Social media pedagogy: Applying an interdisciplinary approach to teach multimodal critical digital literacy

Abstract

Social media permeates the daily lives of millennials, as they use it constantly for a variety of reasons. A significant contributing factor is the availability of social media through smartphones and mobile apps. This kind of immersive and complex media environment calls for a literacy pedagogy that prepares students to understand, engage with, and adapt to social media that are inevitably going to remain a part of their lives. Research into digital literacy/literacies has sought to address the development of tools and methods to aid college students in becoming more situated and adept digital citizens. This article extends the conceptualization and application of digital media literacy through the inclusion of a critical, multimodal, and interdisciplinary pedagogical approach. The paper illustrates that critical digital literacy drawing upon multimodal and interdisciplinary analysis is imperative in preparing students to manage the predominance of social media in their lives.

Introduction

Social media permeates the daily lives of millennials. A majority of them admit to checking their smartphones within minutes of waking up. The primary reason for doing so is to check for updates on their social media accounts. This activity of checking their various social media accounts is then repeated throughout the day. The frequency can range from once every few hours to every few minutes (Greenwood et al., 2016). The reason for checking the social media is varied, and the impact on the mental and emotional health is well documented (Jelenchick et al., 2013; Tandoc et al., 2015). Social media are used for staying connected with friends and family, researching school, and receiving news. There is also concern regarding the negative social and emotional impacts of social media manifesting in growing incidence of cyberbullying, social media addiction, and depression.

Beyond personal and emotional impact is also the growing political and civic power of social media in the lives of young people. The way in which young people receive political and social content from social media also varies. They can read a tweet or Facebook update, watch a quick video on YouTube, read discussions on reddit, and see pictures on Instagram and Snapchat. Therefore, students are constantly engaged in sensemaking that draws on a diversity of media forms all delivered through the same platform: social media.

However, research shows that young people are not as critically or technically skilled as they need to be in order to be effective digital citizens. For example, while a majority of them receive their news through social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and, increasingly, Snapchat, research shows that they are not critically adept consumers. A recent study conducted at Stanford University (2016) investigated the ability of 7000 teenagers to evaluate the credibility and quality of news available through social media. The study concluded that these teenagers were “easily duped” with a “Dismaying” consistency. In another study on social media privacy issues, researchers found that while young people care about their online privacy, they take few safeguards to protect it. When asked, the respondents cited “the opaque practices of institutions, the technological affordances of social media, and the concept of networked privacy, which acknowledges that individuals exist in social contexts where others can and do violate their privacy” (Hargittai and Marwick, 2016: 3737).

This kind of immersive and complex media environment calls for a literacy pedagogy that prepares students to understand, engage with, and adapt to social media that are inevitably going to remain a part of their lives. Research into digital literacy/literacies has sought to address the development of tools and methods to aid college students in becoming more situated and adept digital citizens. The purpose of this article is to extend the conceptualization and application of digital media literacy through the inclusion of a critical, multimodal, and interdisciplinary (ID) pedagogical approach. The position of the paper is that critical digital literacy drawing upon multimodal and ID analysis is imperative in preparing students to manage the predominance of social media in their lives.

In support of this proposed pedagogy, the article begins by explaining the underpinning concepts and their applicability to developing a multimodal and ID approach to a critical digital literacy pedagogy for social media. After that, three ID approaches are presented and explained. The article concludes with an example of the application of the recommended pedagogy.

