Free Human Kindness: How ASMR Is Helping Us Survive the Pandemic, Clinical Depression and America's Culture Wars(Part Two)

To read the rest, see part one and part three.

You’ve already said several times here that a majority of the community leaders are women. This has to do with notions of attractiveness and sexiness to be sure, but we’ve also talked about the strong maternal roles these women play in the life of their followers. That they are traditionally attractive gets men to look once. It may even offer some thrill given these women are getting close to the camera, whispering, and otherwise creating a dynamic we associate with more intimate relations, but the maternal nurturing would seem to be what sustains these relationships.  

Since these are complex and personal subjects I just want to say up front: Most of my thoughts on this are based on my close observations and experiences as a viewer. You’re interviewing me as a fan, but an artist might well describe their own work differently.   

 When I was little my mother used to rub my back, ruffle my hair, cuddle me and speak to me in soft voices. Those experiences filled me with a deep sense of well-being. I felt very safe and protected. I did less of that with you, dad – probably because society tries very hard to make men feel self-conscious being affectionate with one another – so I associate those feelings specifically with feminine nurturing. We, as adults, possess “inner children” - versions of ourselves which haven’t really aged that much since our early years, but which we’re usually forced to hide away from the adult world for protection. It can be very healing when we’re able to trust someone enough to let them care for our inner children or play with our inner children. 

 I’ll never forget a video Frivolous Fox made where she sang “You Are My Sunshine”. I started sobbing, because my mother used to sing that song to me when she was about that same age, and I felt like Frivvi had captured that moment in a bottle for me, allowing me to have it back.  

 On her Twitch channel, Cutscene Cutie often hums vintage Disney songs and it always makes my heart soar, because she has such a beautiful voice, and because I watched those animated films when I was little. Scottish Murmurs loves to play the ‘Dot Dot, Line Line’ game with viewers, because it was something her mom always did with her when she was a child. Gibi has a wonderful series where she plays with children’s books and puzzles. Several artists I like have made videos where they play school nurses who check you for lice, grade school teachers who help you make arts and crafts for your parents, or moms who tuck you into bed. The White Rabbit roleplays as an Italian grandmother named Nonna and knits you a scarf. 

 At the same time, different people need other kinds of therapeutic experiences. Some artists offer snuggling videos where they pretend to be your girlfriend and to lie next to you while you go to sleep. Or they pretend to be your wife and they comfort you after you had a bad day at work. I think someone could definitely watch a movie like Blade Runner 2049 or Her which deals with the romance between a man and artificial intelligence and they could view this as a disturbing trend. If you can just get your needs met without confronting the complexities of real human relationships then not only will you be alone, but someone else will be alone who you could have had a relationship with. Switzerland’s Gina Carla has a video where she just repeats, “I love you, I love you, I love you” for several minutes, and by the end of it she’s crying because she’s thinking about the people out there who need to hear that. I just feel that many people have been so damaged by friends and partners who recklessly hurt their feelings that they need to see healthy relationships modeled, and get a sense of what they feel like, before they’ll be prepared to risk looking for them again.

As we look at these women, they often express ideals we might associate with feminism -- from self-empowerment to notions of consent, from queer positivity to a rejection of body and slut shaming. So, tell us more about how the genre facilitates those messages. 

 My favorite ASMR video of all time, because of its potential to transcend entertainment and help people, is Goodnight Moon’s “Can I Touch Your Face?” She demonstrates that asking for consent doesn’t have to be uncomfortable. If you bring a different energy to it, it can be playful, intimate and inviting. Instead of just opening you up for rejection it can be an empowering affirmation of what you want. By making it about something that’s very personal but not sexual she keeps it from coming across as dirty. I wish that sex education students would watch it because if they learned from her they’d probably develop some healthy practices and outlooks. 

I’d hope many of the artists feel empowered by their work. But, one of the most powerful and deeply personal stories I’ve heard comes from FrivolousFox (Lauren). This one is difficult for me to write about, and I can’t imagine how difficult it was for her to tell. It’s the very rare ASMR video that isn’t relaxing, but if anything speaks to the heart of what the art movement is about, it’s this. 

In high school Lauren was a deeply insecure tomboy from a small-town religious upbringing. She fell in love with a girl, which caused her to feel ashamed, and caused her family to stop supporting her. She pursued the relationship in secret for several years, even after the other girl’s mom sent her to a school in another state. In college Lauren got a car so that she could see her girlfriend whenever she wanted. They went on a road trip. They were clowning around and Lauren got into a car wreck. The car somersaulted and landed on the other side of the highway. Her girlfriend was in a coma for 33 days and when she woke up she was mute and had to relearn everything from scratch. She’s still very limited in what she can do. Lauren wasn’t allowed to see her for five years and had to find a way to process the unbearable regret that she felt. She has dealt with severe emotional problems ever since, but ASMR has given her a way to try to comfort other people who are in pain. She’s probably the most outspoken ASMRtist I know about mental health issues and she’s one of several LGBTQ+ artists who have made videos with queer positive themes, such as roleplays around gay crushes, or ones which offer you words of acceptance.  

I think originally ASMR was, overall, a relatively white group, albeit one which had a lot of diversity in life experience. At the same time, YouTube has such a low barrier for entry that you don’t need to be in Hollywood to make it. You don’t need to be recognized by an agent or a producer. All kinds of people from around the world have been able to add their authentic voices to the culture. There have long been a few icons heavily visible within the space, such as MattyTingles, who was born in South Korea, BoHime Chella, who is of Portugese descent, ASMR Glow, who’s of Israeli and Moroccan descent, and Angelica, RaffyTaphy and The ASMR Ryan, who are Latinx. There have also been Caucasians from countries around the world such as Scottish Undertones, Tinglesmith and WhispersRed, who are British, Gentle Whispers and Palagea, who are Russian, Gina Carla, who is Swiss, and MassageASMR, who is Australian. Over the past few years I have become aware of an ever-wider range of Black voices entering the space, including the aforementioned BoHime Chella, Batala, April’s ASMR, Annura’s ASMR and JayYoung. In many cases my awareness is honestly the operative phrase, because they had been around. In other cases, it’s because our circle of friends has grown exponentially.  

 There are also a whole world of artists like Latte, ASMR PPOMO, SAS-ASMR, Devya Gurjar, KittyKlaw and Petit Sucre Blau who largely or exclusively speak languages other than English. PPOMO and SAS have two of the five largest channels in the world. Honestly, I really enjoy the languages and accents. But apart from just representation, each of these people brings elements of their cultures to their videos. If I’ve misdescribed anyone’s identity, please let me know and I’ll be happy to edit it. Since singling any one culture out with a video example goes against the spirit of what I’m saying I’ll use a playlist again. 

Honestly, it’s easy to get comfortable with a group of favorite artists and never become as familiar with others, even though they’re just as good. There are so many creators out there that it can be easy for busy people to just feel overwhelmed. But when you do take the time to sample artists it can be really rewarding. I’d love to read a similar personal essay written by someone who primarily watches an entirely different group of creators.

I think you have now given us enough of a core understanding of this community, its values, and its leadership structure that we can start to make sense of the role ASMR was playing for people during the Pandemic. So, share a bit more about the ways that these videos focused on self-care and community well-being helped people -- especially those struggling with depression and anxiety -- make it through this incredibly difficult time. How did these performers -- of all races and nationalities, as you note -- embrace new responsibilities for their community? And what did this mean for their followers?

To be honest, the first time I saw a COVID mask in an ASMR video I felt uneasy. I liked it even less when one artist called out another for failing to use her platform to promote Black Lives Matter, and the criticized person received a flood of hateful Twitter DMs, including threats to her children’s safety. She was left visibly frightened and crying. “I make relaxation videos to help people sleep,” she said. As 2020 went by some artists had to step away because their own mental health had collapsed. My clinical depression and anxiety had reached an all-time high and I was mainlining hours of relaxation videos every day, trying to stay fucking calm. Seeing the ASMR community become more like the rest of the world was not helping my confidence that everything was going to turn out alright. 

 A number of ASMR Twitch streamers held 24 hour telethons for a variety of charitable causes. I expected their donors to dry up after the first few hours. A lot of ASMR viewers are young, with very little economic opportunity, especially during a pandemic and record layoffs. But I’d wake up at 4am and check back in and the gifts would still be rolling in. Frivolous Fox regularly used her Twitch channel to go on hours-long, life affirming rambles about topics like empathy and forgiveness. She’d probably be embarrassed by this description, but it was almost like watching a 27 year old pastor deliver sermons for secular Millennial audiences. 

Here is a video where “Doctor” Darling tests you for COVID, debunking misinformation in the process, which captures both the insomnia-producing anxieties and the desire to help during this moment,

We got through it. By the Fall of 2020 I had developed curiosity about what COVID masks my favorite artists were wearing and seen a very welcome increase in the amount of content they were putting out each week. By the Spring of 2021 I had lost interest in their masks and I felt glad for those who were able to go on well-deserved vacations or visit with each other in person. The in-fighting had calmed down to a whisper. The videos were largely indistinguishable from those which had come before the pandemic, except that there were more artists. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of the ranks thin out, both on the supply and demand sides, as people place a renewed value on face-to-face relationships. My consumption has decreased a little, because I’ve been busy and my mental health has been pretty good.  

 I’ll remember, though, that throughout it all, despite and because of their humanity, most of the steadfast helpers stayed on the ship, seemingly ready to go down with it if necessary. I know their work was sometimes exhausting to them, but it gave them a way to help people from the safety of their homes, without spreading the disease. I love them for who they are. 

Charlie Jenkins is a novelist and transmedia consultant. His upcoming debut novel, American Wrestling 1989, is a melodrama which explore cultural conflicts in the world of 1980s professional wrestling and the ways that broken and discarded people can either heal or hurt one another as they endure their own personal tragedies. He was previously the Creative Director of Chaotic Good Studios and Research Director for The Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Company, serving clients like NBC, The CW, Blizzard Entertainment and BaseFX.

Free Human Kindness: How ASMR Is Helping Us Survive the Pandemic, Clinical Depression and America's Culture Wars(Part One)

Throughout 2020 my adult son Charlie and I were locked down together in our Los Angeles apartment, so we necessarily got absorbed much more deeply into each other’s lives than we had in a long time. Perhaps what interested me the most was his engagement with the ASMR community. I learned about the social and emotional support work that YouTube creators and Twitch streamers were leading in their communities during the pandemic. These self-care and community support practices were built into the ASMR ethos. The subculture itself is somewhat guarded against press, because the media has portrayed its videos as strange and inexplicable. I’ve tried to get some leading ASMR influencers to appear on my podcast without luck (The invitation still stands if you are reading this). So, I wanted to get my son to share some of his own reflections as a participant-observer. 

Because this community is little known to outsiders, I wanted to have you start with a basic explanation which we can deepen over time. What is ASMR? How might you characterize the ASMR subculture? What kinds of content does it produce and why?

ASMR is an art movement, an aesthetic, a culture and even a philosophy. Streamers and YouTubers produce videos which are often designed to convey a sense of relaxation, kindness, fellowship and a greater appreciation for life's small pleasures. The videos can also be quite whimsical, and often they revel in absolutely trivial subjects. Welcoming people from all walks of life is a foundational principle, but that's usually accompanied by an underlying sense of unity and togetherness. ASMR is, in short, the anti-Twitter. There's so much important, hard work that needs to be done in our society, so many difficult subjects we need to talk about, and service to others is an important part of a balanced life. But if you become so damaged by the toxicity of our world that you develop serious mental health problems, you're not going to be in an effective place to help anyone. You're going to need other people to invest a lot of their energy in helping you. In times like those you look for the helpers, and ASMRtists are there with an endless supply of wholesomeness and love. 

Nothing beats real world, face-to-face companionship, but as the pandemic has shown us that isn’t always an option. When I discovered ASMR I was living in a small Louisiana town where I didn’t know even one person who I could call up to go for a beer. I tried and tried to make “real” friends but felt rejected. I’ve spent long parts of my adulthood without much money to socialize, and without much social status or confidence, partly as a result of clinical depression. I’m not alone in those regards. 

