied to media and to human rights: -Creating a continuum among rights, children’s and adult’s;-Expliciting
under-represented human rights: to integrity, to dignity, to privacy,
to protection of minors, and connecting them to information and
communication rights, like freedom of expression, self-image,
intellectual property, …;-Training
to exercise these rights on-line and off-line, by developing the
implicit and by being creatively explicit (using symbols, icons,
indexes, …);-Raising
awareness about human responsibilities as media and communication
services increase the roles people play in society, be it in online
networks or offline communities, as they can be in turn consumers,
users, citizens, players and designers;   -Eliminating the risk that media literacy be equated solely to safety awareness and risk avoidance;  -Avoiding the risk that media education be the commercial instrumentalization of trust…;-Distinguishing the high and low contexts of cultures from the open and hidden agendas of the various actors concerned.    At
the end of such a process of clarification, of elucidation, the reward
is full empowerment, as universal, abstract concepts can be endorsed
and appropriated individually, in connection to real life activities
and practices. Such a process presents the additional advantage of
maintaining the  “plasticity” of human rights, so that they don’t turn into a rigid doctrine or a stale ideology, —the most lethal risk of all! NB: this text is the General Rapporteur’s speech, for the Council
of Europe workshop, “Media Literacy and Human Rights: Education for
Sustainable Democratic Societies” held jointly by the Division “European dimension of education” and the “Media and Information Society” Division, Graz, Austria, 5-7 December 2007. Copyright Council of Europe.