Key concepts

Social media

Despite the universal popularity of social media, the definition of the term has been far from a settled concept and has continued to evolve over time. Kaplan and Haenlein define social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content” (2010: 61), where Web 2.0 is a platform for the continuous and collaborative modification of content and applications by individuals (not organizations). Kaplan and Haenlein characterize user-generated content as “the various forms of media content that are publicly available and created by end-users” (2010: 61). Along a similar vein, Keitzmann et al. state that “Social media employ mobile and web-based technologies to create highly interactive platforms via which individuals and communities share, cocreate, discuss, and modify user-generated content” (2011: 241). However, the evolution of social media over the recent years to a more smartphone and visually driven format has encouraged scholars to broaden these definitions. Robbins and Singer advocate this broad view; “Social media refers to any technology that facilitates the dissemination and sharing of information over the Internet” (2014: 87). As social media hosting has moved beyond the World Wide Web and onto apps, Stewart (2015) advocates that the term be applied to both social networking sites as well as apps. The technologies and apps that fall within the category are ever evolving and utilize multiple modalities:

Social media can be used for communicating through photos, videos, and/or text and sharing sourced information with predominantly friends and family (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat) or with more professional contacts (e.g. LinkedIn, Academia.edu, ResearchGate). Social media can also be used for specialized tasks like blogging (text or photo) and writing (e.g. Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress), sharing photos, videos, drawings, and/or text (e.g. Vine, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter), sharing sourced information and discussing it (e.g. Pinterest, Reddit, Twitter), gaming (e.g. Farmville, World of Warcraft), saving and categorizing information to view later (Pocket, Google+, Pinterest), etc. (Stewart, 2015: 483)

Critical digital literacy

Critical pedagogy is rooted in the liberatory model of education advocated by Freire and Macedo (2000). The purpose of Critical pedagogy is to encourage students to take a thoughtful and analytical perspective on the world around them. The process for doing so is to instill in students a critical consciousness, which is “an awareness of the invisible oppression in society combined with a dedication to combating this oppression through education and activism” (Billings, 2015).

Currently, no paradigmatic definition exists for digital literacy. Rene Hobbs sees it as “associated with the ability to use computers, social media, and the Internet” (Hobbs, 2010: 17). Gilster claims that digital literacy is the “cognition of what you see on the computer screen when you use the networked medium” (1998: 2). Some conceive it as pertaining to proficiency with using digital media (Jones and Hafner, 2012). Others see digital literacy as primarily concerned with the sociocultural and analytic aspect of studying digital media (Lankshear and Knobel, 2008). Part of the complexity in arriving at a single definition of digital literacy is the constant and rapid evolution in the digital media available at any given time.

Critical pedagogy is a natural ally of digital literacy because students can be encouraged to develop critical consciousness, an integral outcome, by analyzing popular media texts. Considering the prevalent use of social media (as compared to all other media) by college students, it is important to not only use digital media as a learning tool but also as a subject of critical analysis (Funk et al., 2015).

Critical pedagogy is also rooted in the empowerment of students because it encourages the teacher to incorporate the current skills and knowledge of students. In the case of digital literacy, this is undoubtedly significant because by the time students arrive to post-secondary classrooms, they have already built up a large store of knowledge regarding the norms, use, and creation of digital media.

Another important aspect of critical pedagogy is that it is not enough to merely analyze and critique texts, but students are also required to take activist action as a result of their analysis. The significance of this for digital literacy is that it encourages students to move from being passive consumers to engaged producers and participants of digital media. Another advantage of applying critical pedagogy to digital literacy is that it promotes sensitivity to cultural differences (Kellner, 1998).

Critical digital literacy can support the study of social media in two main ways. First, due to the very nature of critical analysis, it encourages the student to consider the entire context within which the digital communication is taking place. As Funk et al. have emphasized, a focus on context brings to the fore “important questions of ideology, power, political economy, production, and reception” (2015: 3). Second, due to this focus on context, critical digital literacy is able to overcome the challenge of constantly evolving digital technology by emphasizing its “inherent social possibilities to stimulate the creative production and distribution of content to create self-expression and social connections” (Frechette, 2014: 15).

The simplicity and high impact of this approach are evident through a popular activity used in the author’s undergraduate Digital Media course. Students are asked to locate and list the day’s trending topics on Twitter. The list usually comprised social, political, entertainment and, some novelty topics. Each student is asked to select one of the trending topics and investigate the postings associated with the hashtag. The student critically analyzes these postings to ascertain who is posting these tweets, why are these tweets being shared, and any influence current social or cultural attitudes may have on the tweets. This analysis is delivered to class along with a hashtag created by the student. Even though the subject of the presentations may be inconsequential, for example #Alexfromtarget, it generates thoughtful discussion, in this case, including gender equity, digital privacy, workplace harassment, digital law.

