Areas needing work from Media Education with regard to visuality in the digital age. Desiderata in dealing with visual media cultures

Abstract

The leading role of the book in educational culture is diffusing in this digital age of mobile and transversal network media systems. In this context, sociocultural realms of experience, such as educational institutions, families, and peers, are marked by heterogeneity. When these are also made into parts of the web of media-cultural architectures, then formerly valid distinguishing parameters, such as explicit and implicit, formal and informal knowledge, begin to totter. Limitations and competing ideas of these areas, which used to be seen as antithetical to education, are now proving to be problematic. For instance, visuality is playing an ever larger part in the context of multimodal educational materials, and is being used as one possible way to deal with complexity. Although this eliminates the reticence toward (moving) pictures and visual media in pedagogical practice, digitization has opened up fields that are of significance to media culture, and which call for attention from educational science. Media education that takes on the complexity of digital media cultures also entails a reflection on the function and use of visual media in an educational context. Actions informed by media education in visual media cultures is now, moreover, particularly essential because digitally generated visuality has a new quality as opposed to traditional pictorial media, which used to conform to the logic of representation. The theme of this paper is the desiderata in media education arising from visual aspects of data-based media, also addressing issues of communicative imagery, paradigmatic media forms, and data-supported knowledge generation.