You can consume platforms like YouTube as a series of disjointed clickbait. You can also flip through the TV dial, watching things at random. Alternatively, you can choose a favorite serial drama and watch it for ten seasons. YouTubers and streamers may never become your real life friends, but when you watch them and talk to them regularly they also stop being strangers. They offer steadfast daily companionship to those who are love-poor. You can listen to them ramble about their days and it will make a trip to the laundromat go by faster. Often ASMR videos are the last thing I watch before I fall asleep, because they clear my mind of worries. If porn imperfectly meets your sexual needs, they imperfectly meet your social needs. In an ideal world, all of us would have so much healthy human contact we wouldn’t need to look for it online, but humanity has never been that way. Isolated farmers and social outcasts of previous generations simply sat alone in the dark. I think this is better. I’ve even found that some of the positive social skills modeled in ASMR can be learned. Consuming enough free digital kindness can offer you the courage to look for someone who wants to hear you prattle on about your day.

Many people believe that ASMR videos just involve people blowing on wind chimes or licking microphones. Those popular media images of ASMR reduce the genre to a postage stamp sized simplification, which is not entirely inaccurate, but far from complete. If there's one formal convention shared by all ASMR content it is calming sounds. If there’s a second, it’s how slow videos often are, forcing you to stop rushing around, flitting from one thing to the next, and be calm. It's yoga without the exercise. Words are spoken in soft tones or whispers.  

Often Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting is cited as the inspiration point for ASMR because of the host’s calm, soft-spoken demeaner and eternal optimism. But, I think Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is an equally significant predecessor. Most of the ASMRtists are of an age where they developed as children listening to his messages of love and peace. The way he directly addresses the audience throughout each episode and shares his hobbies and interests with them feels very much like ASMR.

If I could get people to watch one video which captures ASMR’s aesthetic it would be one of Goodnight Moon’s travelogues. When I’ve recorded vacation footage the sound has been choppy and the camera work has been disorienting. She creates these contemplative little wanders full of slow, smooth shots, curated atmospheric sounds and whispered narration. 

(Goodnight Moon is one of my absolute favorites, so I’m going to reference her a lot)

ASMR is a broad category. Any video where the filmmaker speaks softly or makes soothing with the intention of relaxing you is an ASMR video. Generally speaking the highest rated ASMR in America and Western Europe are whisper rambles, where the artist chats with the camera about subjects which interest them. For example, BlueWhispers sometimes flips through the new seed catalogues, telling you about the plants she likes to plant in her garden; Russian-born Gentle Whispering often teaches us professional insights about what fashions and accessories will flatter you; former rapper MattyTingles loves shoes and makes a lot of videos where he and his friends share their favorite pairs.

 The western world also loves roleplay videos, where the artist portrays a fictional role and monologues for the camera. Sometimes that means portraying a particular profession. In one video the Chris Hemsworth-esque FredsVoice, who has a fantastic British accent, portrays a professional photographer and pretends to have you pose for a modeling shoot; in another video, WhispersRed replicates the familiar sounds and small talk of an English barber shop. Other times artists cosplay as their favorite media characters and act out original scenes. Glow is a Star Wars nerd, so she dressed up as Darth Maul and pretended to hold you as her prisoner. A group of European artists collaborated on a richly-ornamented interpretation of A Christmas Carol for the holidays one year. Still other times artists create original characters. Goodnight Moon has an entire Medieval fantasy world called Babblebrook where she plays all of the different people in town and plays out storylines between them. Gibi, currently the most-followed English language ASMRtist, is the queen of all kinds of roleplays. My favorite of her creations is Tatyana, your Eastern European personal assistant, who measures you for wax figures and helps you to buy private islands. If you look at Japanese and Korean ASMR, or ACMP (Russian ASMR), or ASMR porn, those are different worlds. There are different trends in each. 

 Note that in most whisper ramble and roleplay videos the artist directly addresses you, the audience, and pretends as though you’re actually in the room with them, even asking you questions and pausing for you to answer. (You can answer in your head, or not at all, if you feel silly playing along at home.) Their goal is to make you feel like someone is paying attention to you in a friendly way and treating you the way you deserve to be treated. But occasionally artists turn the dynamic on its head, clownishly portraying rude and disruptive characters in order to make you laugh. 

Here is a playlist with all of the aforementioned examples. Once someone figures out what types of videos they most enjoy it’s easy to find variations on a theme. 

ASMR is named after a cool scientific phenomenon which I first noticed in childhood, long before I had any idea what it was called. Every once in a while I'd hear a sound like the howling of wind through the trees or the crunching of autumn leaves that gave me a pleasant little shiver. Sometimes when people would touch the back of my neck I’d shiver even more. Both of those are ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response), also referred to as "the tingles." I experience that occasionally while listening to ASMR videos, and it's pleasant, but personally I always find it overstated in media coverage. 

If you want to talk about neuroscience, here's a way of looking at it which speaks much more to my experience. When I hear forks scratching against ceramic dishes in the sink it gives me a shudder of revulsion. If I'm dining with someone who chews with their mouth open it disturbs me so much I need to leave the room. Those are examples of a really common psychological phenomenon called misophonia. I also deal with sensory integration disorder, a related problem. If I'm trying to have a conversation with someone and they're loudly crunching nuts or there's a fussy toddler having a tantrum nearby I can barely string two sentences together. Your brain is supposed to focus on relevant information and fade out irrelevant background noise without your needing to consciously think about it, but mine is bad at that. I suspect many - if not most - people have had experiences like those, it's just a question of how frequently it detracts from your quality of life. I'm not a neuroscience researcher, but those issues seem to be really common among ASMR fans. I would speculate that the more unsettled someone is by painful sound frequencies or disruptive noises, the more soothing they find pleasant other frequencies or harmonious sounds (and thus ASMR videos.) They might also get the tingles, but they might simply feel like their fur or feathers are being smoothed down in the right direction rather than being rubbed against the grain. I'd also say it's an especially good place for people with depression, anxiety and related disorders to heal and maintain good mental health.

I like the way you discuss the aesthetic and philosophical dimensions of ASMR practice as well as its neurological roots. And with your suggestion that it is the “anti-twitter” you start to get at the social and political dimensions too.  In what ways does ASMR illustrate a different model of how online communities might operate than the social dynamics many find frustrating and even frightening on Twitter in the Age of Trump? How do the content producers and consumers, if those are even the right words, relate to each other? The word ‘community’ has been so overused in the Web 2.0 era that many of us have become skeptical about it; the promises of “virtual community” seem a quaint reminder of another time and place, like haircuts in high school yearbooks. Yet, when I watch your interactions with ASMR folks, it does seem to have some elements of a gift economy, even if some of the artists find ways to make money off of what they produce. I don’t mean to romanticize this. But I would like to get your sense of what you see yourself as participating in here.

Generally speaking, I believe social media is one of the most corrosive things to ever happen to American politics and society, making it harder to solve every other problem we face. I guess it's a little ironic I feel that way, since you’re the author of Spreadable Media. But overall, for me, ASMR has the healthiest online fan community I've encountered since before the advent of Facebook. 

YouTube comments, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok offer additional places for artists to express themselves and share brief interactions with supporters. But, generally I think of ASMR communities in terms of two platforms, Twitch and Discord. Twitch is essentially a one-way Zoom conversation. The creator sits in front of their webcam and performs live. You can then comment in a chatroom and they can read what you say and reply verbally. Discord provides private message boards. The artist gives you permission to join and they can kick you out. But as long as you act appropriately you can hang out with them and their other core supporters. The one I'm active in has threads about far flung topics like video games, sports, animal pictures, trivia, poetry and self-care. Every week we vote as a group on a movie to watch together, and often stay up until all hours watching sitcoms and cartoons afterward. Sometimes we play networked video games and all converse over voice chat while we compete. The artist is certainly doted on, but all of us are homies. Several of the people in the community have Twitch streams and we drop by to support all of them if we can.

 There are several reasons why, I suspect, ASMR fares somewhat better than most online communities. One is the subject matter. Generally relaxation videos appeal to empaths and sensitive types. The lower the volume of comments a community receives, the easier it is to police. Generally, in ASMR communities trolls are escorted off the premises very quickly. Personal animosities are mediated or split up ASAP. Artists typically designate some of the supporters they know best to moderate their communities and because the moderators are invested in the brand they loyally defend it from malicious assailants.

 With all of that said, there is unfortunately a darker side to everything. Sadly, a lot of the most toxic elements of the community are reserved for the artist as an individual rather than the group as a whole. Many ASMRtists have sensitive personalities. They might be a nurse who wants to ease people’s pain; or a mom who wants to nurture; or a drug store cashier who wants to feel a greater sense of purpose. They encounter people who want to bluntly critique their work. From the outside those comments may seem fair and harmless enough, but if they catch someone at the wrong moment they can really sting. Because it's a visual medium performers constantly have people evaluating their appearance. One moment they might hear, “Your chest looks nice in that dress” and the next they might hear “You look pale and sickly. Are you taking care of yourself?” Performers have shared Twitter DMs they received where people called them slurs or made threats against their family. I suspect virtually all ASMRtists have dealt with amateur sleuths curious about their personal information, and I know of at least one who had a stalker show up at their home. In short, they deal with all of the negative aspects of celebrity culture, but without making millions of dollars. But they deal with some of the negatives that therapists do when they try to help people who are mentally ill or miserable. Someone says, “I’m thinking about killing myself and you’re the only person who’s keeping me from doing it. I need you to pay constant attention to me.” I don't want to overstate all of that. We’re talking about a tiny fraction of the audience. But I'm painting such an otherwise - and deservedly - rosy picture that I do want to acknowledge some of the negatives.

To read the rest, see Part Two and Part Three.

Charlie Jenkins is a novelist and transmedia consultant. His upcoming debut novel, American Wrestling 1989, is a melodrama which explore cultural conflicts in the world of 1980s professional wrestling and the ways that broken and discarded people can either heal or hurt one another as they endure their own personal tragedies. He was previously the Creative Director of Chaotic Good Studios and Research Director for The Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Company, serving clients like NBC, The CW, Blizzard Entertainment and BaseFX.

Agents of Influence: An Educational Video Game to Fight Misinformation

Over the past few years, I have been offering advice to Anahita Dalma and a team of USC students (among others) who have been working on a game, Agents of Influence, intended to address current issues around misinformation and disinformation circulation on social networking platforms. The group is launching a Kickstarter campaign as of today to help raise money to push the project to the next level. Having been impressed by their original insights into games-based learning and media literacy, not to mention their professionalism, I want to give them a chance to share some of their work here.

Agents of Influence: An Educational Video Game to Fight Misinformation

Written by: Michael Warker


Over the last year, we all have had to live much of our lives on the internet, whether it be through work, play, or reading the latest updates on these tumultuous times. With the convenience of the internet comes risks, however, as misinformation can easily masquerade as verified fact, and this threat inspired us at Alterea Inc. to think of a way to help. 

The solution we came up with is Agents of Influence: a spy-themed, educational video game that uses active inoculation theory to prepare students to recognize and combat digital misinformation. This theory is much like an inoculation for a virus, as it posits that exposing students to manipulative argumentation strategies makes them more resistant to subsequent manipulation attempts. Through Agents of Influence, we are aiming to equip a generation of “digital natives” in middle school with the tools and knowledge they need to combat digital misinformation.

Agents of Influence was created around the belief that video games have the capacity to be extremely useful learning tools. We constantly abided by teaching best practices to make sure our game was fulfilling the goals we wanted. Video games are a fantastic tool, as demonstrated by the idea of mastery orientations, which states that true knowledge comes from a desire for learning and understanding, not from a letter grade. Through the fun of video games, students actually want to learn. Studies have also shown that feedback is most helpful when it is “specific” and “immediate”, which is easy to accomplish through the video game format. 

As we researched our game and made connections with teachers, librarians, government officials, and more, we realized that misinformation may be one of the greatest threats facing our generation. During the 2016 election, it was found that the top “fake news” stories outperformed the top real ones on Facebook. Even more troubling, an Ipsos poll showed that 75% of Americans who see fake news view it as “somewhat” or “very” accurate. Since the 2016 election, the world has faced many huge issues that require credible information to combat them, including an ongoing global pandemic. We need tools to fight back against the growing threat of misinformation.

The “truth decay” caused by misinformation has taken hold of the world during the digital age, eroding civil discourse, causing political paralysis, and leading to public uncertainty and disengagement. With so much noise, people are taking the easy route of simply reaffirming their own biases with the information that they consume. The most recent and prevalent of these issues lies in COVID-19 vaccine trust, with many people on both sides of the issue finding information that simply reaffirms their own beliefs, as opposed to engaging in civil conversation with each other. 

