Media quiteracy: Why digital disconnection belongs in the media literacy curriculum

Abstract

In this essay, we introduce media quiteracy, which we use to conceptualize and describe the valuable learning that can happen through the refusal to take up new media or the act of pausing or ceasing its use. We see media quiteracy as an active and generative approach to learning and argue for its inclusion in the media literacy curriculum. We trace the history of critical engagement with technologies within education and then articulate what media quiteracy can look like in practice. We surface and discuss three potential obstacles to teaching media quiteracy, which include the ways in which it problematizes assumptions around participation, progress, and efforts to limit tech use. Ultimately, we argue that media quiteracy can be an act of not only individual learning but of collective action and social transformation in a heavily mediatized, commercialized, and digitized information environment.

Full text

Journal of Media Literacy Education, 17(1), 150-165, 2025
https://doi.org/10.23860/JMLE-2025-17-1-10
ISSN: 2167-8715
Journal of Media Literacy Education
THE OFFICIAL PUBLICATION OF THE
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR MEDIA LITERACY EDUCATION (NAMLE)
Online at www.jmle.org
Media quiteracy:
Why digital disconnection belongs in the media literacy curriculum
OPEN ACCESS
Peer-reviewed article
Citation: Good, K. D., & Ciccone, M.
(2025). Media quiteracy: Why digital
disconnection belongs in the media
literacy curriculum. Journal of Media
Literacy Education, 17(1), 150-165.
https://doi.org/10.23860/JMLE-2025-
17-1-10
Corresponding Author:
Katie Day Good
katie.good@calvin.edu
Copyright: © 2025 Author(s). This is
an open access, peer-reviewed article
published by Bepress and distributed
under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License, which
permits unrestricted use, distribution,
and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original author and
source are credited. JMLE is the
official journal of NAMLE.
Received: March 29, 2024
Accepted: December 4, 2024
Published: April 29, 2025
Data Availability Statement: All
relevant data are within the paper and
its Supporting Information files.
Competing Interests: The Author(s)
declare(s) no conflict of interest.
Editorial Board
Katie Day Good
Calvin University, USA
Michelle Ciccone
University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
ABSTRACT
In this essay, we introduce media quiteracy, which we use to conceptualize
and describe the valuable learning that can happen through the refusal to take
up new media or the act of pausing or ceasing its use. We see media quiteracy
as an active and generative approach to learning and argue for its inclusion in
the media literacy curriculum. We trace the history of critical engagement with
technologies within education and then articulate what media quiteracy can
look like in practice. We surface and discuss three potential obstacles to
teaching media quiteracy, which include the ways in which it problematizes
assumptions around participation, progress, and efforts to limit tech use.
Ultimately, we argue that media quiteracy can be an act of not only individual
learning but of collective action and social transformation in a heavily
mediatized, commercialized, and digitized information environment.
Keywords: digital disconnection, digital literacy, media refusal.

Good & Ciccone ǀ Journal of Media Literacy Education, 17(1), 150-165, 2025 151
INTRODUCTION
In this essay, we introduce what we are calling media
quiteracy. Rather than a passive disengagement from
digital culture, media quiteracy can be understood as an
active, generative approach to learning about and
intervening in a heavily mediatized, commercialized,
and digitized information environment through
intentional acts of refusal, abstention, and
disconnection.
Our conceptualization of media quiteracy builds on
the related but separate traditions of media literacy and
digital literacy education. At the heart of these traditions
is a belief in the agency of the individual to make
informed choices as both a media consumer and media
producer (Buckingham, 2007; Kellner & Share, 2005;
Livingstone, 2004). In media and digital literacy
education, students are encouraged to gain familiarity
with various texts, tools, and technologies so that they
can develop the skills, dispositions, and contextual
understanding necessary to skillfully and critically
navigate the mediated world. Students learn that
technologies can indeed be put to problematic use and
that their use may have unintended and even negative
consequences. And so, when encountering a particular
media technology, the empowered and agentic media
consumer and producer should seek to understand the
technology’s affordances and limitations. Students are
invited and empowered to make decisions about whether
and how to use or not use any particular text or tool
based on their own communication needs and goals
(Hobbs, 2010; Hobbs, 2017).
Media quiteracy builds on this tradition of
engendering a sense of choice in media consumers and
media producers, while also opening space to address
particular limitations and tensions when media literacy
bumps up against the complexities of a “platform
society” and “attention economy” (Odell, 2019; van
Dijck et al., 2018). Today, media are increasingly
entangled with machines and computational agents
(Leander & Burriss, 2020). In this environment,
Pangrazio (2016) describes a situation where many
school-based digital media literacy programs focus on
“technical mastery” and “individual practices” over
“collective concerns” such as the exploitation and
inequality that the digital economy is built on top of and
deepens. There is less instructional focus on developing
the “critical dispositions” that might denaturalize the
culture that has produced the digital tools and practices
that comprise our digital media literacy educational
programs.
Indeed, in the opening essay of the inaugural issue of
this journal, Hobbs and Jensen (2009) decry a creeping
focus on “tool competence” accompanying the rise of
digital technologies, which has led to increased
spending on hardware and software in schools at the
expense of bringing attention to the critical and
contextual concerns at the roots of media literacy
education. Nichols and LeBlanc (2021) add that the
idiom of “literacy” itself might unhelpfully tether media
education to the representational politics of media—
“how media messages are created, interpreted,
mobilized, or critiqued”—which leaves unexamined the
full range of human and non-human actors and
components, such as the code, materiality, and political
economy of media, which are “peripheral to
textualization or irreducible to representation” (p. 391)
but which nevertheless give shape to and order the
media environments we navigate within.
In recent years, researchers and practitioners have
outlined how media and digital literacy education can
and should expand to more directly contend with these
issues. Valtonen et al. (2019) articulate how ideas from
computer science, such as computational thinking and
the basic mechanics of machine learning, might inform
a media literacy education updated to illuminate
techniques of data mining and behavior engineering at
play in today’s media environment. Knaus (2020)
argues for a maker-oriented approach to media literacy
education that allows students to go beyond the “outer
shell” of media technologies and Pötzsch (2019)
outlines how a focus on the structural aspects of digital
media within critical digital literacy might make room
for using alternative open source and non-commercial
technologies in the classroom.
And so, the media literacy field has certainly been
responsive to the needs of students who are living,
playing, and working in an increasingly platformized
and datafied media environment. However, as we will
explore in this essay, we also see the need for media
literacy education to more clearly and directly make
space for the exploration of non-use of digital media
technologies—both for schooling and non-schooling
purposes—as part of what it means to practice and
activate media literacy skills, knowledge, and
competencies.
We flesh out and articulate this idea of media
quiteracy not only because we see informed, considered,
and intentional acts of refusal, abstention, and
disconnection as viable options for individuals and
communities, but also because we see insistence on the
viability of non-use as a necessary intervention in this

