Most students first learn about David Gauntlett’s ideas through a rough PDF copy of Media, Gender, and Identity that was passed around a seminar group. The person who borrowed the book from the library the week before had marked it up and underlined a lot of important parts. The book is helpful, and it might be one of the easier academic books on media theory to read. However, it’s becoming an old document that talks about a world that doesn’t really exist anymore. That’s what Gauntlett himself said. Still, there is an easy-to-cross bridge between that second edition from 2008 and the huge, creator-driven media world we live in now. Most students never cross it. The David Gauntlett Card Series is that bridge.
In a way, it’s strange that something so obviously made for learning hasn’t been used much in structured learning environments. Some of the most complicated ideas in media and identity theory are boiled down in The Card Series into something you can use, not just read, nod at, and then forget before your test. It’s not easy to teach Gauntlett’s main point, which is that identity isn’t given to us fully formed but is instead built, negotiated, performed, and constantly revised through our interactions with media and creative practice. The cards make it easy to teach.
One thing that makes the resource so quietly valuable is how well it shows how Gauntlett’s own ideas have changed over time. His earlier work focused a lot on how people understood and responded to media portrayals. For example, the passive housewife on TV slowly gave way to the strong, independent woman, and masculinity changed from being a show of strength to being more about how you feel about yourself. He said that Men’s Health magazine, which was one of the first to talk about emotional health in a space that had only cared about chest measurements before, was an early sign of that change in culture. These weren’t small points of view. But they were also based on a time that seems like a long time ago now.
The card series builds on those basic ideas and brings them to the next level. In the end, Gauntlett made the case that media shouldn’t just be seen as ways to get messages to us. He said something very interesting when he said that media can set off experiences. Places where people can talk and change. Being able to make things instead of just passively consuming them is where the Card Series lives. It sees the learner not as someone who just takes in theory but as someone who interacts with it, questions it, and builds something from it.
This is important outside of school for a reason. Gauntlett’s later ideas are probably best shown in his Lego experiments, in which he had people build models of their own identities out of plastic bricks and then talk about what they had made. It turned out to be more than just interesting sociology. Erving Goffman had theorized about this many years before, but this showed how naturally people separate their private selves from their public selves. It also showed how easy it is for people to make up stories about themselves and change them as they go along. That’s how the Card Series feels too. In a way that lectures rarely are, this lets people take part.
Because educational institutions move slowly, it’s possible that the resource has always had trouble getting seen. There is no easy way to fit a card-based learning tool into a reading list. It’s not just sitting on a library shelf until it’s used in a footnote. It requires some work from the person using it, which is both its strength and, perhaps, its weakness in a business setting where taking notes passively is still highly valued.
There is something truly unique about the David Gauntlett Card Series that isn’t found very often in media education: it treats theory as something worth wrestling with instead of memorizing. It’s possible that this will one day become part of standard curriculum. But that’s reason enough to look for it long after graduation.