Multimodal literacy

In advocating the need to teach multiple literacies, Kellner (1998) emphasize multidimensionality of digital content where text, graphics, images, and video are often co-located. In their view, akin to Hagel’s Absolute Idea, digital content is able to absorb everything into its form and medium. Multimodal literacy is important from the aspect of social media because it emphasizes the entire content of a message. Text is not given sole attention in this form of teaching and analysis. All possible sources of communication, including signs, symbols, emotes, and pictures within a message are considered for their role in creating the meaning of the message.

Furthermore, text is not even given precedence over other content. O’Halloran and Lim Fei explain

Multimodal literacy explores the design of discourse by investigating the contributions of different semiotic resources (for example, language, gesture, images) co-deployed across various modalities (for example, visual, aural, somatic) as well as their interaction and integration in constructing a coherent text. (O’Halloran and Lim Fei, 2011: 3)

From this perspective, one could extrapolate from McLuhan's (1964) famous aphorism—the medium is the message—and claim that; it is the specific combination of media that is the message in digital media.

The importance of this approach lies in the fact that focusing on the multimodal resources of a message allows one to see the entire context of the communication. To this point, Elleström (2010) emphasizes the differences in modalities offered by various media; physical, sensory, spatiotemporal (space and time), and semiotic. To ignore this context of a message means that we could miss key issues of ideology, processing, and production (Lewis and Jhally, 1998). Kellner (1998) explains that in understanding the context of a message, we can begin to decode how the message was created, the beliefs and biases of the authors, the impact of the distribution medium, as well as the inherent semiotics of the types of content used to create the message.

An example of a social media multimodal analysis project is a digital narrative group project comprising two parts. The first part is a campaign analysis of one of the recipients of the annual Facebook Awards. Facebook Awards highlight social media campaigns by non-profits and companies alike. One of the benefits of using the awards as a starting point is that Facebook creates a rich multimodal (video, text, screenshots) presentation on why each winner was chosen. Therefore, the students are familiarized with the strategies and capacities of multimodal narratives. The second step is for the students to create a social issue-driven digital narrative of their own using strategies they learnt through their analysis. Students are required to use all modes available: video, images, slideshows, interactive elements, and text. The benefit of this project is that students not only engage more deeply in the critical examination of a social issue but they are also able to use multimodal digital tools to convey their ideas.

ID studies

The multimodal nature of social media necessitates an ID approach in order to effectively apply the critical digital literacy principles. This paper advocates an ID approach over transdisciplinary because cross-fertilization is necessitated by the current situation where different disciplines study isolated aspects of social media. While there are various combinations in which different disciplines can study the same subject, multidisciplinary and ID are two main recognized methods of enlisting resources from different disciplines. The main difference between the two methods is the extent to which disciplines are integrated; multidisciplinarity is additive, whereas interdisciplinarity is integrative.

Multidisciplinary cooperation focuses on juxtaposing, sequencing and coordinating ideas from multiple disciplines (Klein, 2010). However, scholars are expected to continue working within the boundaries of their own disciplines. On the other hand, interdisciplinarity is concerned with integrating and blending approaches from different disciplines to focus on a single subject or phenomenon (Klein, 2010). The benefit of ID method in literacy is that it allows a course to take a holistic look at intersectional issues and subjects such as poverty or health communication. In using this approach, instructors have the opportunity to ask a broader range of questions, or even new questions, rather they can now ask ID questions (Lattuca, 2001).

For Boden (1999), interdisciplinarity can take the form of either generalization or integration. Generalization occurs when one theoretical perspective crosses over disciplinary boundaries such as cybernetics or semiology. Integration occurs as concepts and approaches from disciplines cross fertilize, resulting in new insights as in the case of gender studies or cognitive science.