Good & Ciccone ǀ Journal of Media Literacy Education, 17(1), 150-165, 2025 152
moment of increased technoskepticism that has arisen
amidst the continued proliferation of digital and
persuasive technologies in education and community
life. As we see it, making room for media quiteracy in
media literacy education could empower students to not
only flex their agency against machines and explore the
social and ethical implications of their media use and
disuse, but also to question the cultural, institutional, and
economic assumptions that have led “participation” in
platforms to be treated as a precondition for functioning
in our society.
Doing so could bring critical, student-led scrutiny to
decades of technological hype and solutionism in
education that have treated digital “connection”—
defined as more, faster, and more frequent engagement
with technology—as an unalloyed good. Likewise, in
students’ lives outside of school, a disposition toward
media quiteracy could empower them to “say no,”
individually and collectively, to select technologies,
platforms, or practices that they deem to encroach
detrimentally on their personal data, privacy,
relationships, wellbeing, focus, and time. In these ways,
we explore media quiteracy here as one of several
strategies to help students and educators challenge
narratives of inevitability so that they can participate in
shaping the sociotechnical systems of the present and
future. Media quiteracy—the idea that valuable learning
can happen through the action of refusing to take up new
media, or in intentionally leaving it behind—can apply
to any type of media included in conventional
definitions of media literacy. But we envision it as a
particularly useful approach for students to evaluate
both the everyday “edtech,” or the laptops, tablets, apps,
learning management systems, and other digital
technologies that are increasingly embedded in
education, and the popular technologies that they use in
and out of school, such as smartphones, social media,
digital games, and streaming media.
The roots of resistance and “right to not-learn” with
technology
The predominance of techno-solutionist thinking
and discourse in the United States obscures a tradition
of educators and education scholars formulating critical
approaches to teaching, learning, and living with
popular media and technology. Educators have long
asked, and invited their students to ask, critical and
ethical questions about whether and how new
technologies should be used. In their classrooms, they
have modeled a range of approaches to engaging with
new technology, from proactive adoption to a lukewarm
“token compliance” with top-down directives, to
principled refusal (Cain, 2021, pp. 67-74; Cuban, 1986;
Good, 2016). Regarding popular cultural consumption
practices outside of school, too, educators have taught
skills for critical reception and discernment. For
example, when motion pictures and radio exploded in
popularity in the 1930s and 40s, some U.S. educators
initiated a film- and radio appreciation movement—a
forerunner to media literacy education—that invited
high schoolers to practice a kind of “civic spectatorship”
that involved not only consuming and discussing
popular movies and radio programs in and out of school,
but also boycotting, or withholding their consumption
of, the media that they found intentionally misleading,
anti-democratic, or biased in its portrayal of minority
groups (Cain, 2021; Good, 2020, pp. 101–104).
More recently, when enthusiasm for the educational
potential of computers and the internet surged in the
1990s and early 2000s, some educators and education
scholars sought to temper the hype with warnings about
the potential harms of bringing computational
equipment and logics into schools. Their concerns
included that the drive to make learning more automated
and individualized with computers was antithetical to
the civic, democratic, and communitarian aims of
education; that computers were oversold by industries
yet underused in classrooms due to misalignment
between their programmed affordances and schools’
diverse and dynamic instructional needs; and that rising
cultural pressure to equip students with the latest
technology was “the product of manufactured need,
benefiting makers more than consumers” (Abrams,
2011, p. 2; Burch, 2009; Cuban, 2003; Postman, 2011,
pp. 41-46).
Further, some critics worried that the movement to
teach “computer literacy” pushed a kind of educational
conformity, leaving little room for students to opt out or
imagine alternative ways of engaging with information.
“How will educators respond to the student brave
enough to raise her hand and say, ‘I’d rather not use a
computer today?’” wondered R. W. Burniske, a
professor of Learning Design and Technology at the
University of Hawaii-Manoa, in the Teachers’ College
Record in 2000. Offering a defense of “computer
illiteracy,” Burniske argued that “every student should
have the right to not-learn” how to use new technologies,
particularly if they resisted them on ethical grounds. In
his own graduate studies at the intersection of English
and computers, Burniske developed a personal
conviction that “certain types of reading, writing,

