In the film The Truman Show (Weir, 1998), Christof, the creator of a contrived reality television world in which Truman unknowingly lives, defends Truman’s situation by telling an interviewer, "We accept the reality of the world with which we're presented. It's as simple as that." Given the digitally mediated and algorithmically fragmented realities individuals encounter daily through contemporary social media environments, Christof’s statement now feels less dystopian and more descriptive of modern life—almost like a warning issued for a world increasingly shaped by curated and constructed realities. As our terrain of socialization and acculturation continually shifts further into digital spaces, media is no longer merely something adolescents consume; it has become the very landscape within and through which they move socially, politically, emotionally, and cognitively. A 2021 report from Common Sense Media found that teens averaged 8 hours and 39 minutes of media use per day, reflecting what Steven Johnson describes as a generation for whom “the screen is not just something you manipulate, but something you project your identity onto, a place to work through the story of your life as it unfolds” (p. 119). From their TikTok “For You” pages and algorithmically-curated news, to their streaming service programming and reality competition shows, students are constantly being asked to interpret mediated reality without always recognizing how those realities are constructed, who benefits from them, what perspectives are omitted, or how media positions audiences to think and feel in particular ways. In this context, it is imperative that educators begin to devise ways of cultivating critical media literacy skills within the classroom, creating the conditions in which students might learn to recognize the constructed nature of modern media culture rather than simply accepting it as reality. Helping students “see the set” of contemporary media culture requires opportunities to critically examine these media ecosystems that deliver what appears to be real, authentic, and true.
Through artifacts such as The Truman Show, Survivor, and Facing History’s media literacy lessons, secondary English Language Arts classrooms have the potential to become sites of inquiry where students develop the interpretive tools necessary for navigating digitally mediated social, civic, and emotional life. Secondary students, in grades 7-12, are perhaps uniquely positioned to benefit from critical media literacy instruction because they are actively developing within these media-saturated environments. As these digital landscapes become the immediate environment within which adolescents are socialized, they continue to shape how adolescents understand themselves and the world. Whether or not students realize it, their brains are constantly receiving an overload of auditory and visual information, which is only exacerbated by the rat-race of stakeholders trying to break through the noise of an over-saturated media ecosystem. Mayer’s (2001) theory of multimedia learning helps us understand how the media landscape becomes almost imperceptibly overwhelming—perhaps especially for digital native users, who know no other way of being—as their cognitive load is limited by the amount of information that each processing channel is able to handle at one time. From before children can even read words, they begin reading the world—processing symbols, tracing stories, and organizing ideas. As they grow older, these processes become more sophisticated: they begin interpreting narratives, decoding performances, examining authenticity, negotiating identity formation, participating in affinity spaces, and producing (individual and shared) social meanings through multimedia communication. Mayer’s active processing assumption of multimedia learning highlights the need for students to actively engage in cognitive processing in order for meaningful learning to occur, as they attend to, organize, and represent incoming information. Explicitly teaching media literacy ideas will help students become the kind of active participants for which Mayer advocates in the processing of information—sharpening their skills while affirming the literacies they already bring into the classroom. Henry Jenkins’s concept of media convergence further highlights the participatory nature of contemporary digital culture, demonstrating how individuals are no longer merely passive audiences, but rather active participants in the democratization of the production, circulation, and interpretation of media narratives. Along the contours of contemporary media culture, the definition of literacy continues to expand; our understanding of literacy in the classroom must be reframed along with it. By bringing artifacts like reality television and modern films into the classroom alongside lessons exploring democratic literacies, the ELA classroom can create a bridge between academic inquiry and the kinds of meaning-making practices that students already engage in outside of school. Instead of dismissing popular culture artifacts as distractions from “real” humanities education, these artifacts become sites of literacy themselves, helping