Lattuca (2001) advocates viewing ID research and teaching as a continuum along levels of integration: informed, synthetic, and conceptual. She differentiates these according to the kinds of questions each typology encompasses. Informed ID occurs when researchers or teachers borrow methods, theories, or concepts to better address questions within their own disciplines. Synthetic ID occurs when the questions under consideration bridge and intersect different disciplines. Conceptual ID focuses on issues without consideration of disciplinary boundaries, such as cultural studies and feminism.

This paper advocates the use of synthetic ID to create a robust conceptual reservoir from which to draw resources for teaching multimodal critical analysis of social media. Synthetic ID allows faculty to draw concepts, theories, and methods of analysis from all the disciplines currently studying social media. Furthermore, this form of interdisciplinarity allows faculty to integrate the concepts into different combinations to suit the needs of a course. “A synthetic interdisciplinary course might examine historical and legal perspectives on public education. A synthetic interdisciplinary research question might explore the biological and psychological aspects of human communication” (Lattuca, 2001: 83).

ID teaching does pose certain challenges to instructors. A major one is that the instructor has to build a personal store of knowledge beyond the discipline they have trained in. Another challenge is the congruence of concepts selected from different fields, because often the same term can be defined in different ways within disciplines. For example, “social networks” means online structured communities in communication, but in Math the term refers to the web of interconnectivity surrounding every individual. That said, the significance of ID approaches for teaching social media warrants the additional effort required. Furthermore, collaborative course development and teaching is one way to share the burden of additional work required by this method of teaching. Another solution is for teachers and scholars to work towards sharing relevant theories from their own fields towards building a collection of ID approaches to social media. This paper attempts to take a step towards the latter, by detailing the following approaches from the fields of media studies, visual communication and user design.

ID approaches

As an illustration of the teaching method advocated above, three approaches to social media from three different fields of scholarship are examined and then used to illustrate an applied pedagogical approach. These suggested fields and approaches are not meant to be exhaustive. Rather, they are meant to point the way towards the search for creating customized avenues to critical multimodal digital pedagogy by drawing on available conceptual/theoretical resources in various disciplines.

Framing/media studies

The first approach, Framing, draws from the Media Studies field. As a concept, Framing is concerned with embedded messaging in media content where the emphasis on certain aspects of a subject creates a field of meaning around it. For example, two news articles on the same issue, urban homelessness, could frame it as either a failure of governance in a city or as a need for community service. Framing has variously been defined as “principles of organizing” media messages (Goffman, 1974: 10), “principles of selection, emphasis, and presentation” of content (Gitlin, 1980: 6), and creating a “structured understanding” of how the world works (Sweetser and Fauconnier, 1996: 5).

Within Framing, there are two recognized modes of organizing content: equivalence framing and emphasis framing (Cacciatore et al., 2016). The major difference between these two modes could be viewed as how (equivalency) and why (emphasis) one frame is emphasized over others. Equivalence framing is concerned with the manipulation of “logically equivalent information” (Cacciatore et al., 2016: 8). The same content is positioned for maximum persuasiveness. In this type of framing, a smoking cessation campaign could either frame Quitting in terms of the benefits of stopping or it could be framed according to the health consequences of smoking depending on which message is the most convincing for a given audience. Emphasis framing shapes the messages through the selection of content. In this case, the impetus is to convince the audience to focus more on one aspect of a topic rather than another. The forgoing example of urban homelessness would fall within this category.

Framing has been one of the most researched concepts in the field (Cacciatore et al., 2016). However, scholars have called for an evolution of the concept of Framing to move it beyond a focus on text-based analysis and towards multimodal analysis (Scheufele and Iyengar, 2012). To this effect, a definition by Price et al. (1997) fits the needs of multimodal analysis, where framing triggers associations through the “salient attributes of a message (its organization, selection of content, or thematic structure)” (p. 486).

