An accessible introduction to understanding the current media environment and the culture it contains, this book provides an indispensable guide to dynamic media literacy in the digital environment. Katherine G. Fry draws from philosophies of technology and communication, from media ecology, critical cultural theory, and critical pedagogy to explain the dimensions of media environments. Fry introduces an essential dynamic media environment model that can be used as a framework for understanding global social challenges. The model extends media literacy education and practice by de-centering media messages, instead explaining media as environments-as cultures created by and within our dominant form of communication. Exploring progressive education philosophies that advocate inclusion, independence, empathy, and critical thinking toward problem-solving in a rapidly changing world, this book includes media literacy examples, global case studies, exercises, and learning tools to facilitate learning the full scope of the current media environment. This book explores how the digital communication environment operates on many dimensions so that we, as citizens, as players within the shifting digital environment, can act to shape it. Essential reading for students and scholars of media and communication studies, media literacy and media education, as well as other disciplines where media is used as a lens to examine issues within society.

An accessible introduction to understanding the current media environment and the culture it contains, this book provides an indispensable guide to dynamic media literacy in the digital environment. Katherine G. Fry draws from philosophies of technology and communication, from media ecology, critical cultural theory, and critical pedagogy to explain the dimensions of media environments. Fry introduces an essential dynamic media environment model that can be used as a framework for understanding global social challenges. The model extends media literacy education and practice by de-centering media messages, instead explaining media as environments-as cultures created by and within our dominant form of communication. Exploring progressive education philosophies that advocate inclusion, independence, empathy, and critical thinking toward problem-solving in a rapidly changing world, this book includes media literacy examples, global case studies, exercises, and learning tools to facilitate learning the full scope of the current media environment. This book explores how the digital communication environment operates on many dimensions so that we, as citizens, as players within the shifting digital environment, can act to shape it. Essential reading for students and scholars of media and communication studies, media literacy and media education, as well as other disciplines where media is used as a lens to examine issues within society.

Each of the essays in this book explores identity in different contexts. The contexts included here are space, time, myth, religion, and media. The specifics of history and place are important contexts to consider when analyzing how identity is shaped. But the contextual frameworks of communications media, myth systems, and religions also draw unique boundaries around the identities of individuals and groups. Myth and religion are belief systems that bind people physically, spiritually, and emotionally. Communications media are the cultural and technological means through which communication among and between individuals and groups occur. Of course, all of these contexts are very different, but they are not mutually exclusive. The essays offer examples of the various ways in which a number of contextual frameworks work together in creating and sustaining identities, in space and through time.