What You See is What You Get: Invisibility, Spectacle and Media Literacy in the Age of Digital Media

Media literacy’s conceptualisations have largely been Western. Media literacy can be reimagined to adopt a community awareness role, especially in societies where access to digital discourse is compounded by social hierarchies. Media literacy endeavours to help media audiences detect misinformation from media and non-media sources and understand the multiplicity of media-disseminated realities. Meanwhile, the Covid-19 pandemic of the early 2020s accelerated the use of virtual interfaces in media literacy training programmes for communities. Learners are asked to scour the information landscape to verify, trust available texts on mainstream media, and in general consume and disseminate responsibly. ‘Mainstream’ media thrives on the virality of digital discourse. This fluid discursive interface between social media and mainstream media is problematic for media literacy’s efforts in creating rubrics users can follow in sifting information from misinformation. Digital discourse can appropriate what the mainstream news media may leave in visibilised: For example, one of the refrains among politically active WhatsApp groups that discredit mainstream media is that they hide truths and over represent minorities, or the converse. These are issues of absence, invisibility and unavailability of texts and communities. This chapter identifies media literacy’s limitations in addressing these issues. It debates whether media literacy can resolve these contradictions between digital and mainstream media. A model that can be further developed into an operational framework is warranted, and this chapter offers one.