Along the same lines, Cacciatore et al. (2016) have put forth a model of preference-based reinforcement which posits that in the increasingly fragmented digital media environment, content is increasingly being tailored to specific audiences. This type of framing is driven by three related phenomena: (a) narrowcasting of information, (b) audience pillarization, and (c) affordances of media and audience interfaces. The value of this conceptualization of Framing for multimodal analysis lies in that the text, images, visual design, and social affordances of a message can all now be considered for the associations evoked in the audience. Furthermore, as is evidenced in social media, certain frames—with associated phrases, images and videos, tend to circulate with different publics. For example, in the recent news story about Russia’s possible involvement in election season leaks, the story has either been framed alternately as media dishonesty or as foreign meddling in American Democratic processes.

Visual communication

Multimodal analysis presses us to move beyond primarily textual analysis and to include non-verbal/visual elements. A fundamental part of this need has emerged through the primacy of the visual in digital media. The most popular sites and apps rely heavily on images and videos: YouTube, Vine, Snapchat, and Instagram among others. Even if they are not purely photo and visual based, more and more sites and apps rely heavily on visual cues and photographs. One of the most prominent examples is the transformation online news sites to heavy reliance on photos and auto-loading video, for example, CNN, Washington Post, and Fox News.

A prominent and widespread approach within the visual communication field to address the embedded messages within visuals is the concept of Semiotics. Semiotics is fundamentally concerned with the study of signs and their processing. Jakobson positions Semiotics as including all forms of signs: “Semiotics is the study of signs and their meanings. In semiotics, the term signs refers not only to literal signs, such as traffic signs, but also to images, words, and other symbols that represent a meaning” (Ungvarsky, 2017).

Semiotics is underpinned by a few significant concepts: sign, signified, and encoding and decoding. Sign is any symbol that stands for something else, such as textual symbols that represent objects, for example chair or cat (Eco, 1986: 15). According to Saussure, the relationship between a sign and its signified (the subject) is arbitrary and understood through conventional use (2015). However, Messaris elaborates that this arbitrariness is limited mostly to text and less applicable to images (1994). Still, Pierce emphasizes the importance of congruent referencing for the sign between the encoding (message intended by the sender) and decoding (messaging apprehended by the receiver) (Hoopes, 1991).

There are three types of signs: iconic, indexical, and symbolic. Iconic signs resemble what they represent, for example maps and pictures. Indexical signs point to causal relationships, such as an image of a destroyed city block indicates the occurrence of a disaster. Finally, symbolic signs are purely arbitrary, as in the example of language where a sequence of letters—for example, girl—represents a human of a certain age range and gender.

From the perspective of the decoder, Gross and Worth posit two interpretive strategies: symbolic and natural (1981). Symbolic signs are those where the receiver assumes that there is an intended (deliberately encoded) meaning and are created according to a shared system of signification. For natural signs, the receiver automatically adjusts and does not feel the need to call on shared interpretive schema. Either way, interpretation draws on inferences and modes of interpretation absorbed through socialization and culture. According to Eco (1979), visual meaning interpretation adds a further layer of complexity where meaning can be denotative (representative) or connotative (associations, attitudes). This again emphasizes the need for a multimodal understanding of social media messaging.

User interaction design

Another important aspect of social media is the different levels and types of affordances incorporated in their interface design. The importance of studying this aspect of social media, especially online networks, has been previously recognized. According to Papacharissi (2009), “the architecture of virtual spaces, much like the architecture of physical spaces, simultaneously suggests and enables particular modes of interaction” (p. 200). Including UX in social media pedagogy from both the production and analytical sides allows students to learn about the relationship between design, media, and usability (Faiola et al., 2010).

That these modes of interaction are not accidental or incidental can be confirmed by comparing the mission statements of the two of the most popular social networks: Facebook and Twitter. Facebook’s stated goal is to help people “to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them” (Facebook – Resources, n.d.). Twitter aims to “To give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers” (Twitter, n.d.). An examination of the UX of each of these social networks illustrates that each, respectively, offers different tools to allow user to interact in ways conducive to the network’s stated goals.