These are all immense issues, but the solution lies in every individual’s ability and, more importantly, their willingness, to investigate the information that they consume. To encourage our target audience of middle schoolers to become more engaged and critical of what they see online, we knew that we had to make it fun for them. This reason is why we decided to make a video game to teach them about misinformation. 

Before thinking about the fun, however, we had to determine what we were trying to teach our middle schoolers. We spoke to multiple experts on media literacy, and we investigated how other organizations such as MediaWise, News Literacy Project, and more are educating people about misinformation. From all of this research, we derived three core learning objectives that have guided our game. 

Agents of Influence will teach students how to: 

1) Question the trustworthiness of information.

2) Investigate the trustworthiness of information.

3) Use this investigation to inform their decisions and build better information consumption habits.

If students walk away from this game questioning information they consume, and they have the ability and drive to research to verify their information, then we will qualify Agents of Influence as a success. For added benefit, however, we have also included much more educational content. 

We’ve designed our game around many educational standards, including Common Core, CASEL SEL, NAMLE, ISTE, Learning for Justice Digital Literacy Framework, Media Smarts, California Model School Library Standards, and NCSS C3 Framework. A process which is common to many of these standards is the IRAC, or the Inquiry, Research, Analysis, and Conclusion model. The IRAC model was formative to both our story structure and our game structure during the creation of Agents of Influence. Once we finished our initial education prep, we tackled the hard part: making it entertaining for middle schoolers. 

We discovered that the IRAC model forms well into a mystery story structure, so we decided to make our spy-themed game center around an investigation that students will have to lead. Every one of our three core modules will involve a plot from an evil spy group led by the nefarious Harbinger, and the player will have to work together with their spy team, the Agents of Influence, to stop them before it’s too late. These three modules are centered around cyber danger, political disinformation, and pseudoscience, respectively, so even the theming of each story is tied into our core learning objectives.

Creating a compelling narrative was an essential step in the development of this game, as it has been shown that emotional resonance helps students better retain information. We’re creating an experience that will teach students to question information, which is a new skill, not just information to be regurgitated on a test, so having a narrative that helps them remember the significance of their actions both online and in the real world is essential to a successful game In addition to our compelling narrative,we developed four mini-games centered around our other learning objectives. 

Conversation: Disguised in the narrative context of an interrogation, students must use good conversation practices to talk to a suspect. Every turn, students choose between different dialogue options, putting them in control of how they talk and act. If they’re not careful, however, they could trigger a negative “state,” such as making their suspect defensive or suspicious of them. These negative states are triggered when a student says something aggressive, critical, contemptuous, or alienating to their suspect. In addition, this game also teaches students how to recognize logical fallacies that may arise in arguments so they can better combat these fallacies in their daily lives. 

Research: This game takes place in the all too familiar landscape of a social media feed. Setting the game on social media allows for high transferability of skills, as this is where students would most likely encounter misinformation in their own lives. In our research game, students must flag posts as “accurate” or “misleading” by researching the post’s content in a simulated search engine. They’re also taught lateral reading techniques, along with learning about different misinformation types such as satire, false context, imposter content, and fact versus opinion. 

Analysis: Your artificial intelligence friend, A.M.I.E. is malfunctioning, and you have to prove to her that you’re a master of misinformation by answering her questions. Visually, we have a maze representation of A.M.I.E.’s circuitry, which students can navigate if they correctly answer analytical questions about an article they read. Students answer true and false questions about the purpose of the article, the bias of the author, logical and data fallacies the article employs, and many other relevant skills useful to critical reading. 

Finale: This last game is the emotional and intellectual climax of every module of Agents of Influence. Players must save a fellow student who has had their memories corrupted by misinformation. Through research and critical thinking, the player must remind their classmate who they truly are and save them from the clutches of misinformation. 

Of course, we did not know whether our game would be fun for a middle schooler until we sat down over Zoom with a few of them and heard what they had to say. After playing our research game, a small pool of middle schoolers we tested all said that they would research more. This was after only one version of the game in an early paper prototype. Stacking this exposure along with our other games and our narrative could have a huge potential impact on students. Plus, to top it all off, our testers all had fun and were engaged with the material. One of them even asked if we could make the game for his Nintendo DS so that he could take it on the go.

In addition to these small tests with middle schoolers, we brought in teachers and other experts to playtest our games so that we could learn more from industry professionals about how to enhance Agents of Influence. We also sent out multiple surveys to teachers around the world to learn how to make our game seamlessly accomplish their various classroom needs. Through this research, we learned that designing with ample flexibility was essential, which is why we decided to separate the game into smaller, thirty minute sections that are individually playable. This structure allows for teachers to focus on skills that are most applicable to their classrooms. This feedback, along with the copious other guidance from experts we consulted, has been essential in forming the structure and content of our game.

While our initial tests were small, they have allowed us to prepare our framework for feedback, which will be instrumental in our expanded testing period in the near future. Some of our core questions include asking if players have the motivation to look for multiple perspectives when researching after playing our games. We also want to know if they feel better empowered to fight misinformation online after playing Agents of Influence. So far, our takeaways are solid, but expanded testing will be necessary to verify our information. 

To truly see if our game is effective in preparing students for the looming threat of misinformation, we need additional funding. Going forward, we hope to fund our first module, Agents of Influence: Cyber Danger, and we want thousands of students to play it for our in-depth beta period. We have worked hard to ensure this large-scale test will show similarly enthusiastic results as our initial tests. 

Agents of Influence was created wholly to fit the needs of our educational objectives. Story, character, and gamified elements all arose from the core need to teach students how to better combat misinformation, and we are very excited to get Agents of Influence in front of even more students and teachers in the future. This game has a long road ahead of it, and if you would like to follow that journey, try our prototype, or learn more about the game, please visit our kickstarter or our website for more information.

Michael Warker is a recent graduate of the University of Southern California where he studied Theatre and Screenwriting. He is writing on behalf of Alterea, Inc., which is a story-telling company focused on immersive story-living that lets participants grow and change through the stories they experience. This article was written in association with Anahita Dalmia and Jasper McEvoy. Visit our website here: https://www.altereainc.com/ 

Watching Teen TV: An Interview with Stefania Marghitu (Part Three)

To what degree is teen television an aspirational category targeting those on the threshold of adolescence rather than speaking to those actually undergoing such shifts in their age and social status?

There’s no denying any commercial for profit endeavor is exactly that. But I also do find the solution parents often find is censorship, those that are sheltered from media don’t have the literacy to understand it later on in life. I think it’s why I’m so keen to move on to one of my next hopeful projects on the idea of the digital masquerade in social media. The carefully fabricated authenticity behind the ideal beauty standard on platforms like Instagram is leading young people into a dangerous path. Going back to issues of gender and girl making, and added on to complexities of race, colorist, ethnicity, body image, gender identity, Im seeing a lot more organizations outside of the US invest in taking on these issues. Tracing back to the feminine masquerade to the post-feminist masquerade, and to Safiy Noble’s Algorithims of Opression, this is not a new issue, but a newly presented one.

At some point the media literacy and development does kick in with fictional media as fabricated and aspirational. Every single character in a teen show also breaks down some kind of vulnerability at some point, even if it’s solved within a “very special episode” or given more depth through a serialized plot line. I think there’s a reckoning with body images and a wave of amazing resistance geared towards breaking down the ideal beauty standard online right now too, but far too often the potential psychological or physical damage can already be done. And this is why the pain and suffering from childhood and adolescence carries on into adulthood, as it was never resolved or sometimes not even acknowledged.

Again we’re seeing some paradigm shifts, but those most in need of help in this country are also the least likely to receive any form of support. I dedicated the book to a dear childhood friend of mine who struggled with issues of identity, belonging, and self-worth. When we first met we bonded over the music and film and television that we loved. Going back to our town after the vaccine I see a lot of good for teens today, but it makes me realize how much can still be improved and how things have not changed as much as I wish. Finishing the book during the pandemic really reinforced this drive in me to dedicate my pedagogy and research to marginalized communities. 

A recurring critique of teen television is that the actors playing high school students are a decade or so older and often “too old” to convincingly play the part. Why do networks feel the need to cast actors in their 20s in such role and what are the consequences of this choice for the evolution of the genre?

This is a double edged sword. Age appropriate casting like Schulyer’s choice in Degrassi is geared towards public service authenticity and connection. But because it’s so common, audiences are also all the more aware of it. Gabrielle Cartiers just spoke about lying about her age for her part in 90210 because of ageism. Most audiences can look up or roughly know the twenty something playing a teen and be cognizant. Part of the reason behind the casting is industrial, and also  financial. As Holzman described, there are limitations to hiring a child actor. But it also grants authenticity and can also allow for more storylines. But again at this point it’s been satirized and accepted that it almost helps in acknowledge the false standards of what an ideal teen should look like. It’s poked fun of at the beginning of Never Have I Ever.  That kind of self reflexivity helps show behind the curtain and is also helpful for the young viewers. It can also take the pressure of child actors who have historically struggled in their own lives due to the pressures associated with their stardom.

Teen television has proven unusually successful at generating stars -- from Sally Field to John Travolta, from  Clare Danes  to Zendaya. What mechanisms are used to create teen idols? How does this impact the production of the shows? What are some of the challenges of escaping this teen idol status?

There are mechanisms - marketing, promotion, etc. - to try to make stars and there are also sometimes happenstance. Danes’ series was canceled but My So Called Life and her acting allowed her to be a film star. Field’s career shows how quickly one can go from teen to love interest to mother, highlighting ageism in the industry. Both Field and Danes returned to television later in their careers, which shows the opportunities it can give in contrast to film. Travolta and the Saturday Night Fever sensation is a whole phenomenon, and the story behind The Bee Gees soundtrack as told through their recent documentary merits its own academic study. I think it’s telling a lot of the men who started on TV and became film stars - from Tom Hanks to George Clooney to Leonardo DiCaprio, stayed strong in film. Of course the pipeline of movie stars is already so limited.

Zendaya is definitely a unicorn in the world of former child stars. She tried a bit of film acting, singing, yet still found her way back to television where she thrived.  She choose her projects wisely, has an enviable public image, and is now the youngest lead actress in a drama Emmy award winner. 

As I am writing these questions, I just finished watching the final series of Atypical, which deals with a teen who is on the autism spectrum. It raises questions for me about the notion of “normality” as a key theme in these series? It’s built into the title of  Freaks and Geeks, both groups who feel themselves to be outcasts in their school but for different reasons. My So-Called Life’s Winnie Holzman talks about “people who ‘fit in’ and don’t fit in.”  How has this push to deal with “outcasts” taken different forms across the history of the genre and how might a character like the protagonist of Atypical relate to this dynamic/  Or for that matter, the number of queer characters in recent series?

Atypical was another show I was really delighted to see my students engage with. Historical research has traditionally told us escapist media is where audiences turn to after national and global trauma. Some folks don’t want Covid in their fictional media at all. Some seek that for normalcy and catharsis. I’m really not sure how this might play out in relation to diversity and inclusion given those cyclical histories of shutting out, erasing, or scapegoating marginalized communities. But the positive responses for series like Atypical and Never Have I Ever, as well as docu series and interests in understanding how media history works is also encouraging. 

The recent decision in Tennessee to ban all state outreach with Covid-19 information to adolescents reflects ongoing struggles of adults to exert greater control over teen’s lives, at least among more conservative parts of the culture. Does this make teen television a particularly intense battleground in struggles over cultural politics?

I was actually just talking with a friend who is a teacher in a neighboring state about the upcoming school year right after discussing the new season of Never Have I Ever.  Public school teachers are being told they can’t express their vaccination status or opinions on it. There was a recent episode of Good Fight in which parents sued a private Zoom teacher tutor for “teaching socialism” and that students started critiquing their parents after seeing Parasite through a class lens. It’s all a battleground right now.

The politicization of the vaccine makes “sense” based on the rhetoric, but not on the logics of what vaccines have done for humanity for eradicating diseases. Especially as 12 is the starting age of vaccine eligibility now, but that it depends on their parents’ decisions. Also, of course, as with many of us, teens and pre teens have spent more time at home and potentially with television.  And some folks wanted escapism, but even family dramas like This Is Us showed the difficulties of both being away from family and loved ones, but also the tensions of multi-generational “bubbles” or “pods” and how young people especially were missing out on milestones and social lives.

