On enhancing media ownership literacy

The development of globalized media ownership throughout the last 25 years has been paradoxical: while increasingly fewer companies own more media outlets, the complex web of media has vastly expanded. Even for us as media scholars, it is hard to keep up with these developments.

Because media affect all of us, and most information that reaches our society is mediated, we believe that it is important for everyone to know about ownership structures is media. As a basic premise, we hypothesized that many 'ordinary' people have some idea about media ownership, but that their understanding and critical consumption of media would be enhanced by a better knowledge of who actually owns the media. The idea of media as transparent mirrors from 'real world' to society is not accurate in our view. Mediation of actual events always implies framing to a certain context, and methods of framing are tied to commercial strategies and cultural ideologies. In order to actively assess media, it is thus important to have some knowledge about underlying strategies that have framed media. Our goal for this project was therefore to visualize structures of media ownership in a web application, so that users could develop an understanding of who owns the media they consume.

Our aims for developing this web application were strongly supported by a preliminary study we held. The informal study provided us with a strong justification to build our application. The user can click and choose different ways to visualize structures of ownership, and drag the nodes around.

We believe that the ability for users to playfully interact with this complex visualization, allows them to actively grasp the paradoxical nature of ownership in media. Users are able to trace back the origins of many media they might consume on a daily basis, and draw their own conclusions on how concentrated or diverse their media consumption patterns are.

Acknowledgements

Our visualization was made possible by Graph Gear, an open source visualization platform developed by Creative Synthesis.

Our data regarding media ownership was culled from personal knowledge, stopbigmedia.com, and "Then There Were Eight," an informative infographic from Mother Jones.

Thanks to our friends and colleagues for participating in our informal survey.

Courtenay Bird - courtenaybirdATgatech.edu
MS Candidate in Digtal Media

Adam Rice - radriceATgatech.edu
MS Candidate in Digital Media

Jasper Sluijs, MA - sluysATgatech.edu
MS Candidate in Digital Media