Good & Ciccone ǀ Journal of Media Literacy Education, 17(1), 150-165, 2025 153
speaking, and listening would be overwhelmed by
technology rather than served by it.” Burniske saw
schools as increasingly “putting [students] through the
electronic paces,” requiring them to use screens and
machines to undertake their creative and compositional
work. He suggested that allowing students to resist the
mounting pressure to become “computer literate” in
schools could “prove to be a virtue, providing an
essential counter-balance to de-humanizing forces”
(Burniske, 2000).
Despite these early and recurring concerns about the
potential impact of digital technologies on education,
the use of digital “edtech” products in schools has grown
dramatically. This growth mirrors the widespread
adoption of smartphones, social media, and streaming
media in students’ families and personal lives,
translating to a substantial share of students’ waking
hours involving the use of screens (Radesky et al.,
2023). Popular educational apps, such as Google
Classroom, Canvas, ClassDojo, and PowerSchool,
constitute increasingly powerful, for-profit
intermediaries between schools, families, and the state.
Global spending on edtech is projected to reach $404
billion in 2025 (Williamson, 2022), representing a
significant flow of public resources to private
companies, and scholars are beginning to map the
influence that edtech investors have on education policy
(Williamson & Komljenovic, 2023).
While there is evidence that digital devices and
platforms, when used with intentionality and critical
media literacy, can support young people’s learning in
school as well as their socialization and wellbeing out of
school, there is also evidence that such technologies can
interfere with learning and wellbeing through
mechanisms such as digital distraction, cyberbullying
and harassment, and social comparison (Stoilova et al.,
2021; UNESCO, 2023, pp. 76-84). As users navigate
ambivalent experiences of empowerment and
disempowerment with technology, a range of
technology resistance movements are emerging both
within educational settings, such as schools and
universities, and in out-of-school settings, including
community and healthcare organizations, adolescent
clubs, and parenting groups. We use media quiteracy as
an umbrella term to both describe the interrelated nature
of these efforts to limit, reimagine, or resist the use of
technology in and outside of schools, and to offer a
practical approach for teachers and learners to apply to
their own interests and needs in media literacy and use.
On learning through leaving: Media quiteracy in
practice
In a moment when digital platforms and devices are
becoming increasingly embedded into students’ social
and academic lives, we deliberately build on the
tradition of U.S. schools cultivating diverse and ever-
evolving approaches to media literacy as preparation for
lifelong learning, critical thinking, and engaged
citizenship (Hobbs & Jensen, 2009; Hobbs & McGee,
2014). In our proposed model of media quiteracy, we
encourage educators to introduce students to a range of
skills and philosophies for critical engagement with
technologies—including, but not limited to, voluntary
disconnection and non-use. We do not assume that the
options for disconnection and non-use do not appear in
media literacy education otherwise, but argue that equal
consideration of what we are calling media quiteracy
reintroduces non-participation as a viable option and a
legitimate enactment of media and digital literacy skills
and dispositions in its own right.
There is much to be learned through non-use, non-
participation, and disconnection, or what we could
simply call “opting out.” For example, “media fasts” are
a common learning exercise in college-level courses in
communication, media, and psychology. They require
students to temporarily reduce or suspend altogether
their use of certain media, such as television or social
media apps, and reflect on the experience. The enduring
impact of these kinds of short-term experiments on the
behavior and routines of individuals can be mixed, but
experiencing non-use and disconnection in community
with others generates important opportunities for
reflection and learning. Gomes et al. (2021), for
example, found the media fast to be a “transformative
learning experience” for college students, who, after a
four-day break from electronic media of their choosing,
reported improved focus, deepened social connections,
better sleep, and, importantly, a heightened awareness of
how the design of technologies, and the social norms
surrounding their use, influence their habits, attention,
and interactions.
Teaching media quiteracy would involve, in age-
appropriate ways and across the K-12 and higher
education media literacy curriculum, these and other
ways of analyzing media through acts of abstention, or
“learning through leaving.” Unlike most short-term
media fasts, however, this approach would treat non-use
as both a workable long-term proposition and a terrain
in which young people can decide not just to selectively
disengage from, but to actively speak back to and

Good & Ciccone ǀ Journal of Media Literacy Education, 17(1), 150-165, 2025 154
change, certain aspects of their media environment. In
this sense, media quiteracy seeks to draw a firmer
connection to the traditions of consumer resistance and
media boycotts that were of great interest to mass
communication and critical media literacy scholars in
the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries
(Syvertsen, 2017, pp. 55-76), but which have not yet
been widely discussed or explored in reference to social
media platforms and edtech—two of the most widely
used media domains among young people today. In this
way, we believe that media quiteracy creates an
opportunity to explore the connection between
collective concerns and individual action within the
digital media environment and platform society.
For example, schools could invite greater student-
and community deliberation around the procurement
and use of education technologies in schools, including
regular invitations to “pause, reset, and reimagine”
whether the institutional reliance on certain tools has
become excessive, intrusive, burdensome, or not
produced the hoped-for outcomes. After many decades
of schools urging students to “keep up with” new
technology, it would be a paradigm shift for these
institutions to invite students to slow down or even
question these imperatives. But we believe that
developing a district- or school-wide culture of scrutiny
and caution over edtech procurement, as well as
transparency about the uses and outcomes of new
technologies in schools, could serve to strengthen not
only parental involvement and public trust in schools,
but also students’ critical digital literacies as they
participate in discussions of whether and how public
institutions should adopt new technological products
(Williamson et al., 2024)
To support the development of media quiteracy in
students’ lives outside of school, schools could consider
supporting, with the institutional resources afforded to
official extracurricular activities, a version of the
“Luddite Club” formed by high school students in
Brooklyn, New York in 2021. Responding to feelings of
digital overuse and pressures to participate in social
media, which had intensified during the period of remote
schooling during the Covid-19 pandemic, the Luddite
Club’s founder, Logan Lane, and her peers formed a
local collective dedicated to rejecting smartphones and
social media. They met regularly in person to nurture
friendships offline and discuss ways to seek “liberation
from technology.” In subsequent press coverage of the
club, members reported how the action of leaving media
behind resulted in deep learning about media and
themselves. They expanded their knowledge as they
found more time for hobbies, reading, and artistic
pursuits, redirected their attention to in-person
relationships, and grappled with philosophical and
pragmatic questions about living in a heavily
technologized culture. This included discussions about
the possibility of “opting out,” or sustaining a low-tech
lifestyle in the long term, when more and more sectors
of society, from restaurants to transportation to banking
and education services, encourage or require the use of
technologies such as smartphones (Garcia-Navarro,
2023; Vadukul, 2022).
The idea of learning about media through non-
participation dovetails with emergent approaches that
education scholars have formulated to cultivate
students’ critical information literacies in an era of
increasing information abundance and platform
influence. Learning to scale back the use of unwanted
apps, or going further to abandon the use of a
smartphone or mobile digital device altogether in favor
of analog, print-based, or other “low-tech” alternatives,
can help students practice the skills of “critical ignoring”
that may be necessary to maintaining focus and
wellbeing in a sea of mis/information. Kozyreva et al.
(2022) define “critical ignoring” as the disposition of
“choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s
limited attentional capacities” in an information-
saturated attention economy.
In addition to helping students exercise greater
control over their attention in and outside of school,
media quiteracy can encourage them to “slow down”
and ponder the costs of certain media technologies to the
environment, educational institutions, and people’s
wellbeing (Selwyn, 2024). The use of personal digital
devices and data-hungry digital applications, such as
generative AI tools, contributes to growing
environmental problems of e-waste, carbon emissions,
and the extraction of rare-earth elements. Inviting
students to reflect on these issues can contribute to their
well-rounded “technology education,” not merely an
“education with technology,” rooted in what Pleasants
et al. (2023) call technoskepticism, a framework for
encouraging students to reflect on what kind of
relationship they want to have with technologies before
adopting them.
We find several examples of media quiteracy in what
Krutka (2024) describes as an “anti-social media
curriculum,” a proposal to teach civic engagement in a
way that is anchored in “showing students other ways of
being, knowing and making change away from social
media.” Urging social studies educators to foster “slow
responses to fast media,” Krutka highlights the school’s