I know there was a lot of criticism towards young people who “didn’t care” about Covid because it didn’t impact them, but I found that my students were cautious and considerate, though they were also forthcoming of the frustration behind spending a year in college off campus and back home. 

I’m all for criticizing Big Pharma and the inequalities of the health care system, but this is a free vaccine, that is also adding new incentives for folks to get vaccinated in states with low statistics. Meanwhile other countries don’t have the access to the vaccine and citizens which they could have the same protection.

Again I’m seeing both advancements and regressions in these areas. I do think access is key here. Horace Newcomb once said in an interview that he didn’t have access to cinemas growing in the non-urban South, so TV was his entry point into a lot of new worlds. I think about the books and media that was banned and censored while my parents were growing up in Communist Romania. And for teens especially, this is a time when they are gaining independence and forming their own views and perspectives while coming of age. There’s a lot of pressure and to some extent blame being put on educators for pushing agendas and having students turn against their parents. In the new HBO series White Lotus, a great critique of class and privilege, Connie Britton’s character tells her teenage daughter played by Sydney Sweeney that their generation’s legacy is “biting the hand that feeds them, ” not caring about their families who actually know and love them, while caring about oppressed groups who they don’t even know. I think being newly critical and questioning the world around you, including your own privilege, is part of the gears turning towards critical thinking and media literacy.

As college professors, there’s less pressure than teachers in K-12, I am not envious of the constant battles they face in just teaching objective facts in courses like science and history and how that is being challenged, or censorship over the type of literature being taught in English classes. But one interesting aspect of teaching this past year, more students were more in touch with their hometowns as adults, and more self-reflexive about childhood and upbringing. There’s a tendency for some to get out of their hometowns as soon as possible and start anew, which can be liberating of course. And some students stay nearby for various reasons, so this kind of united folks from high school who would have previously not kept in touch. Living in their childhood homes and sleeping in their rooms, being more involved in their local communities, they had a lot of interesting perspectives they previously wouldn’t have.

I had some students in conservative cities or states and they were realizing the changes they can make or impact was greater than in a political bubble or the echo chamber idea. And that’s why we’re seeing folks return to their hometowns or the south to contribute to change. That’s where the good fight is really being fought in those battlegrounds. And I think teen TV has allowed for a lot of relatability and catharsis for college students dealing with their high school past through nee series like Normal People , which also shows the transition to college, Cruel Summer, Never Have I Ever, End of fhe F***ng World, and Sex Education, but also revisiting or exploring past teen TV like Freaks and Geeks, Moesha, Skins, The OC, MSCL and so on. 

From the afterschool specials to East Los High, we can see tensions playing out between the desire to education teens about particular issues or concerns and the entertainment value of these series. What are some of the strategies producers use to negotiate these tensions?

This is where I think the influence of Canadian and British- and of course other non-US- public service television is making both a direct and indirect influence.

Some students don’t realize British shows like Skins and Misfits they loved when younger are on a public service platform- and even if it caused moral panic around the drugs, drinking and sex- and as scholars like Susan Berridge have asserted reassert some of the same stereotypes and narratives of marginalized folks - it was new ground for teen audiences at the time. And when we discuss the failed Skins US remake, it can be traced to adapting the surface level or shock value without a thoughtful or culturally specific eye

As both the folks behind East Los High and Degrassi told me, and for really many teen series that connected to its audiences, talking down is never the answer. Teens are critical when the writing is forced, whether it’s too commercial and like an algorithm of teen speak, or too much of a cautionary tale based on moral panic. Many grow up watching those sometimes terrifying and trite health class videos, or programs like Abstinence Only and D.A.R.E. It’s interesting because a lot of English television scholars have written on how US teen TV influenced the Channel 4 youth series and the American-ness of the teenage experience. And of course we know it’s more common for US to make their own versions of UK shows. But seeing audiences love not only other Anglophone teen series, but from continental Europe and K-dramas, really defies a lot of assumptions about US audience.

And shows like Norway’s Skam, which has been remade in various countries multiple times over, is still revered for its original and the way fans translated for subtitles  and distributed it via Tumblr. And that came from a very savvy Norwegian public service model. I don’t think we’ll see US public service programming beyond childhood series, though Sesame Street and other programs are revered. I see students really want more oversight and checks and balances of the Disney and Nickelodeon programming they grew up on. Children’s programming is not my area of expertise but again I’m seeing more self reflexivity towards that exposure. And the “representation matters” discourse and seeing someone like them on screen matters so much, but again I want to stress to them the cultural and industrial contexts beyond that. And that’s a main goal of the book, and my dissertation, and I think a lot of my work : to trace how socially conscious programming is developed, brought in, distributed and received, and when and why.

Stefania Marghitu holds her PhD from the University of Southern California’s Division of Cinema and Media Studies, with a minor from The Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. Her book, Teen Television (Routledge Genre Guidebook series), was released in May 2021. You can also find her work published in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Communication, Culture, and Critique, and Spectator, as well as the edited collections White Supremacy and the American Media (Routledge, forthcoming, 2021) and ReFocus on Amy Heckerling (Edinburgh University Press). 

She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Loyola University New Orleans, where she teaches courses on digital media, film, gender, race, and adaptation. She has previously taught introductory and upper level courses on film, television, and digital media history, aesthetics, industry, and theory at Pitzer College, Chapman University, California State University Northridge, and Columbia College Hollywood.

Watching Teen TV: An Interview with Stefania Marghitu (Part Two)

How have shifts in delivery channels from broadcast networks to cable channels to streaming platforms reshape the genre? You describe Euphoria as a premium cable network series so perhaps it would be a good example to spell out some of your assumptions here.

I think in terms of teaching, and as this book is geared towards teaching introductory students to television, media and cultural studies, it’s important to distinguish both how historical and contemporary platforms function. One thing that has been lost amidst streaming’s prevalence is confusion with streaming “originals.” And by distinguishing the production, distribution, and reception of platforms but also by historical eras at the interaction of social movements, we can also teach students about cyclical patterns and distinguish what is actually “new.”

The interviews and inclusion of race and media scholars within the book shows how different eras allowed for more inclusion, and how droughts occurred. Linking to market demands and assumptions about demographics, as well as socio-political shifts, are key. Students get very excited about representation and visibility, and I want to acknowledge that, but also encourage them to demand more and be discerning in the same way they are towards politics and policy. Kristen Warner, Racquel Gates, Brandy Monk-Payton and Alfred Martin are scholars doing amazing work on these dynamics. Warner’s work on plastic representation has been a tremendous resource for students to understand. 

You cite Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Archie as key early influences on teen television for the baby boom generation.  How and where was this influence felt? It might be interesting to compare the early formulations of these characters with whats happened as all three franchises have been back in production in the past few years.

 The recombinant culture and nature of remakes, reboots and spin-offs is an opportunity both for repeated stagnant formulas as well as room for innovation and updates to beloved past examples. Literary adaptations are constant, and the serialized nature of television lends itself to how novels were first released as well. These series also both allow that prime time hybrid serial that Michal Z. Newman discusses in his work.

The core of these franchises have both a universal appeal and a malleability and flexibility to update and expand. Different eras come back in different futures- it’s most evident in fashion trends and perhaps most apparent in the aesthetics of a media text. Fashion like music and slang is integral to the teen lifestyle identities- Riverdale has this ‘50s look with the darker edge of crime series under Jughead’s narrative of a post-industrial American utopia gone dystopic. It also shows how audiences are split between fans of the genre in general and demographic targets. Fandom and nostalgia pushes audiences one way, and we can have tendencies to either be more lenient or more critical of a beloved media text being newly revamped and released. We tend to think of these as either the tent pole franchises or the cult fandoms, perhaps the “fanboy” at the heart of it too. 

As your book makes clear, the television and music industries are complexly intertwined where the teen market is concerned. Does music television represent an alternative genre to teen television in terms of attracting the youth market? You could have a successful music program which did not directly depict the lives of young people, for example?

Absolutely. Music programming or music related content is by no means limited to age. I do think a strong sense of a teen series identity is rooted in music, fashion, and language. 

It’s hard for me to imagine a successful teen series without a full sense of self- and part of that to me is the inclusion of fashion and costume design, music supervision and soundtrack , casting and acting, production design, in addition to all the traditional above the line markers. This also allows ways to look at how authorship and influence is being shown by those traditionally below the line folks in the industry, but also how you can’t really not include those integral aspects of teen media. There’s a special relationship between how identity and self expression are defined through fashion, slang, and music. The first piece I published on teen media pinpointed how Clueless is still revered by fans through these key elements, and how its influence is still seen. A strong sense of music, fashion, and vernacular sets the tone for so many of these teen series. You can’t think of My So Called Life without thinking of grunge, or The O.C. without indie rock

Your interviews with production personnel consistently point to the “mandates’ that shaped their production choices. What were some of the mandates these producers felt they needed to achieve if they were going to gain the respect and interest of a teen audience?

While my core was in US media, what is nice about including dominant or influential non-US distribution was a way to discuss the differences between public service and commercial models, then into different modes of production, distribution and reception. With Linda Schulyer and Degrassi, the decades long history of the series reveals how her and her colleagues model is essentially the answer to a lot of issues US television comes short in terms of diversity and inclusion both on and offscreen. First of all, that a middle school teacher like Schulyer could enter the media industry, and slowly develop her own series. As a teacher, she saw that educational media geared towards young people talked down to them, giving into moral panics. It’s like the abstinence only model of sex eduction. Those are the areas where teenage pregnancy is highest. Beyond the Canadian mandate, Schulyer gained freedom, and a franchise, once the show provided US audiences what it was missing. Schulyer also hired and enlisted writers, consultants, etc. to speak on topics relevant to teens who could offer expertise. 

Winnie Holzman was in broadcast television during this time that I think helps students understand periods of time where high ratings were crucial for a series, and critical acclaim and awards could not save My So Called Life from cancellation. Again it’s important to have that context when teaching television, and another reason why I find Teen TV the perfect lens for the complexities of the ecosystem.

Eric Damon was the costume designer for Gossip Girl, a show which really brought high fashion to the small screen after its initial success. The star status of Blake Lively after season one and appeal from adults, especially New Yorkers and a rising blog culture and TV recaps and reviews online, all helped boost the show’s fashion credo. And it was the same with his experience on Sex and the City, who made a multi million dollar franchise of its fashion tie ins and product placements. Comparing the relatively low budget of the original Gossip Girl to the new HBO Max iteration that has just premiered also shows how the fandom and legacy of its fashion influence is absolutely integral to the series’ identity. 

East Los High shows how early streaming models allowed this series originally funded by a non profit, with no links to the industry, to exist and thrive. It’s an anomaly to the nature of US television, but those are the interesting moments when the innovation can outweigh the convention. And the work given into the show, on par with the thoughtfulness of Degrassi, is really admirable. I think it’s what a lot of my students write about wishing they had when they were younger- we need more than PBS and Sesame Street and a few other examples. But we can’t seem to get this country to agree for universal health care, much less to further provide services to media when budgets are being slashed for what little there is. 

 Stefania Marghitu holds her PhD from the University of Southern California’s Division of Cinema and Media Studies, with a minor from The Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. Her book, Teen Television (Routledge Genre Guidebook series), was released in May 2021. You can also find her work published in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Communication, Culture, and Critique, and Spectator, as well as the edited collections White Supremacy and the American Media (Routledge, forthcoming, 2021) and ReFocus on Amy Heckerling (Edinburgh University Press). 

She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Loyola University New Orleans, where she teaches courses on digital media, film, gender, race, and adaptation. She has previously taught introductory and upper level courses on film, television, and digital media history, aesthetics, industry, and theory at Pitzer College, Chapman University, California State University Northridge, and Columbia College Hollywood.

Watching Teen TV: An Interview with Stefania Marghitu (Part One)

i’ve spent an astonishing number of hours during the pandemic watching shows set in high school and middle school — Sex Education, Never Have I Ever, Atypical, The Baby Sitter’s Club, and so many others. These years were not very fun or comfortable ones in my own life, yet there is something very comforting about the emotional legibility of teen television.

Stefania Marghitu’s newly released Teen TV examines this terrain as a market demographic and genre category with a rich history, one which sheds light on how young people understand their lives across the second half of the 20th century. Each generation seems to discover this genre on its own as producers seek to update recurring themes and conventions with new iconography, new issues that reflect how young people see themselves and their lives. Marghitu combines nuanced analysis of shows, audiences, producers, marketing and programming trends, and shifting media ecologies with interviews with leading producers of teen television series. The resulting book is short but sweet — easy to read and teach but also rich in insight and deeply grounded in historical research.