challenge the monopoly of traditionally schooled ways of knowing rooted in oppression and exclusion. James P. Gee writes that video games “situate meaning in a multimodal space through embodied experiences to solve problems and reflect on the intricacies of the design of imagined worlds and the design of both real and imagined social relationships and identities in the modern world” (p. 48). Although Gee wrote this in reference to video games, the idealized ELA classroom can function similarly: as a space where students enter into experiential modes of inquiry and reflection to critically interpret the complex, multimodal systems that define what it means to exist in our modern, digitally-mediated world. Bandura’s social cognitive theory underscores the urgency of this work, as adolescents often learn and inherit behaviors, values, and social norms through their mediated observations of symbolic models online. Students must learn not only how to stay afloat in today’s media landscape, but also how to row against the oncoming tides of algorithmic feeds, influencer culture, and “fake news.” Together, these artifacts help create a framework for students to begin to interpret and examine the media systems shaping their social, emotional, and civic realities. To beckon students to begin to see why media literacy matters, the first artifact is The Truman Show. As a satirical film about the reality genre, it provides an opening for students to start thinking about concepts like authenticity, surveillance, and the illusion of constructed realities. The dystopian farce keeps students engaged, their breath bated in its dramatic irony, waiting to see how Truman will navigate his monitored confinement. Gradually, as the film progresses—and the absurdity of product placements, corporate greed, and manufactured relationships reveal themselves—students realize that the film is more than just a farce—it is a critique of the erosion of privacy and agency in a world that is increasingly surveilled and exploited for profit. At once amusing and poignant, the film invites students to question not only the constructed world surrounding Truman, but also the mediated realities shaping their own everyday lives. Students are well aware of how algorithms have constructed our individual online realities, serving us only content deemed relevant to us, often aligning with our beliefs and perpetuating our biases—perhaps not all that different from Truman’s cushioned life in “Seahaven Island.” Like Truman’s actor best friend, Marlon, says: “It’s all true. It’s all real. Nothing here is fake… It’s merely controlled.” While Truman’s journey helps materialize the importance of media literacy in our current age, it also serves as a dramatization of Bandura’s (2002) theory illustrating how media environments shape our behaviors, beliefs, norms, and, thereby, our very understanding of social reality itself. Though the film is prescient in many ways, “[what] the film failed to predict… was how many people would one day beg to take part in a Truman show of their own” (Moore, 2024). In this sense, one limitation of the artifact is that it imagines surveillance primarily as something imposed upon unwilling participants, whereas contemporary digital culture is marked by millions of users who voluntarily commodify and publicize their own identities online. The problem educators must address is that adolescents are not always aware of the ways in which they are complicit in this surveillance; our social and media lives have converged: as the character Meryl, Truman’s actor wife, explains, “Well, I mean, there…is no difference between a private life and a public life. My–my life… is ‘The Truman Show.’” However, the goal of studying The Truman Show is not to incite “Big Brother” paranoia, but rather to raise their consciousness of the systems shaping modern social life. As Truman shouts, “You never had a camera in my head!,” students are invited to consider what forms of agency, individuality, resistance, and self-awareness remain possible within environments controlled by algorithms, corporations, and the commodification of personal identity. If The Truman Show helps students recognize the constructed nature of mediated realities, then the television show Survivor helps make the social-political, psychological, and participatory dimensions of those realities. Unlike The Truman Show, where surveillance is imposed onto Truman, the contestants on Survivor complicate the conversation by entering this ecosystem of observation, performance, and competition willingly. As a genre, reality television is one of the most accessible sites through which students can learn to critically interpret mediated presentations and constructed narratives because reality television modes are deeply familiar to adolescents. The conventions of reality television—curated identities, participatory spectatorship, emotional presentations, etc.