Consequently, understanding UX in social media can be useful in analyzing “the ways in which participants co-/de-/un-construct or negotiate meaning, (mis-)understand each other, cooperate, argue” (Adami, 2013). The interactivity of a digital site “configures its relation with its intended users and other actors/texts” (Adami, 2013). Therefore, at its core, “Interaction Design (IxD) defines the structure and behavior of interactive systems” (About & History – Interaction Design Association – IxDA, n.d.) and “focuses on creating engaging interfaces with well thought out behaviors” as the goal (www.usability.gov, n.d.).

Evolving beyond an original focus on usability, models of user interaction design (UX) have moved to focus on a holistic view. For example, Mahlke and Thüring (2007) offer a model of user interaction based on three components: user perceptions of instrumental qualities (usability), non-instrumental (aesthetic appeal, community, fun, etc.), and user emotional reactions. In other words, the end goal of UX is not just ease and consistency of use. Now designers are considering the aesthetic appeal and social contribution of their creations.

Therefore, it is now acknowledged in the field that social media sites “become successful when using structural features to create symbolic codes that facilitate communication and create” community and identity (Papacharissi, 2009). In keeping with Mahlke and Thuring’s model, Papacharissi defines social network design as a “composite result of structure, design, and organization” (2009: 205). Using this definition, Papacharissi conducted a comparative analysis of three social networking sites: Facebook, LinkedIn, and ASmallWorld. He found that the difference in UX does in fact impact community and connection along four main themes including: (a) public/private content, (b) styles of self presentation, (c) cultivation of taste performances, and (d) social settings.

Illustration of pedagogy

As mentioned in the introduction of this paper, social media is a primary source of news for millennials. Keeping this in mind, the illustration will focus on the multimodal critical analysis of news in social media. The illustration is not designed as a single exercise, but rather forms a multistage analysis. At the first stage, the students begin their analysis by investigating the framing of a current news event, for instance Women’s History Month. Multimodal semiotic analysis is used to document the hashtags, images, and videos associated with the event. This analysis draws on posts to Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat. Students investigate not only the texts but also the associated visual (photos, gifs, and videos) and signs such as hashtags. This is followed by looking for the sources and origins of these signs to understand the ideologies and aims driving the framing of the story. The second stage is to account for the comparative affordances of the social media through which the news stories are being received, e.g. to determine what kinds of messages are posted to the social media sites, and if there is a difference in interaction around comparative messages.

In the third stage, in keeping with the requirement of critical pedagogy that there be response to analysis, the students create a digital portfolio piece. Students create their own posts on the topic for the three social networks: Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat. In the final stage, students analyze their own posts. Their analysis is a reversal of the media analysis. They begin by exploring the influence of the structure and affordances of the networks on their content and media selection for their posts. They also explore the ways in which they unconsciously or deliberately they framed their stories by encoding in terms of denotative and connotative multimodal symbols.

Research has shown that while young people are perpetually immersed in social media, they are not particularly skilled or critical users. Simultaneously, educational institutions have recognized the significance of digital and social media in the lives of their students and colleges are offering courses and degrees in digital as well as social media. However, the primary pedagogical approach remains disciplinary and often driven by textual analysis.

This paper sets forth a pedagogical approach for social media designed to enhance the ability of youth to become critical and active digital citizens. The author also details three ID approaches and offers an illustration of the applied use of the proposed pedagogy.

By illustrating how an ID approach driven by multimodal and critical literacy can benefit social media teaching, the author hopes to stimulate further research and discussion. One important avenue of further research could be a cross-disciplinary meta-analysis of social media research. This would help codify and increase the number of ID approaches available to people interested in adopting this method in their teaching and research. For teaching, it would be useful to explore how this pedagogy evolves as it is applied in different fields such as sociology and digital humanities among others.