Marghitu was recently included in a Vice documentary on Teen TV. Check it out!

Marghitu is a recent graduate from the PhD program in critical studies at the USC Cinema School, where I was lucky enough to advise her dissertation — in this case, an exploration of the impact of female writer-producers at different phases of television history. She’s an exceptional television historian embarking on the early phases of her career and it is my pleasure and honor to present her to my readers. Across this three part interview, we dig deep into the premises of her Teen TV book. Enjoy!

Let’s start where your book starts -- “What is Teen TV? Does Teen TV even exist anymore? Do teens even watch television?”

I’m not an essentialist by any means- I mention anecdotes in the introduction that ask these questions while Teen TV was on a new precipice, and the boom continues across television. This line of questioning on its existence and assumed “extinction” reminded me of television and media scholars like Amanda Lotz who took on the cyclical “television is dead” statement. Television has gone through phases that need to be distinguished. In a recent job interview I was asked where I draw the line on what television is, and it’s more about discerning what early broadcast, post-network, cable, streaming, etc is.

Teen TV is both aimed at a demographic (or multiple demographics, such as TV for Teens themselves or Teen TV for fans of the genre). And what I remain fascinated about television and this genre specifically is how we can trace the history just as much as we can apply cultural specificities to different eras, movements, trends, success, failures, and flops. It’s along with the generational cord cutter argument, but it’s also connected to, say, college students traditionally not having televisions. This is what else interested me in the generational aspect of the genre- the idea that teens didn’t want to watch TV in early broadcast because it was for their parents and they were going to drive ins, concerts etc. once they had freedom, or even listening to music or using the telephone instead of TV.. That argument has been made for every generation whether it’s  new music sensation and related venues, shopping, roller rinks, the Internet…

There is presumably no market for Teen TV until there is. That’s commercial art, and the fickle and unreliable nature of the industry. Formulas can only last for so long, what Todd Gitlin calls recombinant culture that makes television go on, and teens are discerning of what they will actually like. The supply and demand nature of the medium is based on certain “universal” aspects of coming of age as well as nuances of each generation.

You describe teens as a “desired, but elusive audience”? Can you explain both sides of that phrase?

Great segue! Teens are fickle. Pre WWII youth culture can be traced to flappers,.I made a joke about how VSCO girls are like this for the pandemic, because the trend was being likened to 1920s flappers. To be a desired audience means you have money to spend in the eyes of commercial television. To be an elusive audience is to be constantly changing demographic that is one of the most difficult to cater to when generational shifts and rebellion against past generations defines the current one. That’s part of teens evolving and gaining independence in US Post World War economies because of the rise in wealth and more expendable income of teens as a new market. The socioeconomic affordances of being a teenager and having that experience, especially an American Teenager, is intrinsically linked to marketing to the new demographic.

I remember taking a music history class as an undergrad and my professor at Indiana University indicating it was the first time in modern history teens tastes were radically different from their parents. Rock N Roll provided this, not just as a music genre, but as a fashion choice, a backdrop to subversion. Alternative Rock, grunge and hip-hop did this for the MTV generation and subsequent programming. The media industries are going to try to appeal to any demographic with money to spend. Again this is an argument of why progressive programming was accepted in the ‘70s- Mary Tyler Moore for second wave feminists with their own jobs and income; The Jeffersons for Black Americans quite literally “moving on up.”

When I was growing up the “tween” category was everywhere. The last year I taught as a graduate student a lot of students said teens shows didn’t speak to them at all, then Euphoria was able to tap in, gaining this fascination from my students more universally than any other series before.  As much as reboots and spin-offs try, they are not a guarantee. And many Teen TV reboots and spin-offs failed, as well as global adaptations. It’s a perfect case study of a genre that cannot be stagnant and must adapt to its demographic.

You describe teen television as a “gender factory,” a phrase which evokes for me Geraldine Bloustein’s phrase “girlmaking” to refer to the way femininity is produced, performed, and enforced in everyday life. So, how would you describe the role that television plays in the construction of teen’s gender identity as compared with socialization through social media or face to face encounters? Does television produce or consume or both gender norms?

I think it’s no surprise those interested in television genre such as soap opera, and all of the amazing early television scholars abroad and in the US discussing the discourse of gender and genre, are also attracted to Teen TV. Just as early teen media for middle class girls was targeted to future housewives, that still had to change. Television can both influence girl making and reflect it. And just as women in soap operas and melodramas, or audiences could queer media texts, interpreted texts beyond a one way understanding - it’s why I love citing Stuart Hall’s early writing on popular media serving as beyond propaganda, whether capitalist or nationalistic or any other intended messages, Teens are coming of age and learning along the way a new understanding of the world around them and their own identity. And teens and youth movements are traditionally associated with change and demanding more each generation.

I have a hard time telling students that writing on the “impact” of a media text is actually quite difficult- and of course it’s because media studies scholars are in direct opposition to the overly simplified “media effects” conclusions. If a generation of teens are more accepting of, and demand, equality for marginalized groups, then there is an initiative to appeal to that if it’s also market driven.

One of my favorite assignments is a media biography, and I have so many students who write about a turn or development towards understating who they are, who they want to be, and what they won’t let themselves be deterred by. Taste and material cultures and branding and lifestyle determines a lot of what give teens these feelings of identity. It’s a push pull between a commercial industry and capitalist system trying to package and promote and those trying to make sense of where they’ll fit into that world.

Aniko Imre gives this brilliant lecture on Neoliberalism in Introduction to TV, and it’s very complex and sprawling, but for some students it clicks in this really amazing way. This is why media that supports traditional expectations like gender norms can be totally rejected, and that’s when it has to change.

 We know surface level representation and tokenism is not the answer, and students who look at Teen TV see how the lens of media industries and other systems and hierarchies of power can provide an understanding of how ideology works. Because it’s their identity and their future at stake. And it’s what’s amazing about connecting to students through what they care about and connect to.

 If the teen in teen tv is a demographic group, a market construct, a genre category, a discursive formation, etc., then might we need a new genre distinction for Preteen TV to refer to shows like Never Have I Ever, The Babysitter’s Club, and Pen15 to distinguish it from teen shows that tend to skew much older and increasingly deal with sexual matters?

Absolutely.  Watching Pen15 was very cathartic for me, seeing a reflection of this awkward, confusing, strange time in your life back at you. Not just the age but the time period. It’s also why Freaks and Geeks is actually quite complex- the geeks are more like the preteens and the freaks are the teens. They’re distinguished not just by social category but also by age. We see this in Pen15 too- different levels of puberty and milestones reached at certain ages, entering these new spaces as not just the youngest and most naive, but most likely to be the lowest rung of middle school, or high school’s, hierarchy.

And we also see immigrants, children of immigrants, teens dealing with grief or loss, alongside understating gender and sexual identity, experiments with drugs and alcohol, mental health issues. And I think what makes the Preteen shows distinguishable is that parents and their children can watch together. Preteens may not quite be ready for the intense nature of the new HBO Max series, but also they’re not interested in the sexual milestones. It’s this stage where you want to be released from being a child- think about the shifts in development as well as clothes, bedroom decor.

All of these shows also present new independence but also feeling confined by parents, and that desire to bond with friends. Pen15 is about two best friends dealing with things together but also moments of tension and rupture, it taps into that same age range that Broad City did for post-college twenty somethings. Babysitters Club puts both likely and unlikely friends together, almost on the same fundamentals as a workplace sitcom, because they’re these future entrepreneurs essentially. 

Never Have I Ever is another one that so many Indian Americans and children of immigrants have identified with. Mindy Kaling has this background in both workplace sitcoms with The Office and rom-com hybrids with The Mindy Project and Love Actually. So Never Have I Ever captures something even more untapped than her previous projects.

And something like the thoughtful reconfiguring of the characters, cultural specificity and subsequent casting in the new Babysitters Club can appeal both to the nostalgia of past fans and new audiences of the preteen demographic. And it’s a balance between friendships, school, family, storylines also including parents and other family members like Claudia’s grandmother.

My students once had an argument about an indigenous coming of age series and its cancellation. One student very quickly looked up the reviews and said the show shouldn’t just keep going because of the “optics.” The student who originally mentioned it said she quite enjoyed it, although it was not perfect. And many first seasons, or first few seasons aren’t. It’s about which series are granted that time to develop, it became a conversation about privilege and what stories get to be told.

Stefania Marghitu holds her PhD from the University of Southern California’s Division of Cinema and Media Studies, with a minor from The Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. Her book, Teen Television (Routledge Genre Guidebook series), was released in May 2021. You can also find her work published in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Communication, Culture, and Critique, and Spectator, as well as the edited collections White Supremacy and the American Media (Routledge, forthcoming, 2021) and ReFocus on Amy Heckerling (Edinburgh University Press). 

She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Loyola University New Orleans, where she teaches courses on digital media, film, gender, race, and adaptation. She has previously taught introductory and upper level courses on film, television, and digital media history, aesthetics, industry, and theory at Pitzer College, Chapman University, California State University Northridge, and Columbia College Hollywood.

An Invitation to Continue the Dialogue on Educomunicación: North-South and South-South collaborations. (Part 5)

An Invitation to Continue the Dialogue on Educomunicación: North-South and South-South collaborations. (Part 5)

by Julio-César Mateus, PhD and Andres Lombana-Bermudez, PhD

In the final post of our series, we would like to address some critical questions about the future and current state of educomunicación that were not fully discussed in the webinars, and share some ideas for promoting the South-South and North-South dialogues on media education and media literacies. 

Andres: 

As we have listened in the previous entries of the series, educomunicación, as a Latin American movement and tradition, offers situated knowledges and practices that can be useful for building a more plural ecology of media education and media literacies. However, given the diversity of educomunicación initiatives, systematizing the heterogeneity of practices can be a daunting task. Moreover, there is also the challenge of translating local and situated knowledge to other languages. One of the recent efforts that aimed to extend and amplify the Latin American dialogue on educomunicacion is the collective book  Media Education in Latin America (2019). What have we learned from this project? What are the key problems and thematics addressed in that book and how can they help us to promote the North-South and South-South dialogues?

Julio Cesar:

Indeed, we edited the book Media Education in Latin America to offer an updated state of the development of this topic in the region. Likewise, we also published it in English to promote dialogue with the Anglo-Saxon world, contributing to overcome language barriers that have historically impeded a more fluid and horizontal relationship between South and North. In Latin America, educomunicacion traces a parallel route to the media literacy traditions of the Anglosphere, most of which remain relatively unknown in English-speaking countries. As Michael Hoechmann says in the book, for the most part, the Anglosphere has not been good at South-North dialogue, besides two exceptions with considerable traction in English-speaking countries: the book “How to Read Donald Duck” by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart (1971), which is used to teach the concept of cultural imperialism, and the other, and perhaps most significant, common ground is the transformative work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. He did not work directly in media education, but his methods and ideas changed the teaching and learning dynamics in both Latin American educomunicación and the Anglosphere traditions of media literacy.

On the other hand, “one must remember that educomunicación was born from North-South and South-North dialogues. It is not a nativist tradition, but rather draws on multiple sources that include key authors. Jesus Martin-Babero cites Benjamin, Barthes, Williams and many others; Mario Kaplun (1998) references Bruner, Piaget, Vygotsky and Pierce; Freire himself quotes Lukacs, Lenin, Buber and Althusser. That is a recurrent factor in Latinamerican scholars”. (Hoechsmann, 2019, p. 265). 

While editing the book, we realized it was going to be useful to organize and preserve the memories from the long tradition of Educomunicación. One of the most prominent actors of this movement, Brazilian professor Ismar de Oliveira Soares (2019), explained that the first initiatives began in the middle of the 1960’s, focusing on film analysis. In fact, the first project of introducing movie analysis at schools, called “Plan de Educación Cinematográfica para Niños (DENI)”, rapidly spread to many countries. In the 1970’s, Media Education agenda aggregated printed media and, mainly, television production. At first, the predominant theoretical tendency at this period was the behaviorism theories of effects. In Latin America, moreover, many of the media education promoters working with popular groups in the communities added another perspective. As Oliveira recalled, they used “media analysis” to reinforce the critical awareness of audiences, in order to resist “cultural invasion”, as a result of the powerful media production coming from the North. Later, the strength of Latin American concepts in the field of communication for social development, with an emphasis on participatory planning, has had a profound impact on the construction of the concept of educommunicacion. Sadly, throughout this process, the school remained marginal. 

