číslo 1/2013 - Paneurópska vysoká škola

10
Global Media Journal
The New Politics of Protest:
Young People, Social Media and News Literacy
Stuart Allan
Media School, Bournemouth University, United Kingdom
‘... the popular Press is the most powerful and pervasive de-educator of the public mind...’
F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson (1933: 138)
Abstract
For researchers concerned with the changing imperatives of global media literacy, young people’s uses of
social media to co-ordinate and articulate dissent with state power is of pressing significance. This article, in
taking as its conceptual point of departure a formative intervention in the early days of media education in the
UK, namely F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson’s (1933) Culture and Environment, proceeds to show how longstanding
assumptions about media engagement are being recast in the age of social networking. In striving
to elucidate the political implications of these emergent forms of connectivity, particular attention is devoted
to young people’s contributions to real-time reportage of civic unrest, including during the riots taking place
in several British cities in the summer of 2011. It is argued that research into news literacy must rethink the
current emphasis placed on the social competencies associated with news consumption in order to attend to
the ways in which young people are actively recrafting social media as resources in the service of elaborating
new, empowering forms of civic engagement in public life.
Keywords:
global – media literacy – young people – social media and networking – conceptualization – F.R. Leavis
and Denys Thompson’s (1933) Culture and Environment – media engagement – civic unrest – 2011
British riots – civic engagement
Introduction
There is little doubt that the significance of events at the heart of what is currently being described as
the Arab Spring of 2011 will be defined by outcomes we can only begin to anticipate today. In following
journalistic accounts of what is transpiring, it is intriguing to note the extent to which young people’s use of
internet and social media – such as Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and the like – have proven to be newsworthy
topics in their own right within the coverage. In a news article headlined ‘A Tunisian–Egyptian link that shook
Arab history’, David D. Kirkpatrick and David E. Sanger (2011) of the New York Times underscore this point:
As protesters in Tahrir Square faced off against pro-government forces, they drew a lesson from their
counterparts in Tunisia: ‘Advice to the youth of Egypt: Put vinegar or onion under your scarf for tear gas.’
GMJ Book.indb 10 21.1.2013 9:44