“I'm looking at how people experience and live with digital technologies”

Annette Markham is Chair Professor Media Literacy and Public Engagement

Still van Annette Markham in interview met GW (2024)

The relations we have with our phones, tablets and laptops are intimate: we trust them with our most personal information and allow ‘the cloud’ to become an extension of our personal and collective memory. This year Annette Markham was appointed Chair Professor of Media Literacy and Public Engagement in the department of Media and Culture Studies. She focusses on these intimate relations users have with technologies and the possible implications they have for the future.

Media literacy: shifting from media skills to critical thinking

The field of media literacy has been around for a long time, but the content and interpretation of the subject has shifted in recent decades. When you search for a definition of media literacy, Wikipedia defines it as: “The ability to access and analyse media messages as well as create, reflect and take action, using the power of information and communication to make a difference in the world.”

Markham adds: “In a world marked by continuous digital disruptions, media literacy is better defined as critical and future-oriented literacy, focused on the possibilities, politics, and ethics within digitally-saturated and data-driven media ecologies. Which inherently involve powerful digital platforms, ever-present datafication and surveillance, algorithmic systems of personalisation and more recently, the generative power of AI.

Watch the complete interview here:

Interview with Annette Markham

Technologies will not solve all of our problems

Markham sees the opportunities technology brings and is especially interested and how people interact and engage with their technological devices. “As AI becomes more powerful, everyday citizens must also know more about what’s happening under the surface. To be vigilant and conscious about what automated, autonomous, and self-learning entities are nudging us to think about or do.”

“We need to be able to assess the possible value and consequences for ourselves and our communities.” Markham stresses, “The challenge is not to be technologically solutionist and to think that technologies will solve all the problems but rather just slow down and think more broadly about questions such as: “What do we want to become and how can we get there?”

The challenge is not to be technologically solutionist and to think that technologies will solve all the problems.

Utrecht University and public engagement

After years of working as a professor in many parts of the world: from the United States to Sweden, from Denmark to Melbourne, Australia, Markham was appointed as Chair Professor of Media Literacies and Public Engagement at Utrecht University in January 2024.

Markham’s choice for Utrecht has a lot to do with how the university embraces public engagement, she says: “Utrecht has a very generous attitude toward public engagement that stretches beyond reaching out to the public and is fully committed to co-creating knowledge together based on mutually shared matters of concern.”