We concluded in the book that media education has had a varied presence in national policies in Latin America, and has not adequately responded to the citizen rights approach or the theoretical tradition of educomunicación. In the last 30 years, Latin American governments have made efforts to connect schools to audiovisual media, and later with digital technologies, but from the perspective of media as teaching assistants. Even when teacher education and training programmes on technology use have been undertaken, the balance is not positive because in most of these, technological action has taken priority over pedagogical action.

Andres: 

In terms of media education and literacy policies, there is a lot of work to do at the national levels in most of the countries from the region. As you mention, policy makers in Latin America have prioritized technological interventions over pedagogical ones. Digital transformation is part of several national policies but has tended to focus on promoting access to the Internet, computers and mobile phones and e-government rather than supporting access to knowledge and developing media literacies among the population. Although some governments have even included the terminology of “digital citizenship” in their policies and discourse, its conceptualization has been limited to enabling bureaucratic procedures online instead of supporting the participation of citizens across the multiple dimensions of digital societies.  Media education and educomunicacion can help to build that kind of active citizenship as our societies make the digital transformation. And it is precisely here where I see a space of opportunity for doing South-South and North-South collaborations, and for joining efforts across multiple stakeholders. The opportunity to support media education and media literacies, in all their plurality, across formal (e.g. schools, universities) and informal (e.g. home, museums, libraries) contexts is here. The pandemic and post-pandemic has even made it more urgent. And there are interesting examples of how those collaborative efforts are already taking place. The initiative of DW Akademy in Central America we heard about in one of our webinars is one of them. Other initiatives such as EducaMidia in Brazil and DigiMente in Argentina, Colombia and Mexico, reveal the potential of North-South and South-South collaborations for developing and promoting open media education resources and programs in and out of school, and for combining global and local knowledges and practices. However, the opportunities go beyond curricular and educational interventions. Which other efforts can we develop to promote a more plural ecology of media education and media literacies?

Julio Cesar: 

I think global scientific publishing gives us some opportunities. For instance, using journals to spread and discuss educomunicación approaches and practices. Spain and Brazil created two more than 20 years ago: Comunicar, born in the University of Huelva and founded in 1993, published in English among other languages, and a year later, Comunicação e Educação, published in the University of Sao Paulo. Both are committed to disseminating experiences and research related to Educomunicación. Likewise, other journals have published special issues regarding these topics, such as the one we edited in Contratexto in 2019. Also the Latin American Association of Communication Researchers (ALAIC), with UNESCO support, launched an English-written journal, which is an excellent example of the willingness to share beyond the Spanisk-speaking academic community.

Also, in 2010, Roberto Aparici gathered texts written by Ibero-American leaders in the field, editing in Spanish the book Educomunication: beyond the 2.0, an exhaustive map of what has been said and done about media in relation to education from the 1980s to date. 

May be the most promising initiative in the region regarding educomunicación is Alfamed, an Euro-American inter-university research network on media literacy which brings together more than 50 researchers from 13 European and Latin American countries, aiming to promote opportunities and to improve the academic research and dissemination on "media education". This network has promoted five congresses in many countries and the 6th will be held in Arequipa, Peru, in 2022. These events are excellent opportunities for making more visible educomunicacion. 

Andres: 

One of the questions that we couldn't fully explore in the two webinars given the limitations of time, was the one related to the possibilities of educomunicacion and media education in a context characterized by increasing datification and by the deployment of artificial intelligence systems and algorithms. This context is global, national and local, and varies according to different material, cultural and geographical conditions. However, it is pervasive across countries and is shaping our everyday lives. The pandemic and post-pandemic have revealed how it is transforming all dimensions of society and how it is also exacerbating structural inequalities. From the economy to education, politics, culture, and health, datification is reconfiguring the processes of participation, decision-making, and access to opportunities in our societies. Hence, this process is also transforming democratic processes of deliberation and governance, and changing how citizens exercise their agency and rights. In order to participate in data-driven societies, people need to understand these complex transformations and become aware of how our citizen rights and responsibilities, decision-making, and governance are changing. This is of course, a process that requires access to knowledge, critical thinking and dialogue among multiple sectors, and that needs to be supported in schools and out of schools. How can the educomunicacion approach help us to navigate and to solve the inequalities and other wicked problems that societies and communities confront in the midst of datification?

Julio Cesar: 

When it comes to inequality as well as other social and political problems, we should try to focus our efforts in empowering the individual, and society at large, so they can navigate a culture that is becoming more and more digital. The jump from a protectionist to a liberatory paradigm,  one that genuinely supports “emancipation” is a key factor in the educomunicación approach. Many initiatives are already working on that basis even if they do not use that terminology. The objective of achieving parity in education opportunities  and literacy skills may be an ideal, but it's still a goal nonetheless that can orient interventions and policies.

Andres: 

I think that educomunicacion efforts to promote emancipation, freedom, creativity, social justice and self-determination through critical thinking, dialogue, collaboration and participation can be very useful today. Particularly, I think that supporting the development of critical awareness of how data infraestructures work, how they are shaped by power dynamics, and how they are changing our social lives can foster active citizenship and strengthen democracies.  However, given the abstract qualities of datification, becoming aware of it can be a difficult task. Although there is an increasing visibility in the public discourse about how using digital platforms can affect our privacy, security, and emotions, there is still a lot of work to do in terms of helping people to understand how our rights, agency and self-determination are changing. The dialogic pedagogy that characterizes educomunicacion offers some useful strategies for concretizing datification and grounding that process in real life stories told by students and teachers. Through dialogue it is possible to learn about how others experience algorithms and data in their everyday lives when they use digital platforms, and develop critical awareness of how datification affects people differently according to their social positions. This is an issue that is directly related to structural inequalities and social injustice, and that has been addressed by several scholars and activists working on critical data studies, digital rights, data justice and design justice. It is also an issue that is currently being addressed by several media education initiatives in the Global North but that still has not been fully tackled by educomunicacion in Latin America.

And here I see an opportunity to further develop North-South collaborations and dialogues. The term data literacy, for instance,  is already being used across the Global North and has become part of educational and learning initiatives that offer tools and resources for teachers, students, and people in general. Recognizing data practices as literacies helps us to support critical awareness and reflexivity of datification, and contributes to a more complex understanding of how citizenship has changed, and continues to change in our digital and datified world. For instance, the Data Detox Toolkit offers online resources for helping people control and understand their digital privacy, security, and wellbeing. Another initiative, the Data Culture Project is a self-service learning program offering free activities and tools for improving people's capacity to work with data. Among the different learning experiences available on the Digital Citizenship + Resource Platform, there is a collection of open educational resources for teaching and learning about data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence. Like these, there are other data literacy projects that are currently being developed (the Critical Big Data and Algorithmic Literacy Network has mapped many of them) and that can be put in dialogue with Latin American educomunicacion initiatives. Such kind of collaboration could not only support teaching and learning about datification in the Global South but also help to better understand how diverse data practices, experiences and imaginaries vary across different contexts and subjects. Although the process of datification is global, it varies across national and local contexts according to specific social, cultural, economic and political configurations.

[image: social DATA justice]

Julio Cesar: 

I believe media education has the potential to help individuals in exercising their political rights in a number of issues, like the right to access information. An immediate challenge in the region is to honor the long tradition of educomunicacion and "de-technologize" the way we look at the media. Today, to speak about citizenship demands that we speak of the digital not only in relation to skill development, but also in relation to the generation of an ecosystem. Faced with scenarios with precariousness and gaps, as the practitioners said in one of the webinars, it is difficult to avoid focusing on technology because it is the greatest demand: that is why most of the educational solutions in the region have relied on the purchase of tablets and other digital devices for schools. Yet, the problem of educomunicacion is not just about the jump from a discipline to a political program. A recent paper by Narvaes (2021) reminds us that there is a risk in believing that technology alone can resolve the problems of political democratization and knowledge democratization, even without explaining how these technologies improved the cognitive and communicative processes in the first place. 

Andres: 

Addressing the political dimension of education and communication, as mixed and intertwined processes, is key for building citizenship and democracies today. That is how the educomunicación approach based on dialogical and critical pedagogies aimed to empower individuals and vulnerable populations so they could become aware of the world and transform it. However, as you mention, the risk of assuming an educational approach that focuses on functional skills and technology use is high given the rapid digital transformations that are taking place in culture, economy, politics and all social dimensions. There is a pressure to become digital, to connect, to use digital infraestructures for working, learning, socializing and entertaining. That pressure affects governments, industries and citizens, and has become stronger during the pandemic and post pandemic. While communities and societies cope with that it is important to keep in mind that fostering citizenship and democracy requires dialogue, tolerance, “listening to and encountering the other.” Supporting the development of dispositions such as dialogue and critical thinking and reflexivity needs to be balanced with the development of instrumental and functional skills. This can be quite a challenge because the business model and design of most digital platforms and technological innovations we use today tends to privilege efficiency, fast interactions, consumption, and data extractivism. However, transforming that business model and infrastructure design also opens a space of opportunity for imagining alternative futures, data decolonization,  and advancing media education.  What is in your opinion about the future of educomunicación?

Julio Cesar: 

Regarding future perspectives, I want to recall some of the opportunities we identified in our book. The first is to recognise the existence of media education in Latin America as an interdisciplinary field of study and action, and to recover the theoretical basis of educomunicación instead of focusing on purely digital and technological rhetoric. Updating it and continuing to develop educomunicacion knowledges and practices is crucial for designing public policy interventions in our countries. One of the most important points for Latin American public policies is to overcome the understanding that educational technology and media education are different issues.

Secondly, we have to project media education to other audiences and spaces beyond the school context. This is an opportunity to generate new dialogues among generations and groups about the impact of media in society. On that matter, we need to incorporate dynamics that are characteristic of social media and of digital literacies as part of a training centred around the person and democratic values. This can help to combat intolerant speech in social media, diminish the circulation of ‘fake news’ and other issues that may endanger peaceful and respectful coexistence.

And finally, to be consistent with the educomunicación approach, we have to encourage media education that is oriented toward confronting inequality in rural or marginalised areas, starting with their own interests and needs. Media education is not only about getting technology there but also about guaranteeing fundamental rights to citizens that are usually disregarded, favouring their voice and their culture.

Works cited:

• Aguirre Alvis, J. L. (2020). Development Communication in Latin America. En Servaes, J. (ed.), Handbook of Communication for Development and Social Change. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2014-3_135 

• Aparici, R. (2011). Educomunicación: Más allá del 2.0 (Comunicación Educativa). Gedisa.

• DeSignis. (2015). Tres décadas de educomunicación en América Latina. Caminos desde el Plan Deni. https://issuu.com/oclacc/docs/tres_decadas_de_educomunicacion_en_/275  

• Dorfman, A., & Mattelart, A. (1975). How to Read Donald Duck. Pluto Press

• Freire Institute. (n. d.). Paulo Freire. https://www.freire.org/ 

• Lumen Learning. (n. d.). Media Effects Theories. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-massmedia/chapter/2-2-media-effects-theories/ 

• Mateus, J. C., Andrada, P., & Quiroz, M. T. (Eds.). (2019). Media Education in Latin America (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429244469 

• Narvaez, A. (2021). Educomunicación y alfabetización mediática: ¿tecnología o cultura ? ¿adiestramiento o educación? Pedagogía y Saberes, (55), 155-174. https://doi.org/10.17227/pys.num55-12245  

Authors

Julio-César Mateus (@juliussinmundo) is Full Professor and researcher in the Faculty of Communication at the University of Lima, Peru. He coordinates the Education and Communication research group and is editor-in-chief of the academic journal Contratexto. His PhD thesis explores the media literacy approach in teachers' initial training in Peru. He has published Media Education in Latin America (coedited with M.Teresa Quiroz and Pablo Andrada for Routledge) and several articles in indexed journals.

Andres Lombana-Bermudez (@vVvA) is an assistant professor of communication at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, Colombia. He is also an associate researcher at the Centro ISUR at the Universidad del Rosario, and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.  He is the co-author of  "The Digital Edge: How Black and Latino Youth Navigate Digital Inequality" (2018), “Youth and the Digital Economy: Exploring Youth Practices, Motivations, Skills, Pathways, and Value Creation” (2020), among other publications.