Good & Ciccone ǀ Journal of Media Literacy Education, 17(1), 150-165, 2025 155
unique potential, as a civic institution and a physical
gathering place, to foster “anti-social media
environments.” By this he means that schools can serve
as a uniquely generative space for students to dialogue
with each other and explore their civic interests and
identities away from the algorithmic and commercial
logics, and magnified social pressures, of social media
platforms.
“In response to the speed and outrage of social
media, offer students opportunities for slower
contemplation, intergroup dialogue, and reflection,”
Krutka suggests, along with other ideas to
counterbalance online platforms’ promotion of
performance metrics (such as “likes” and “follows”) and
disjointed media feeds with more localized, quality
interpersonal interactions within school groups (2024,
pp. 36-37). Such a curriculum aligns with observations
from sociologists, who have argued that despite social
media’s long-heralded potential to strengthen social
connections and power social movements, it is the long-
term, local relationships that are perhaps most essential
to communities’ wellbeing and to successful movements
for social change (Klinenberg, 2018; Tufekci, 2022).
Media quiteracy recognizes the ways in which
people, including our students, are already making
personal decisions to “quit” or scale back their
technology use, however partially or temporarily. They
may be interested in discussing how discourses of
disconnection appear in popular culture or their own
social media feeds. For example, the actress and pop star
Selena Gomez, comedian Aziz Ansari, and athlete
Nikola Jokic have all made headlines in recent years for
their periodic rejection of smartphones or social media,
or for their adoption of seemingly “obsolete”
technologies like the flip phone. The musician Lorde, in
her 2021 hit single, “Solar Power,” referenced her desire
to disconnect from the Internet and find refuge from the
glare of the media in the verse: “And I throw my cellular
device in the water / Can you reach me? / No, you can’t.”
In interviews, Lorde spoke about her decision to lock
herself out of her social media apps and trade a life lived
largely online for offline activities like baking,
gardening, and “chilling.” “I would see my screen time
go to, like, 11 hours and I knew it was just looking at the
Daily Mail,” the 24-year-old singer told the New York
1 In 2023 alone, the Education Ministry of Sweden announced
that schools would abandon digital textbooks in favor of print
materials. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO) argued, in a pair of
unusually techno-critical reports, that despite decades of
optimism that technology would improve learning, its benefits
Times. “I remember sitting up in bed and realizing I
could get to the end of my life and have done this every
day. And it’s up to me to choose, right now. So I just
sort of chose” (Coscarelli, 2021).
Students may find it a worthwhile learning activity
to explore why such meditations on disconnection are
becoming part of the zeitgeist, a notable development
within a popular culture that has traditionally celebrated
technological innovation and consumerism. They may
also be interested in learning about well-known
technological resisters from the past, including the
Luddites, nineteenth-century textile workers who
protested the introduction of industrialized looms into
their factories by destroying the machines, or the
naturalist and romanticist writer Henry David Thoreau,
among others (Jones, 2006). Students could consider:
How are contemporary instances of resistance to
technologies and a culture of default connection
resonant with or a departure from these historical
examples? What conditions and concerns inspired these
individuals and movements in the past, and how have
these shifted (or not) over time?
Signs are emerging across the education landscape
that educators, parents, policymakers, and students are
likewise “in the mood for disconnection” and seeking
opportunities to resist or reimagine the widespread
integration of technology into schools and society
(Balslev & Oehlenschläger, 2023; Karppi et al., 2021).
“While students need to be taught about digital
technology, this does not mean that students need to be
taught through digital technology,” advised UNESCO in
one of two unusually techno-critical reports released by
the organization in 2023 that cautioned that
technology’s benefits to learning had been overstated
(UNESCO, 2023; West, 2023).
National- and district-wide bans on cell phones in
schools, country-wide policies abandoning digital for
print-based textbooks, health officials’ warnings of
social media and smartphones’ risks to youth
development and mental health, and teacher-, parent-,
and youth-led calls for regulation of social media
industries are some of the emerging activities that
suggest that a “techlash” has roots in a diversity of
constituencies and social and political concerns.1
remained largely unsubstantiated and the adoption of remote
learning during the Covid-19 pandemic had worsened
educational inequalities (UNESCO, 2023; West, 2023). In the
U.S., the Surgeon General issued a warning that social media
was harmful to young people’s health. The American
Federation of Teachers, the nation’s largest teacher’s union,

