Prof. Brian O’Neill is co-chair of Media Literacy Ireland. He is also deputy chair of the National Advisory Council for Online Safety and a life-long advocate for media literacy.
My first exposure to media literacy was in fact as a secondary school student in Galway. A trend at the time, following the Marshall McLuhan-inspired educational television movement in the U.S., was to recreate tv studio environments in school settings to foster an interest in the media and to deconstruct otherwise unreachable media institutions. This made a big impression not just on me but many school colleagues who went on to follow successful media careers. There weren’t too many opportunities at the time to study media at third level but I picked up a sufficient background in media and cultural studies in my undergraduate years at UCG to start work as a media studies teacher in the 1980s. This was at the newly established Ballyfermot Senior College (now Ballyfermot College of Further Education), a truly innovative institution with a mandate to break down social, cultural and economic barriers to further education. Jerome Morrissey as Principal (he went on to lead the National Centre for Technology in Education now incorporated as PDST) created a host of dynamic new post-Leaving Certificate programmes in areas like radio, television, media management and later the Rock School, all of which broke new ground.
It was a particularly fertile time for media education in Ireland. The Media Education Department at the Irish Film Institute, the Curriculum Development Unit at Trinity College and the RTÉ series of Summer Schools on television and Irish society all created an environment in which media were treated in an intellectually serious way and something to which education needed to respond. Ballyfermot Senior College also established the first Teachers’ Association for Media Education attracting over 300 teachers to its first national conference and thereby introduced a generation of teachers to international trends in media education.
Against this background, the College of Commerce, Rathmines must be credited as a key pioneer. It already had a reputation as a provider of journalism education since the 1960s. But in 1979, Lelia Doolan and a number of other RTÉ expatriate producers, established Ireland’s first full-time programme in media and communications. Interestingly, the curriculum was modelled on The New School for Social Research in New York, where under the influence of McLuhan, new radical modes of media literacy education were being developed. I joined the College of Commerce at the end of the 1980s and later started the MA in Media Studies which like its equivalent at The New School had a particular emphasis on teacher education and media pedagogy.
All of this would suggest McLuhan as a primary influence on my work and indeed McLuhan was directly associated with the likes of school-based educational television as well as the media literacy ferment in New York and Toronto. In truth, I was much more interested in media and cultural studies in the UK, including the likes of Stuart Hall and work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies as well as the Institute of Education in London. This is something I brought into my own PhD work on cultural formations in Irish radio and was also the motivation to develop further research into changing media environments of media consumption for children and youth.
Media literacy is therefore something of a thread that runs throughout my academic career, connecting these earlier, more formative experiences and my more recent research work on media literacy – particularly as regards youth – in a policy context.
This shift to media literacy policy was triggered by my becoming an active member of the EU Kids Online research network, the origins of which can be traced to an earlier European network called Changing Media, Changing Europe which sought to map the changing landscape for media in Europe in the early 2000s. This was also the context in which digitalisation of mass media and the emergence of digital platforms led the European Parliament in 2007 to mandate media literacy as a public policy response to fundamental transformations in the media environment and to support citizens in their negotiation of new, increasingly complex ways in how we create, disseminate and consume media content. The incorporation of media literacy of part of an overall regulatory approach (as in the European Audiovisual Media Services Directive as well as in national policy frameworks such as the BAI’s Media Literacy Policy) stems from this and has to be welcomed as a recognition of its central importance to twenty first century citizenship.
Media Literacy Ireland has been a pioneering example of how this initial impetus can be seized upon and can flourish as a social movement, bringing all interested stakeholders together around the common theme of enhancing media literacy opportunities for all. It has been a privilege to be associated with it and after many years of working within the media education field, to find a truly supportive community for media literacy is incredibly inspiring.
Arguably, we are just at the beginning of reconfiguring policy responses to fundamental transformations of the media and information environment. I am currently working on two European projects in this area. One of them, called CO:RE – Children Online: Research & Evidence will create a new knowledge platform synthesising the diverse information and evidence we have on this changing environment. The second is the BIK Policy Map – a mapping of how European countries develop their strategies and responses in line with the EU Strategy for a Better Internet for Children (to be updated in 2022). This will be a first look at how Europe has altered or updated its overall approach towards a better digital environment for young people. Having recently retired from a full-time academic role, this is a context I am keen to explore further and to study how technologies and our relationships with them can extend (McLuhan again … ) or hinder our capacities for social and cultural experience and communication over the course of what the European Commission has dubbed the Digital Decade.