Mapping Educomunicacion Projects (Part 4)

Mapping Educomunicacion Projects (Part 4)

Edited by Julio-César Mateus, Ph.D. and Andres Lombana-Bermudez, Ph.D

Mapping the geography of educomunicación projects in Latin America is a pending task. Inspired by Martin-Barbero´s cartographic method we tracked four media education projects across the region that stand out for their contributions and diversity of approaches. These initiatives range from NGOs to community groups doing educomunicacion at schools, and through Internet and community radios. While some have been working for more than 20 years, others are just starting. Some have been born in the digital world and connected to the global media education debates, others come from local educomunicacion traditions and have recently transitioned to the digital. Such heterogeneity of projects reveals the evolution of educomunicacion in the region and the diversification and fragmentation of the field. On the 15th of june we reunited them at the second webinar “Post Pandemic Educomunicación. Learnings from Latin America 2”

“A mí no me la hacen” (AMNMLH) is a media education group born in Peru in the middle of the pandemic. Composed of an interdisciplinary team of communicators, philosophers, artists, geologists, internationalists and pedagogues, their objective is to provide a “bottom-up” response to the infodemic and public distrust in media. The group’s effort complements several Peruvian “fact-checking” initiatives which have had a limited impact fighting disinformation. Through workshops in schools, universities and institutes, as well as the creation of educational content on networks, AMNMLH seeks to “empower people so that they can judge the messages and media ecosystems where they are found”. For Manuel-Antonio Monteagudo, coordinator of the group, “many fake news thrive because one wants to question, but lacks the training to articulate their response. We want to explain to people how information creators work, how this information reaches us, how our biases process it, and how to evaluate the quality of the information we access ”. In a local context characterized by the proliferation of disinformation related to the pandemic and the 2021 Peruvian presidential elections, AMNMLH work has been on demand. Currently, AMNMLH is  organizing a Peruvian media education symposium, which will take place from October 26 to 29, 2021, during UNESCO's Global Media and Information Literacy (MIL) Week.

Poster of the school contest “Media education to decipher the world” sponsored by AMNMLH 

From Argentina, Ezequiel Passeron is the co-founder of an NGO called Faro Digital, whose purpose is to promote a reflective, critical and creative digital citizenship. “We consider the Internet as a public space, where it is crucial to have moments of critical thinking about our relationships with information, with others and with the world,” he says. Among other projects, the training program ‘I am digital’ (#SoyDigital) stands out, supporting creative and imaginative uses of social media among youth and adults.  The program promotes strategies for dealing with  issues such as grooming, gender violence, hate speech and disinformation. Another project is ‘Digital RAP, a contest promoted in conjunction with UNICEF. “RAP” is an acronym for respect, art and participation, values ​​that the members of Faro Digital seek to promote through the voices of young people.

[Image: Workshops Faro Digital]

Free on-line workshops “How to confront hate speech” and “Children and screens” sponsored by Faro Digital in Argentina 

Members of Faro Digital also participate in research projects and are aware of the need to disseminate scientific knowledge through the new formats and channels that are familiar to youth. Along these lines, together with the Esbrina Group of the University of Barcelona, ​​they created the “Educar con sentido” (“Teach with sense”) program, a cycle of conversations and interviews with voices from the educational, communication and media ecosystem.

For its part, Comunicarte, in Colombia, is a group led by Alma Montoya that has been working for more than 25 years in educommunicacion projects, specifically with school children in conflict zones across the country. “We work on human mobility issues, whether due to migration or displacement; climate change; and human rights, such as freedom of expression”. From the production of information sheets to workshops, they found a strategic ally in community and educational radio stations. As Alma says, “it is not about becoming a teleclass, but rather generating a real and tangible learning community; remember that today there are no longer senders and receivers, but prosumers, all of us. The media are in everyone's hands, and the real question is about the content”.

[Image: Comunicarte]

School radio project in Arauquita, Colombia (Photo: Comunicarte)

Along the same line of work with vulnerable groups, the DW Akademie, the center of the German channel Deutsche Welle for the development of media and financed with public funds, promotes several initiatives of media and information literacy (AMI) in various countries, including some in Central America. For Patricia Noboa, the DW AMI project coordinator, “the idea stems from the right to access information and freedom of expression, that's why we deal with things like populism, propaganda, misinformation, etc.” They help to build networks of individuals and organizations that work on digital rights issues and participate in the public debate. At the regional level, they have developed training kits for indigenous groups, as well as an e-learning course to teach informational skills in a pandemic context. At the local level, they support initiatives conceived by local partners (mainly community radio stations and youth groups) through participatory methodologies.

Challenges and opportunities on the field 

For Ezequiel Passeron, the social and digital gaps in the region are the main stumbling block, something that became even more visible with the pandemic. “Social and cultural inequalities, pre-existing and reproduced in digital spaces, should be the flags to raise from activism with a clear horizon: continue to expand the human rights of all”. Alma Montoya highlighted the challenge of access, explaining that in many of the rural areas of Colombia where she works, there are children and youth who must travel long distances to have internet access. These gaps transcend connectivity barriers and are mixed with structural socioeconomic inequalities. 

The four projects aim to promote dialogue and “the encounter of the other,” the basis of educomunicacion. “The school cannot be virtualized simply by copying what was done in class. We must promote spaces where teachers and student interventions are welcomed”, says Ezequiel. Along the same lines, Patricia Noboa explained the urgency of adapting interventions to different local contexts and people's needs. That is why DW Akademy works in collaboration with local communities for their projects. For instance, “our partner in Guatemala, Comunicares, worked with members from each language community in the country and with a group of teachers to teach AMI to indigenous youth. They speak their language as well as Spanish, and that ensures that they help their communities''. Such is the importance of conceiving projects that adapt to the local context: “A game, a course, a workshop can be adjusted to the reality of another country or region”, Patricia pointed out.

Workshop on media literacy and indigenous languages in Guatemala  (Photo: Comunicares)

In terms of sustainability each project is different. While some have robust public financing as in the case of DW Akademie, others have very limited funds as those provided by the Colombian Ministry of Education and local governments to Comunicarte. “Sometimes communities call us in an emergency and we have to pay the tickets, bring something to keep us warm, and find a place to sleep. We don´t say no to anything”, Alma explains. Other projects have self-financing mechanisms as in the case of AMNMLH, whose team is made up of part-time volunteers. “We do interventions in universities that allow us to have a common fund for future initiatives such as podcasts, digital materials or series on media education”, explains Manuel. In the case of Faro Digital, they fund their activities and work through multiple funders, “with international and private organizations, with the state, etc.”

Finally, the projects are very clear about the advantage of the interdisciplinary approach to create new pedagogies and imaginaries. Creating spaces for reflection and criticism goes beyond schools and educators: they can take place inside of people's homes, where media also reaches. “Digital gaps, of course, are not limited to connectivity problems: they include socioeconomic conditions, cultural capital, disposition of the homes, etc.”, affirms Ezequiel. In this sense, a major challenge is to form multidisciplinary teams that address complex issues, such as how artificial intelligence changes the production and consumption of content. “In order to be critical we must understand how digital platforms work.” It is from that critical, creative and dialogic perspective that Latin American projects meet and respond to the principles of educommunicacion. 

Webinar Panelists 

Manuel-Antonio Monteagudo (@ManuelMontea) is a French-Peruvian filmmaker and coordinator of “A Mi No Me La Hacen”, an association dedicated of providing Media and Information Literacy workshops and stimulating a national conversation on MIL as a way to answer to the Infodemic and reinforcing democracy. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Sciences from Sciences Po Paris, and a Master’s Degree in Journalism from Sciences Po’s School of Journalism. He directs fiction and documentary projects in France and Peru.

Ezequiel Passeron, (@farodigitalok) Institutional director at Faro Digital. Ph.D candidate in “Education and Society” at the University of Barcelona. Coordinator of “Conectados al Sur” network. Associate professor at the University of Barcelona. Member of “ESBRINA — Subjetividades, visualidades y entornos educativos contemporáneos (2017SGR1248) research group. His research activity focuses on the intersections between communication, education and digital media.

Patricia Noboa Armendáriz (@PatyeNoboa), is the DW Akademie program director in Guatemala and Central America. She develops media projects for freedom of expression and access to information focused on Media and Information Literacy (MIL). She is Ecuadorian journalist with experience in radio, television and media production for youth. She has a degree in communication and journalism from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador and a Master in “International Media Studies” from the University of Bonn and the Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, in Germany.

Special thanks: 

We want to thank Alejandro Núñez Álberca for his committed help transcribing the two educomunicacion webinars, and editing and translating this post. Alejandro is a research assistant at the Institute of Scientific Research (IDIC) at the University of Lima and a lecturer in the Peruvian Institute of Arts and Design (IPAD).

“Welcome again to Chaos.” Educomunicación’s Challenges and Opportunities. (Part 3)

“Welcome again to Chaos.” Educomunicación’s Challenges and Opportunities. (Part 3)

Edited by Julio-César Mateus, Ph.D. and Andres Lombana-Bermudez, Ph.D.

Continuing with the dialogue about Educomunicación, the media education movement and tradition from Latin America, in this entry we share another excerpt from the webinar “Post Pandemic Educomunicación. Learnings from Latin America 1” (May 25, 2021) and listen to the voices of Maria Teresa Quiroz (Peru), Silvia Bacher (Argentina), Amparo Marroquín (El Salvador) and Eduardo Gutierrez (Colombia). We start listening to their answers to the following question: 

What are the most pressing challenges and opportunities that Educomunicacion confronts as countries, cities, and communities adapt to the new normality of the pandemic and post pandemic?

Silvia:

We face several challenges. To begin with, it is undeniable that connectivity is the new face of inequality. Latin America was already a continent of inequalities, but the pandemic has enhanced them even more. 

I cannot avoid mentioning that there is a gender bias: women support the household, their children, and sometimes they have also had to replicate the pedagogical content that schools used to supply in a traditional way. It is a time of crisis, but it is also urgent to account for these aspects. My fear is that we do not take the time to be critical and end up replicating pre-pandemic cultural patterns to the post-pandemic world. 

This crisis is an opportunity to transform culture, to look at technology and the links between people with different eyes. New ideas allow us to build different paths in education and communication, otherwise this will again be a wasted opportunity. We do not know what will happen and we are building it as we go along, but we have to start at some point.

Maria Teresa:

Economic and social gaps have widened as poverty, inequality and vulnerability have spread. The great challenge is to address our diversity. The history of education and communication is different depending on the country, but the only common thing is this urgency to assume social heterogeneity, to bring the voice of all to public policies.

A great Peruvian educator, Juan Cadillo, is optimistic and thinks that in this period has significantly increased the mastery of teachers on digital tools. They are developing very creative proposals to address their precarious situation. Of course, as far as the media industry and large technology corporations are concerned, as well as other public and private institutions, a lot of support is required for these initiatives to grow. 

It is true that several institutions have prepared learning strategies, as well as all kinds of materials, but their success depends on developing and designing them with teachers. It is not a process that can be done from above. A constant dialogue must be maintained with the teachers who are on the front line, who know the children, their interests and talents.

Eduardo Gutiérrez:

It is something that my work has taught me to notice. For years I have been in direct contact with teachers, I am close to them in many places and I gather their experiences. This seems important to me because, historically, the work of teachers has been made invisible. The school, as a space where knowledge is produced, is very little valued. This invisibility must be addressed from below: how do we teachers face this situation and build possibilities? These are some of the current challenges of educommunication.

A curious thing has happened with the pandemic. Many teachers have had time to meet, talk and compare experiences. The network in which I work, Chisua, has an international seminar on knowledge networks, school and discipline, and every week we have meetings and presentations of teachers from Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, Colombia, etc. “Chisua” is a Muisca word that means 'knapsack' (mochila in Spanish), it is a good metaphor for what we do: we weave knowledge, we carry and share our content with others, motivating them and recognizing the teacher as a mobilizer of citizenship. It is an emerging network of collective actions. 

This collective took advantage of the production of content for a series called Viajemos por Colombia desde casa (Let's travel through Colombia from home). There we have managed to include themes of interculturality, diversity, territory, rurality, etc. Several dimensions that are not traditionally addressed in pedagogy.