Good & Ciccone ǀ Journal of Media Literacy Education, 17(1), 150-165, 2025 156
While we do not know where these initiatives will
lead or whether they will have positive effects on
students’ learning or wellbeing, we do see these as
significant, collective efforts to speak back to a changing
media environment and pause and imagine differently.
And so, we stress that media quiteracy is not a stance of
foreclosing opportunity to engage in digital culture, but
rather is a meaningful educational and social response to
students’ interests as well as an opportunity for new
possibilities for engagement. As such, it is in keeping
with long traditions of scholarship that argue that
resistance and refusal are actually generative of new
possibilities (Barabas, 2022; Lachney & Dotson, 2018;
McGranahan, 2016; Prasse-Freeman, 2022).
OVERCOMING OBSTACLES TO TEACHING
MEDIA QUITERACY
We identify three obstacles to teaching media
quiteracy and offer ideas to overcome them.
Participation is assumed as a prerequisite for literacy
and non-use framed as a problem
The dominant model of digital literacy education
today is focused on cultivating literacy through
encouraging students’ digital participation and
technology adoption. According to this “digital
participation” model, schools should be equipped with
ample digital technology and support students’
exploration of online platforms to build their critical
literacies. The National Association for Media Literacy
Education (NAMLE), for example, defines media
literacy as “the ability to encode and decode the symbols
transmitted via media and synthesize, analyze and
produce mediated messages,” and encourages “hands-
on experiences and media production” as central to a
critical media education (National Association for
Media Literacy Education, 2024)
Within the participation model, media literacy
scholars and advocates have traditionally regarded
technology non-use as a problem, indicating a
deficiency of interest and skills in, and access to,
technology. In this journal, the terms “non-use” and
“non-user” appear infrequently and mainly in reference
to older adults who lack digital literacy, basic
along with children’s advocacy groups, including the youth-
led organization for online safety, Design It For Us, jointly
published a report detailing how social media was disrupting
learning in schools (American Federation of Teachers et al.,
technology skills, and competencies, suggesting a need
for intervention (Rasi et al., 2019), though scholars
remind us to take seriously the cultural and contextual
reasons for non-use (Lantela, 2019). The concepts of
“media refusal,” “technology refusal,” “digital
disconnection,” and “slow media” have received little
coverage, while relevant terms such as “Luddism” and
“technoskepticism” don’t appear in the journal at all. All
of these concepts are gaining attention in adjacent fields,
such as media, communication, and education research,
as domains of technology practice in which users seek
to lessen their dependence on or reform their stance
toward digital devices. The field of media education
research is ripe for analyzing the learning potential of
lessons involving technology refusal.
The participation-forward approach in media
literacy education is guided by laudable aims of closing
the digital divide, “meeting students where they are”
(which is to say, already online), and preparing them
with the skills and competencies to thrive in an
increasingly technologically-mediated society and
economy. But does the “digital participation” model of
literacy inadvertently normalize the acceptance of for-
profit, surveillant, and manipulative technologies, and
thereby assist the expansionist aims of commercial
interests in schools and students’ lives? How might this
approach to teaching digital literacy act as a form of
“soft governance” (Pangrazio, 2023), circumscribing
learners’ ability to imagine non-digitally-mediated ways
of reading, writing, accessing information, working, and
connecting with others? And does this approach
overlook the ways that some students already are, on
their own, expressing desires or taking steps to
“unplug,” “log off,” quit, or to reduce their use of certain
technologies?
We propose a more expansive definition of non-use
in media literacy research and practice to account for the
diversity of motivations and circumstances that drive it.
We suggest, following the growing body of scholarship
on disconnection, that non-use can stem not only from
conditions of inadequate access or education, but also,
or alternatively, from learned awareness of and personal
or cultural aversion to technology (Light, 2014;
Portwood-Stacer, 2013; Ross et al., 2024; Selwyn,
2006). Plaut writes, “Illiteracies—digital and
otherwise—are not always deficits. They may instead be
2023). A U.S. parent-led organization, the Phone-Free Schools
Movement, began advocating for schools to prohibit the use of
smartphones in classrooms.