—have been scaled to size for social media, embedding those sensibilities into the logic of digital online culture at large. Students watch as contestants strategically perform versions of themselves for both fellow competitors and a national audience, inviting them to decode social cues, examine performances of credibility, and trace the development of relationships among competitors. Johnson writes, “The unique cocktail that the reality genre serves up—real people, evolving rule systems, and emotional intimacy—prods the mind into action. You don’t zone out in front of [these] shows… You play along” (p. 107). This sense of playing along closely aligns with Bandura’s (2002) social cognitive theory, as the contestants themselves become symbolic models through which students vicariously observe behaviors, values, socio-emotional responses, and decision making. “[That] social chess becomes part of the audience’s experience as well” (Johnson, p. 95). As students “play along” and evaluate the alliances, deceptions, and betrayals that shape the game, they are simultaneously reflecting upon broader themes of morality, social behavior, and interpersonal dynamics. Johnson (2005) argues for how these unscripted reality programs rigorously engage the mind, particularly the social mind, because “[when] you watch these shows, the part of our brain that monitors the emotional lives of the people around us—the part that tracks subtle shifts in intonation and gesture and facial expressions—scrutinizes the action on the screen, looking for clues” (p. 96). A significant advantage of studying Survivor as a classroom artifact is that it transforms media analysis into an active interpretive process rather than a passive viewing experience, while cultivating precisely the kinds of interpretive and socio-emotional literacy skills that contemporary media environments increasingly demand. Although one disadvantage of Survivor as an artifact might be that it contains biases through its selective editing, manufactured conflicts, and producer involvement, these elements also create opportunities for more traditional ELA analyses of the show’s rhetoric and storytelling. For example, educators could invite students to study literary elements like characterization, unreliable narration, dramatic irony, or persuasion by analyzing show features like confessionals, music/score cues, camera framing, or narrative arcs (e.g., hero, villain, underdog, game-player, etc.). By intentionally teaching into the interpretive capacities students already possess, educators can use these entry points to leverage Gee’s theory of learning in semiotic domains, or “any set of practices that recruits one or more modalities (e.g., oral or written language, images, equations, symbols, sounds, gestures, graphs, artifacts, etc.) to communicate distinctive types of meanings” (Gee, p. 18). Each of these lessons, rooted in situated meanings and literary practices, cultivates students’ critical media literacy, helping them build upon those skills critically as they become increasingly aware of how they move through these domains as observers and participants. Rather than passively consuming the episodes, students become active participants in meaning-making, as they are constantly asking themselves who is trustworthy, what performances are authentic, and how narratives are being constructed both within the competition game and through the show’s editing. In the premiere episode of Survivor in 2000, the show’s host, Jeff Probst, introduces the show with the following framing: “Sixteen strangers forced to band together, carve out a new existence, totally accountable for their actions—they must learn to adapt or they’ll be voted off.” Often self-dubbed as “the greatest social experiment of all time,” the show gives us a window into real-world challenges like social dynamics and political maneuvering involved in building a miniature society (in this way, I could also see Survivor being a compelling artifact to accompany a class study of William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies!). Just as Survivor creates a micro-society out of its participants, so do our classrooms. To help realize the civic and democratic potential of our classrooms to act as micro-societies where students learn to critically engage with one another and with media systems that shape their lives, the third artifact, media literacy lessons from Facing History, becomes especially valuable. Harkening back to Bandura’s (2002) theories exploring how media environments shape social understanding, these four lessons provide a more explicit framework for connecting media analysis to the interpretive demands of contemporary social and political life. Centering on the essential question “What is media literacy and why does it matter to individuals, communities, and the strength of our democracy?,” the lessons use a variety of multimodal activities as they invite students to thoughtfully examine the role mass media plays in shaping our public perception and collective behavior. Throughout the lesson sequence, students are gradually encouraged to interrogate how mass media functions, how misinformation or disinformation circulate, how audiences can verify information responsibly, and how media narratives influence the ways individuals understand truth, power, and social reality. Essentially, these lessons translate the very kinds of critical practices that artifacts such as The Truman Show and