Towards Platform Awareness in Media Education

Abstract

Digitalisation has profoundly affected societies worldwide, changing the media landscape and transforming the ways in which information is accessed, produced and distributed. In these processes, the data-based and algorithm-driven platforms owned by a few global corporations play a central role today. Academic and policy discourses increasingly emphasise that these platforms, characterised by their nontransparent operations and monopolistic control over the media environment, function as global gatekeepers of information, posing substantial challenges to democracy, constraining citizens’ agency and adversely affecting their wellbeing.

Although academic community and policy reports have pointed to the negative effects of platforms, media education studies have found it difficult to develop conceptual and analytical frameworks that address the impact of platforms on individuals and society. Since the advent of digitalisation, this field of study, primarily utilising literacy-based concepts and frameworks, has focused on developing people’s abilities to create, analyse and interpret digital media content, as well as on promoting user participation and creative expression through digital media. The infrastructural elements of the digital media ecosystem, the emerging power of platforms, their role in providing and limiting access to information, and their impact on users’ agency have received less attention. This dissertation acknowledges this gap and places the need to understand the interplay between platform power and user agency through the lens of media education at the core of its investigation. Recognising the limitations of literacy-based approaches that have so far prevailed in platform-related media education studies, this dissertation proposes a novel approach for conceptualising this field. Its primary objective is to introduce the notion of platform awareness and conceptualise it from a media education perspective.

To achieve its aim, this dissertation draws on empirical evidence from four sub-studies, each of which was conducted following an interpretivist research approach and using qualitative research methods. The data for the three sub-studies were collected through in-depth interviews with librarians, library experts and labour market experts serving as informants. One sub-study for data gathering utilized youth consultation as a form of participatory research. A thematic analysis was used to analyse the data from the four sub-studies. The analytical framework was informed by insights from the existing literature, primarily derived from platform studies, research related to user agency and platform-oriented media education studies.

Based on the results of the sub-studies, combined with insights from existing literature, this dissertation proposes that platform awareness in the context of media education can be understood as a comprehensive understanding of the complex interplay between the social, technological, economic and political aspects of platform power. The findings suggest that platform awareness is necessary to support digital media users’ agency, understood in this dissertation as the freedom to choose, create and share information. Platform awareness is also a crucial precondition for developing the literacies, such as digital literacy, media literacy, data literacy and algorithmic literacy, required for people living in a contemporary digitalised society.

The primary theoretical contribution of this dissertation is the introduction of the notion of platform awareness, the steps taken towards its conceptualisation from a media education perspective, as well as the outlining of its relationships with digital media user agency and associated literacies. From a practical standpoint, this dissertation has presented a list of themes that can be useful for promoting platform awareness through media education. It has also suggested pathways for future research, emphasising the necessity of exploring users’ motivations for acquiring platform awareness and advocating studies that enhance platform awareness among those involved in the development of media education, including educators and researchers.