Good & Ciccone ǀ Journal of Media Literacy Education, 17(1), 150-165, 2025 157
far-sighted, enduring forms of resistance” (2023). What
Plaut (2023) terms “strategic illiteracies” can be found,
for example, in the history of indigenous people and
immigrants refusing to learn or speak the imposed
language of a colonial power or dominant linguistic
group in order to preserve the connection to their own
language and cultural identity (see also Burniske, 2000).
Non-use should be understood not solely as something
that people passively experience due to irregular access
to or knowledge of technology, but, additionally, as a
disposition that individuals may actively seek to
cultivate to manage their experiences with media.
Therefore, in a media literacy curriculum that includes
media quiteracy, students should be able to describe
situations when non-use stems from a lack of access to
or skill in technology, and when it reflects a
conscientious act of refusal, and why.
Teaching students to explore and engage in actions
of technology refusal exposes an additional dimension
of the digital divide and digital inequalities in terms of
who has the option to disconnect. Smartphone adoption
has become almost universal among U.S. teens, while
access to broadband and computers at home remains
stratified by race, class, and geography (Anderson et al.,
2023; Pew Research Center, 2024). While involuntary
disconnection from the internet is shaped by such factors
(Bozan & Treré, 2023; Treré, 2021), opportunities to
voluntarily disconnect also appear to be stratified by
socioeconomic status, with the most affluent having the
most opportunities and resources to “opt out” and
“unplug” (Kuntsman & Miyake, 2022; Nguyen &
Hargittai, 2023). Expanding the treatment of non-use in
media literacy research and practice can help the field
wrestle with this emerging dimension of digital
inequality.
As scholars explore the terrains of voluntary and
involuntary disconnection, it is worth noting that the
present-day use of technology in schools complicates a
simple dichotomization of these practices. Schools can
theoretically be a place where students both experience
involuntary disconnection, due to inadequate or
inconsistent access to technology, and practice
voluntary disconnection through lessons involving
media quiteracy. But more commonly, schools are a
place where students experience connection to
technology involuntarily, or what we could call
involuntary connection. As a growing majority of
schools deploy a 1:1 computing model, these schools
compel students, as a matter of course in their studies, to
participate in learning through technologically-mediated
means, such as Chromebooks, tablets, and learning apps.
In short, there is an opportunity to scrutinize how
schools position digital participation as a requisite for
learning about the digital, and to reckon with their own
role in equating digital literacy with media use.
An expanded definition of non-use is important as
younger generations gain access to increasingly mobile,
ubiquitous, and sophisticated technologies and confront
the problems of digital abundance and overuse (Büchi et
al., 2019). Media quiteracy would invite students to
reflect on and articulate the ways in which they are
already, or have considered, opting out of certain media
experiences. For example, as a growing suite of social-
and school-related technologies blur the traditional
boundaries between home and school life, students and
teachers may have a particular interest in, and readiness
to discuss, the issues at stake in international efforts to
pass “right to disconnect” laws, which give workers the
right to refrain from checking digital communications
off-hours without penalties from their employers
(Terada, 2021). In a digital literacy curriculum that
makes room for “quiteracy,” students could debate the
implications of the increasingly common practice in
which schools communicate grades and official
communications at all hours via push notifications on
online learning management systems. Such debates
could lead to student- or community-led actions within
school districts or universities to devise different norms.
By collectively abandoning problematic
technologies or negotiating new boundaries for their
use, users can gain a deeper perspective on the extent to
which such technologies have encroached into diverse
domains of life and captured formerly vital information
practices and industries, such as local news and
community forums. Students can observe, and even try
to change, if they wish, the social network effects that
make social media platforms difficult to disengage from.
While individual retreat from a platform is difficult
when one’s community remains active there, a
collective and deliberate retreat, or migration to
different spaces, may make the process easier (Haidt,
2024; Simpson, 2022).
Tech refusal challenges narratives that equate
technological innovation with progress
The idea that technological innovation and invention
necessarily lead to social and economic progress is a
deeply held cultural belief (Slack & Wise, 2015). In fact,
as ecomedia literacy scholar Antonio López (2020)
argues, “Mainstream media literacy practices are
primarily based on a 19th-century mechanistic paradigm

Good & Ciccone ǀ Journal of Media Literacy Education, 17(1), 150-165, 2025 158
of communication and education, reinforcing the
ideology of technological progress at the core of the
Modernity project” (p. 25). This “progress narrative”
certainly sets the stage for the dominant participation
paradigm in media literacy education, which we have
explored above.
But we know from critical tech scholarship from
Virginia Eubanks, Ruha Benjamin, Meredith Broussard,
Safiya Umoja Noble, and others that technologies do not
necessarily support or lead to social progress, and in fact
often not only reinforce discriminatory systems, but also
give a false sense of objectivity, purporting to remove
human bias via computation all the while leaving
unacknowledged the ways that inequalities and bias get
baked into digital technologies themselves. Even the
notion of ensuring “access” to technology in schools—
long regarded as essential to bringing progress in the
form of reducing structural and racial inequalities in
education—has delivered, according to Crooks (2024),
greater value to the tech industry than it has to
marginalized learners and communities. Critical tech
scholars recast this “progress narrative” and the
attendant idea that technology can provide the solution
to the problems we face as digital solutionism or
technosolutionism (Morozov, 2013) or techno-
chauvinism (Broussard, 2019).
Making room for media quiteracy in the digital
literacy curriculum can invite students to denaturalize
dominant discourses about the benefits of technology—
such as the notion that digital skills are necessary to be
competitive in the global labor marketplace—that they
may have ambivalent feelings about but feel unable to
express out loud (Brown, 2019). Likewise, it can equip
them to challenge narratives of technological
inevitability that suggest that resistance to new products
is not only futile but also counter-productive to the
social, political, and economic progress that they may
desire. Media scholar Annette Markham (2021) writes
that the “progress narrative” can act as “discursive
closure,” whereby narratives of progress and
inevitability operate on the “personal sensibilities” of
members of the public, making it difficult for
individuals to imagine alternatives to dominant future
imaginaries that begin to circulate (p. 387).
We see media quiteracy as a re-insistence that
alternatives are always possible, and that “quitting”
technology is its own kind of participation. Non-use and
refusal should be understood not as equivalent to total
removal from sociotechnical systems, but instead as
strategies for shaping the future of technology
development, adoption, and implementation. To this
point, we can study examples of technology refusal from
within the tech industry itself, including high-profile
examples such as Google employee protest in 2018 over
the company’s Pentagon-funded Project Maven AI
weapons program (Shane & Wakabayashi, 2018) and
whistleblowers like former Facebook employee Frances
Haugen (Mac & Kang, 2023). Refusal is also put forth
as a strategic tool for technology developers to use in
order to confront instances when industry solution
frameworks around “fairness” and “ethics” are unable to
confront the actual harms of particular technologies
(Barabas, 2022). In this way, non-use can be informed,
strategic, partial, and an ongoing negotiation.
For young people and educators, engaging with
media quiteracy becomes a critical dimension of
technology literacy insofar as it offers a way to critically
examine the narratives by which particular technologies
have become integrated into, and normalized by,
schooling. Media quiteracy encourages students and
educators to consider this normalization from multiple
perspectives, from the pressures to make public
educational institutions run more like corporations, to
the ways in which “education has been used to control
technological implementation and govern citizens in
order to create desired futures” (Rahm, 2023, p. 46), to
the “virtual turn” of the pandemic, to the “network
effects” and monopolistic control over local information
industries and environments that social media
companies rely on to make their platforms socially and
economically indispensable to users (Simpson, 2022).
At the same time, it is important to ensure that a critical
examination of digital technology does not overlook its
important benefits, particularly to individuals with
disabilities who rely on them in an assistive capacity
(Alper, 2017) and to members of underrepresented
groups who benefit from the access to information,
representation, and community that these tools afford.
The classroom is an ideal setting in which to help
students explore these dynamics in community, and to
devise and debate alternative ways of relating with and
without the assistance of technology (Postman, 2011).
As the education scholars Antero Garcia, Charles
Logan, and T. Philip Nichols recently observed, schools
in this moment should be fertile ground for reviving the
tradition of Luddism, or resisting and reimagining
technology for the greater good and in ways that do not
necessarily mean rejecting technology wholesale. “As
bastions for instilling civic values and decision-making,
the lessons we teach now about automation,
surveillance, and human resistance are among the most
important that schools can offer” (Garcia et al., 2024).