Survivor begin to surface for students. An advantage of integrating this artifact into the classroom’s study is that it moves beyond just having students define and discuss what media literacy is, instead asking them to deeply consider the impacts of mass media and what actions individuals can take to exist more ethically within these media landscapes. By doing so, these lessons reinforce the idea that media literacy is ultimately a democratic literacy, as it expands one’s ability to thoughtfully and responsibly navigate online public spaces. This idea also reflects Jenkins’ media convergence theories, as audiences are no longer passive consumers of stories shipped down from entertainment infrastructure, but instead from average citizens who bring their own perspectives and experiences into the media landscape. Because media literacy should begin with asking students to reflect on their own media consumption and participation, these lessons have the potential disadvantage of creating a detached, procedural view of media literacy. To help students understand media literacy as an engaged mode of moving through the world, hopefully pairing these lessons with artifacts like The Truman Show and Survivor will create opportunities for students to build transferable media literacy practices in context. A quieter, yet deeply moving, moment in The Truman Show is when Sylvia, Truman’s love interest and the only character who tries to tell Truman the truth about his life, calls in to Christof’s broadcast to protest Truman’s confinement: SYLVIA: He's not a performer, he's a prisoner. Look at him. Look at what you’ve done to him. CHRISTOF: He can leave at any time. If it was more than just a vague ambition, if he was absolutely determined to discover the truth, there's no way we could prevent him from leaving. What distresses you, really, caller, is that ultimately, Truman prefers his "cell," as you call it. SYLVIA: That's where you're wrong. You're so wrong. And he'll prove you wrong. Just as Sylvia refuses to accept this complacent, resigned understanding of the mediated world surrounding Truman as inevitable or just, educators can help students recognize that they, too, do not have to accept the socio-political media systems shaping their realities. If media environments shape how adolescents understand themselves and the world, it is imperative that educators help them critically interpret those environments rather than simply inherit them passively. As adolescents increasingly navigate social, emotional, and civic life through digitally mediated environments, secondary English Language Arts classrooms have the unique opportunity—and, perhaps, the obligation—to use engaging media artifacts to cultivate critical media literacy skills. While leveraging the literacies that students already bring into the classroom, educators can aid students in analyzing how contemporary media constructs narratives, identities, and perceptions of reality. Adolescents already live inside multimodal systems of meaning-making; it ought to be the responsibility of the ELA classroom to help them critically interpret those systems. Much like an English teacher might describe the golden nuggets of truth found in works of fiction, Emily Nussbaum calls reality television “the hunt for something real inside of something fake.” Inviting students to take these artifacts seriously, urging them to search for the truths to be discovered within them, The Truman Show, Survivor, and Facing History’s media literacy lessons, become sites of critical engagement and reflection where students might become empowered to question the systems of power, persuasion, and representation shaping their lives within the contemporary media landscape. Ultimately, critical media literacy education is about helping adolescents learn to “see the set” clearly enough to imagine that the world being presented to them is not the only one possible. References Bandura, A. (2002). Social Cognitive Theory of Mass Communication. In J. Bryant & D. Zillman (Eds.), Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research (pp. 121-153). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers. Facing History & Ourselves. (2025). Unit: Media literacy for critical thinking and democracy. https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/media-literacy-critical-thinking-democracy Gee, J. (2007). Semiotic Domains: Is Playing Video Games a “Waste of Time”? What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (pp. 13-50). Palgrave Macmillan. Johnson, Steven (2005). Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. Riverhead Books: New York. Mayer, R. (2001). A Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning. In R. Mayer (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (pp. 41-62). Cambridge University Press. Moore, E. (2024, December 26). Emily Nussbaum’s Cue the Sun! — reality TV bites. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/5e79e9c3-5f24-4ec1-8ee4-048f3d094931 Rideout, V., Peebles, A., Mann, S., & Robb, M. B. (2022). The Common Sense census: Media use by tweens and teens, 2021. Common Sense Media. Weir, P. (1998). The Truman Show. Paramount Pictures.
No comments:
Post a Comment