1. Media Education in the Age of Social Media
David Buckingham
Loughborough University

2. All change?
Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media élite… now it’s the people who are taking control.
Rupert Murdoch, 2006

3. Overview Confusing technology and media
Digital idiocy and Media Studies 2.0
Critical concepts and social media
The case of ‘fake news’
The limits of media literacy

4. Technology or media? ‘ICT’ succeeds where ‘media’ fails
Confusion of technology and media
At an educational level
At a social level
At a commercial level
Technology as a tool, a free service
Technology and cultural form
Not neutral tools but systems of cultural representation

5. Failure to connect The new digital divide Instrumental skills
Risk and safety
The fallacy of the digital natives
Digital creativity: confusing technical skill with critical understanding
Media Studies 2.0: embrace creativity, forget critique!
Reasserting critique – and ‘key concepts’

6. Social media

7. Language How do media create meanings? Not free expression
Genres and conventions
Formality/informality
Public/private
Authority and power
In-groups and out-groups
More than ‘risk’ or ‘bullying’

8. Case study: Trump’s tweets

9. Representation How do media re-present reality?
Versions of the social world and the self – but more than ‘hunting the stereotypes’ or ‘inaccuracy’
Truth, reliability, credibility – more than ‘information’

10. Case study: society of the selfie
Identity, celebrity, mediated social relations
Part of wider social trends

11. Industry Who makes these media, how and why? Media are not monolithic
Selling audiences to advertisers
Now we make the content – and we are the product?
The ‘sharing economy’: the new business model
Disintermediation and trust

12. Case study: Google How does Google make so much money?
Understanding search
Doing business: diversification, integration
Targeted advertising
Data-mining

13. Audience Who uses these media, what meanings do they make?
Beyond effects: active and social
But is this power to the people – or power to corporations?
Who are the active users?

14. Case study: activism online
Illusions of participation
Democratising technology – anti-democratic users
Narrowing social worlds – the echo chamber effect

15. Fake news Post-truth, alternative facts A symptom of wider issues
“No more experts”
The end of trust and deference
The changing media landscape

16. Harmless fun? Another moral panic?

17. Is media literacy the solution?

18. Back to key concepts
Deconstructing the issue: framing, definition, representation
Language: creating authority – word and image; the self-confirming rhetoric of conspiracism
Representation: evidence and interpretation; spin, news management
Industry: making money in Macedonia, and in Silicon Valley; cross-media circulation; non-regulation
Audience: credibility and belief; reputation and trust; audience as producer and distributor

19. Problems What’s real and fake? What about ‘real’ news?
New media and the evil MSM
Fixing democracy?
Media literacy and media reform

20. How ‘fake news’ lost all meaning…