Good & Ciccone ǀ Journal of Media Literacy Education, 17(1), 150-165, 2025 159
Schools should create opportunities for students to
consider their institutions’ involvement in the
digitalization of everything, especially during the
pandemic (see, for example, higher education’s
adoption of Proctorio, TurnItIn, and other surveillance
softwares—which has prompted some student-led
lawsuits [Broussard, 2023]). This could include discrete
learning experiences like conducting a technoethical
audit of a particular technology (Krutka et al., 2021).
This likely requires a culture shift within a school
community to not only include the voices of a full range
of stakeholders in procurement decisions, but also to
consider non-renewal of contracts with particular edtech
vendors as a viable option. We recognize that this kind
of critical interrogation may put individual teachers and
students at odds with institutions that have a stake in
particular technologies being integrated within schools.
But we argue that making space for students to critically
examine their school’s technology policies offers an
important opportunity for young people to step out of
the discursive closures of inevitability and
powerlessness that can govern their relationship to one
of the most central and formative institutional contexts
in their young lives (Ciccone & Logan, 2023).
Calls to limit tech use are framed as a moral panic
Efforts by educators, parents, and other authority
figures to restrict younger people’s access to certain
forms of media have, for several decades in media and
cultural studies scholarship, been regarded as
expressions of a “moral panic,” or an exaggerated and
irrational fear that someone or something is harming
society or challenging dominant social values (Cohen,
1972; Lumby, 1997). A “media panic” is a particular
kind of moral panic in which the object of concern is a
new medium, such as television, video games, or the
Internet, and in which the emotionally-charged
discussions about its possible harms play out in mass
media coverage and in other mediated forums (Drotner,
1999, p. 596; Hall, 1978). Years before the sociologist
Stanley Cohen introduced the term “moral panic” to
social theory (1972), the communication scholar
Marshall McLuhan used it to describe the recurrent
anxieties among society’s elite about the psychological
and social disruptions enabled by new media, including
radio, television, and film (McLuhan, 1964). For some
scholars and cultural observers, the present-day calls to
ban or place limits on young people’s uses of
smartphones and social media websites fit within this
larger historical pattern of exaggerated elite fears and
moralizing, censorious efforts to contain their influence
(Jeffery, 2018; Marwick, 2008; Orben, 2020).
But some scholars have argued for a more nuanced
look at people’s concerns about new media. Syvertsen
(2017), in her historical and cultural study of media
resisters, from 1920s movie censors to the anti-
television activists of the 1960s to 21st-century digital
refusers, notes that the tendency among media scholars
and liberals to characterize these past and present-day
worriers as “panicky moralists” risks obscuring their
diverse motivations and actions. More than just a
concern about the degradation of morals, these resisters
also show “concerns for culture, enlightenment,
democracy, community and health” (2017, p. 11).
Syvertsen argues that we should seriously attend to
media resistance as a surprisingly enduring tradition of
“sense-making efforts, drawing on an eclectic mix of
perspectives and ideas in order to warn about, or explain,
potential damage resulting from media’s presence” (p.
6). Similarly, Lumby (1997) cautions that “to claim
someone else is panicking is to make a claim to the high
rational ground. When we accuse others of panicking
we're accusing them of not thinking clearly.” Rather
than denounce or dismiss people’s worry about new
media as “base displays of ignorance and hysteria,” she
argues, we should seek instead to understand the
rationales behind them, as well as the “coalitions of
concern” that emerge around new technologies, which
can be diverse and contain what may seem like
contradictory political and cultural viewpoints (1997, p.
40).
We propose that media literacy education is well-
equipped to empower students to seriously and
empathetically grapple with theirs and others’ full range
of feelings—including not only awe, appreciation, and
wonder, but also worry, overwhelm, and disquiet—
about new media. Our complex habits and feelings
around digital media suggest that there is not always a
clear demarcation between media resistance and use.
People can be active users and resisters of media
simultaneously, as many describe their efforts to control
their internet use as a continuous struggle to overcome
an “addiction” (Parry et al., 2024). Media literacy
education can help students identify and even intervene
in the “coalitions of concern” that emerge around new
technologies as people seek to understand their effects
on their lives.
The so-called “techlash” against social media
companies in recent years, for example, stems from a
variety of constituencies, including not only
conservative voices concerned about new media