Amparo:

From Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, in Central America in fact, educommunicacion has developed with several particularities. On the one hand, due to the war and social conflicts of the 1990s, liberation theology has had a considerable influence on how we think about education and its emancipatory role for children and youth. At the same time, another particularity has been the migratory phenomena in the region, which have reached international media long time ago, are accelerating the process of appropriation of technologies. This was happening even before the pandemic, and I see it as something very specific to the region in contrast to the rest of Latin America.

During the pandemic we did several exploratory works with different groups of teachers. In one of them we asked people what was their predominant feeling during this crisis. Almost all of them said they felt anguished, fragile in the face of everything that was happening around them. And it is doubly hard because, commonly, the networks and technology of the algorithmic culture give us a sense of control over the apparatus. From this secure position, suddenly, comes COVID-19. The main thing in this scenario is to know how to deal with so much uncertainty. The educommunicacion projects are much clearer about that. Communication and education, I believe, raise the question of how we want to live together and build a society that can cope with the levels of anxiety.

How can educomunicación, as a media education and media literacies approach, mediate the social, economic, and political crisis that are unfolding in several Latin American countries?

Silvia: 

I would rather say those are  the new challenges of educommunicacion. When Martín-Babero was in Buenos Aires he gave a presentation called "Welcome back to chaos". Note: he said 'again', and he saw chaos as an opportunity. He said that the school must face multiple dilemmas, and that if society does not invent new forms of integration for children, they will be left out of it as citizens and will only exist as consumers. Chaos produces fear, but it is also a notorious opportunity. The problem, I believe, is that our vision is of the 20th century, but the problems are of the 21st century. We continue to ignore the voices of the youngest, we forget that democracy must go hand in hand with informed control of the media. We must put technology at the service of human beings, defend freedom of participation and dialogue through the media. Without that the dream of democracy is diluted. This is not new: Freire said it back in 1993, and there is still much to be done. 

Eduardo: 

It is precisely in these cracks and fractures caused by chaos that there are many opportunities to think. In the Colombian case, schools are raising questions about water, memory and territory. From these school spaces we can understand the living pluralities that exist among us. When I see young people protesting I ask myself what happened in their school that led them to decide to march for a different country, how was their civic education. School is a very important place to think about these questions, as long as we do not talk about what the school is but about what it could be: new futures, new ideas.

Amparo: 

It is evident that we are societies with very absent states. Faced with this, the processes of educommunicacion are fundamental from a local dimension: what kind of schools build a citizenship without roots, where the main dream of young people is to go elsewhere? This is where we have challenges and questions. As Freire said, we are still very silenced cultures. Our teachers, I think, are still very afraid to create content in social networks, even if it is beneficial for their class. The fear of creating one's own things should gradually disappear.

Webinar Panelists 

Maria Teresa Quiroz holds a PhD in Sociology. She is director of the Scientific Research Institute of the University of Lima (IDIC) and vice-president of the National Institute of Radio and TV of Peru (IRTP). She is also past-president of the Latin American Federation of Social Communication Schools (FELAFACS) and former dean of the School of Communication at the University of Lima. She has studied the relationship between children and young people and the media. Among other books, she has published Todas las voces: comunicación y educación en el Perú, Jóvenes e internet: entre el pensar y el sentir and La edad de la pantalla.

Silvia Bacher holds a Master 's degree in Communication and Culture (Universidad de Buenos Aires). She is a journalist specialized in culture and education, awarded first prize by the University of Buenos Aires for education reporting. She is the founder and director of the NGO Las Otras Voces, Comunicación para la democracia. awarded by UNESCO Media and Information Literacy Alliance Award. Bacher has published Navigate among cultures. Education. Communication and Digital Citizenship (2016), and Tattooed by the Media: Dilemmas in Education in the Digital Era (2009). She is a member of the National Advisory Board at the Audiovisual Communications in Childhood (CONACAI). She coordinates in Argentina ALFAMED an Euro-American inter-university research network on media literacy for citizenship. https://silviabacher.com.ar/

Eduardo Gutierrez is a professor at the Communication Department of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana of Bogotá, where is a member of the research groups Communication, Media and Culture, and Young Cultures and Powers. He is a participant of the Political Communication and Citizenship Group of CLACSO. He is also a doctoral student in Education at DIE-UD of the Pedagogical, Distrital and Valle Universities, and holds a Master’s Degree in Communication from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Gutierrez is a member of the Editorial Committee of the journal Palabra Clave (Colombia), of the editorial team of Chasqui (Ecuador) and of the external editorial board of Comunicación Social (Bolivia).

Amparo Marroquín, Ph.D., is a professor and researcher at the University of Central America (UCA) of El Salvador since 1997. Her work has focussed on cultural studies, reception studies and communication in Central America. She is also Visiting Professor at UCA Nicaragua; the Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) in Quito, Ecuador; the National Universities of La Plata, Córdoba, Jujuy and Salta in Argentina; and the University of La Frontera in Chile, among others. She is part of the coordinating team of the research group on Political Communication and Citizenship for CLACSO and researcher of the International Center for Studies on Epistemologies Borders and the Political Economy of Culture in Temuco, Chile.

Educomunicación Matters: Media Education in a Pandemic and Post Pandemic World (Part 2)

Educomunicación Matters: Media Education in a Pandemic and Post Pandemic World  (Part 2)

Edited by Julio-César Mateus, Ph.D. and Andres Lombana-Bermudez, Ph.D.

In the second post of the series on Educomunicación, we present an excerpt of the dialogue we had on May 25, during the webinar “Post Pandemic Educomunicación. Learnings from Latin America 1”  co-organized and co-hosted by Universidad de Lima (Peru) and Universidad Javeriana (Colombia). In this webinar we had the opportunity to listen and exchange ideas with four Latin American researchers that have worked on media education and media literacy projects in different countries of the region for several years: Maria Teresa Quiroz (Peru), Silvia Bacher (Argentina), Amparo Marroquín (El Salvador) and Eduardo Gutierrez (Colombia). Below we present, translated to the English language, their responses to the questions Why is educomunicación important today? Why does it matter?

María Teresa Quiroz: 

At this juncture, educommunicacion is at the center of new forms of learning. A recent report published by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL) suggests that we should ask ourselves about the role of education and its relationship with information technologies. In this sense, covid-19 has brought educommunicacion to the very center of education and has eliminated the distance between the two. This approach invites us to conceive education not as a sum of courses, but as a set of different learning processes that must be carefully designed and prepared.

The educommunicative approach helps us to see that this cannot be reduced to a simple technical problem. There is a serious deficit in the ability to make proper educational use of the new platforms. For that we need children and teachers to develop practices that allow them to communicate and form the same social ties through other modalities: from face-to-face to blended and distance learning. From the educommunicacion perspective, we wonder what the effects of this situation will be on the competencies of citizens, especially those who are still in training.

This is especially critical in Latin America, where it is estimated that 120 million children have lost their classes. One of the biggest problems to be solved, according to the World Bank, lies in unequal access: we have children living in very dissimilar geographical, health and social conditions. 

Silvia Bacher:

Personally, I still prefer to think of 'education and communication' instead of educomunicacion, even if it sounds longer. I think it is easier to understand that we are dealing with fundamental rights for millions of people, the same rights that allow us to influence and transform social scenarios. This makes it easier to understand the urgency for post-pandemic life.

We cannot look at covid-19 and its effect without understanding the continuity of policies that have failed, even if they have had some successes. We have worked hard on education and communication, but it has not been enough. If we do not guarantee and demand that governments account for this disparity, the rights of thousands of young people and children will be at stake. 

We can imagine many possible futures, but if we don't listen to the voices of youth and children I don't think we can get very far. This is what we work for in Las Otras Voces, to promote the exercise of the right to communication from childhood and, from there, to strengthen participation in democratic life. What we need most is to reinforce critical thinking about the media and information, because we run the risk of deepening and expanding inequalities in Latin America. 

Eduardo Gutiérrez:

We have to think about the place of educommunicacion in our culture. From this point of view, we should not only talk about the school, but also about different emerging forms of work that dynamize social and educational processes. By inverting the game, by seeing it from the broad spectrum of the social fabric, the map expands and we can involve different elements.

Something that helps us a lot is the metaphor of “the anthill”: there is a real collective work, but it depends on a multiplicity of processes, actions and educommunicacion strategies that operate in isolation, and little by little show us results. We have a multiplicity of processes and actions in the field of educommunicacion, teachers and institutions work each in their own work, but they all advance the system even if they are not aware of it. The objective is to unify our actions, to be able to weave networks.

We do not have the possibility of seeing the complete map of everything that is being done, but we know that we have an 'anthill' of various actions that are already underway. We have to find the emerging configurations, see the dialogue between actors, the network of contents that is being produced. Educommunicacion must work with this proliferation of initiatives, but also encourage them and allow them to meet and work together.

[Image: Anthill]

Amparo Marroquín:

The processes of educommunicacion based on the Latin American heritage give us the tools to build new citizens who understand the importance of combating caudillismo, populism and authoritarianism, which is key in a region that is democratically very fragile. At the same time, we have a challenge: classrooms remain deeply oriented towards rote learning. The pandemic has only transferred a very precarious type of education to the virtual environment, while meaningful student interaction is very little. The student interacts with guides, takes exams, and nothing else. 

The way we think about education has to change if we want to take advantage of this opportunity. In Central America we still risk falling into technophilia, believing that giving a laptop to every child solves the whole problem. That kind of intervention does not mean that we are training the child to be a citizen, not from an educommunicative paradigm. That is why we must bet that education-communication has a place in the communities again. The problems of mental health, but also those of inclusion, coexistence, food sovereignty and respect for the environment, should be discussed at school. 

María Teresa Quiroz: 

Carlos Scolari says that the pandemic throws us into a world of uncertainty, affects the social fabric and the way children socialize. Faced with this, the educommunicative paradigm proposes a space for reinvention. We have to rethink school and education in conjunction with technological and economic changes. The compulsory public school, created three centuries ago, is outdated today and other forms of teaching, which strive to fight against the misunderstanding of the digital environment, are urgent.

Webinar Panelists 

Maria Teresa Quiroz holds a PhD in Sociology. She is director of the Scientific Research Institute of the University of Lima (IDIC) and vice-president of the National Institute of Radio and TV of Peru (IRTP). She is also past-president of the Latin American Federation of Social Communication Schools (FELAFACS) and former dean of the School of Communication at the University of Lima. She has studied the relationship between children and young people and the media. Among other books, she has published Todas las voces: comunicación y educación en el Perú, Jóvenes e internet: entre el pensar y el sentir and La edad de la pantalla.

Silvia Bacher holds a Master 's degree in Communication and Culture (Universidad de Buenos Aires). She is a journalist specialized in culture and education, awarded first prize by the University of Buenos Aires for education reporting. She is the founder and director of the NGO Las Otras Voces, Comunicación para la democracia. awarded by UNESCO Media and Information Literacy Alliance Award. Bacher has published Navigate among cultures. Education. Communication and Digital Citizenship (2016), and Tattooed by the Media: Dilemmas in Education in the Digital Era (2009). She is a member of the National Advisory Board at the Audiovisual Communications in Childhood (CONACAI). She coordinates in Argentina ALFAMED an Euro-American inter-university research network on media literacy for citizenship. https://silviabacher.com.ar/

Eduardo Gutierrez is a professor at the Communication Department of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana of Bogotá, where is a member of the research groups Communication, Media and Culture, and Young Cultures and Powers. He is a participant of the Political Communication and Citizenship Group of CLACSO. He is also a doctoral student in Education at DIE-UD of the Pedagogical, Distrital and Valle Universities, and holds a Master’s Degree in Communication from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Gutierrez is a member of the Editorial Committee of the journal Palabra Clave (Colombia), of the editorial team of Chasqui (Ecuador) and of the external editorial board of Comunicación Social (Bolivia)

Amparo Marroquín, Ph.D., is a professor and researcher at the University of Central America (UCA) of El Salvador since 1997. Her work has focussed on cultural studies, reception studies and communication in Central America. She is also Visiting Professor at UCA Nicaragua; the Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) in Quito, Ecuador; the National Universities of La Plata, Córdoba, Jujuy and Salta in Argentina; and the University of La Frontera in Chile, among others. She is part of the coordinating team of the research group on Political Communication and Citizenship for CLACSO and researcher of the International Center for Studies on Epistemologies Borders and the Political Economy of Culture in Temuco, Chile.