Introducing the Ethics of Actors in SYstems (EASY) approach to digital advertising literacy
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By Michelle Ciccone
I’m excited to share a research article I wrote along with colleagues Cecilia Yuxi Zhou, Thomas Underwood, Alina Ali Durrani, Brendan McCauley, Larrisa Miller, and Erica Scharrer, which was recently made available online in the Journal of Advertising. In the paper, we outline an ethics- and systems-based approach we developed to digital advertising literacy education, and then share findings from a program we designed using this approach which we ran in three 6th grade classrooms.
First, I want to make the case to the Civics of Technology community to consider talking about digital advertising—like personalized ads and influencer marketing—in your classroom. Digital advertising encapsulates so many key features and dynamics of life online today, including the data collection and data aggregation mechanisms which are sometimes invisible and sometimes presented to users as a false opt-in; the computational processes of personalization that determine what content users see; the implications of this personalization for privacy and access to information; the dynamics of commercial culture as it has evolved in tandem with these developments; and the experience of spending time in what feel like increasingly untrustworthy spaces. Focusing on digital advertising invites exploration of all of these issues which are introduced or exacerbated by the platforms that our experiences online are built on.
Because all of this is going on behind the scenes in digital advertising, my coauthors and I argue that a digital advertising literacy program can’t just focus on critical analysis of the content of digital ads. Instead, we argue that we should approach digital advertising from a systems perspective, and help students map out the actors, interactions, and competing interests that are circulating within and enabled by this system. We call this the EASY approach—or the Ethics of Actors in SYstems approach—to digital advertising literacy, which we found allowed us to get our arms around the complexity of digital advertising when working with these students.
You can read the paper to read the full accounting of what we found when we implemented an EASY-based program with 6th graders in Massachusetts. For now, I’ll highlight the finding that surprised us the most: when we asked students what actions internet users should take to deal with the issues raised by digital advertising, the most frequent response given was actually disengagement from online spaces. We continue to grapple with whether advocating for disengagement is advocating for inaction or not, but posit:
“Suggesting that users should withhold their attention or disengage from digital content and platforms…might paradoxically be understood to be the most disruptive and agentive action that users can take in the present in response to the ethical dilemmas introduced by the digital advertising system” (p. 10).
This article is part of an upcoming special issue in the Journal of Advertising that is centered around the Transformative Advertising Research (TAR) framework (Gurrieri, Tuncay Zayer, and Coleman 2022), which argues that the advertising system has the potential to play a transformative role towards broader social change. Our contribution to this special issue explores the potential role that advertising literacy education might play within the emerging TAR subfield:
“Ultimately, we set out to understand how an ethics- and systems-based approach to advertising literacy might scaffold and spur early adolescents’ thinking toward conceptualizing a transformed advertising system, as envisioned by the TAR framework (Gurrieri, Tuncay Zayer, and Coleman 2022). Students in the current study certainly expressed hope for a digital advertising system that works quite differently than these systems work currently, if not an articulated vision of how to move from the individual actions of users at the mico-level to transformation at the meso- and macro-level. We see opportunity for future research to help connect these dots, so that early adolescents, and internet users more broadly, might understand individual actions as part of processes that can reshape digital systems over time” (p. 13)
You can read the full paper here (and please reach out at mmciccone@umass.edu if you need access). In particular, if you are interested in implementing EASY-inspired digital advertising literacy curriculum in your own context, check out the Methods section for more details on our program design, and the Implications section for what we see as some important pedagogy-related considerations. For example, we used role-playing activities as a way to allow students to experience the complexities of the digital advertising system, and we think that interactive and experiential methods like role-plays could be adapted for lots of different classroom contexts.
References
Gurrieri, L., L. Tuncay Zayer, and C. A. Coleman. 2022. “Transformative Advertising Research: Reimagining the Future of Advertising.” Journal of Advertising 51 (5): 539–556. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2022.2098545.