Good & Ciccone ǀ Journal of Media Literacy Education, 17(1), 150-165, 2025 160
corrupting childhood or subverting the authority of
parents, but also former Silicon Valley workers
concerned about the exploitative design of new
technologies, as well as governmental and nonprofit
organizations with stated missions of countering the
commercialization of childhood and promoting youth
mental health. Critically, a growing number of voices in
this movement are young people themselves, who draw
from their experiences of growing up in the social media
age to call for resistance to, or reformation of, tech
platforms.2 Rather than view these groups as
“panicked,” media literacy scholars and educators
should be at the forefront of helping students understand
their motivations and debate whether their solutions
contribute to digital literacy. Taking an empathetic
response to others’ worries can help students take
seriously their own complex feelings about
technology—including feelings of frustration in the
difficulty of “logging off”—and translate those feelings
into constructive action.
Lastly, rather than assume that today’s calls to
restrict new media are a revival of the media panics of
yesteryear, we encourage teachers and students to think
carefully about the unique affordances of each medium,
the historical and social contexts in which they are
situated, and the political economy of the attendant
media industries and environments. We encourage
learners to be skeptical not only of claims that are
narrowly technologically deterministic or appear
alarmist, but also of claims that suggest that fears about
digital technology are necessarily overstated because
past fears about earlier technologies were overstated,
too. After all, to suggest that concerns about social
media and smartphones are equivalent to previously
overstated fears about movies and radio is to overlook
these media’s unique affordances, industrial and
regulatory contexts, and cultures of use. A print-based
comic book is markedly different, in affordances and
industrial origins, from the portable, internet-enabled,
and surveillant computers known as smartphones. An
interactive social media platform that attaches publicly-
viewable metrics, in the form of “likes,” comments, and
views, to users’ interactions and social performances is
qualitatively different from the early video games that
fascinated many teenagers, and worried adults, in the
2 See, for example, the whistleblowing actions and
accompanying resignations of Frances Haugen from Facebook
and Meredith Whittaker from Google, as well as Timnit
Gebru’s departure from Google (Ghaffrey, 2021); the U.S.
Surgeon General’s report warning of social media’s risks to
youth mental and physical health (Murthy, 2023); and the
1970s and 80s (Newman, 2018). Media quiteracy invites
students and educators to become attuned to these
particularities and contexts as they debate and
experiment with different approaches to technology
adoption and use.
Media quiteracy makes for a fuller and richer media
literacy education
In this essay, we have defined what we mean by
“media quiteracy,” traced the history of these ideas,
demonstrated how media quiteracy provides an
opportunity for learning, and articulated three obstacles
to teaching media quiteracy and ways to overcome them.
An additional obstacle to consider is that there is
little time and few resources allocated, currently, toward
teaching media literacy, which may make the teaching
of “media quiteracy” seem like a luxury or even
counterproductive endeavor that few schools can afford.
But we believe that the inclusion of media quiteracy
ultimately enhances and reinforces key media literacy
principles. Such an approach dovetails with calls from
media literacy scholars, going back to the 1990s, that
media literacy education should emphasize students’
development not merely as literate consumers, but as
engaged citizens, thinking beyond the contents of the
“texts themselves” to the larger implications of
technology industries and media use practices in
structuring social relations (Lewis & Jhally, 1998).
Media quiteracy makes space for opportunities to both
build practical skills in the purposeful engagement with
technology and exercise a critical awareness of tech’s
power in education and society. In some ways, a digital
literacy of engagement and a media quiteracy of non-use
go hand in hand: the kind of non-use we advocate
making space for is informed, measured, considered,
and thoughtful, and in some ways that can only come
from a deep familiarity with and knowledge of these
sociotechnical systems.
We offer a note of caution, though, against seeing
non-use as predicated on expertise, because this can
become an impossible benchmark to reach. Markham
(2021) identifies this as a particular discursive closure
she calls “disqualification,” which is a “discourse that
persuades people to believe they are not qualified to
advocacy, in 2023 and 2024, for the passage of the Kids Online
Safety Act (KOSA) by Fairplay (formerly the Campaign for a
Commercial-Free Childhood) and Design It for Us, a “youth-
led coalition advocating for safer social media and online
platforms for kids, teens, and young adults.”

Good & Ciccone ǀ Journal of Media Literacy Education, 17(1), 150-165, 2025 161
enter the conversation” (p. 395). Markham goes on,
“Whether deliberate or not, the disqualification of the
general public functions strategically to sustain the
power of small groups of stakeholders in determining
how our social interactions and streaming habits
‘should’ work” (ibid.).
In this way, then, media quiteracy becomes a
powerful tool in the critical media and digital literacy
educator’s toolkit, as it insists on the qualification of all
members of the public, including our students, to take
seriously their feelings about technology, including and
especially when those feelings include ambivalence,
concern, or overwhelm. What’s more, making space for
students to explore and practice quitting or non-use as
part of their experience in school aligns our digital
media literacy messages of empowerment, choice, and
agency with our practice. If we hope that young people
will at times exercise skepticism, caution, or restraint
when encountering emerging technologies—often a
learning objective within media literacy education—
then we would be wise to provide opportunity for this
within school.
We want to end by re-emphasizing that media
quiteracy is an act of not only individual learning but of
collective action and social transformation. This article
has drawn attention to how media quiteracy is taking
shape in both concrete and proposed ways, from the
teen-led, low-tech Luddite Club to new approaches to
digital literacy and social studies education that
emphasize “critical ignoring,” “technoskepticism,” and
“anti-social media” dispositions in learning and relating
through media. By examining the opportunities for and
barriers to non-use and non-participation via media
quiteracy, we might confront the limitations to digital
literacy education and research in moving beyond the
decisions that can be made between user and tool
interface. By experiencing how the act of leaving media
behind can be an act of learning and action in
community with others, students gain one more tool by
which to reimagine relations between people,
institutions, and technologies.
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