Reading something old again and discovering that it already knew what you were starting to suspect gives you a certain kind of satisfaction. Reexamining David Gauntlett’s writings from around 2001, particularly his ideas about how media works as something people actively engage with, struggle against, and use to create a version of themselves rather than as a passive delivery system, makes you feel that way rather quickly. It wasn’t a loud forecast. It wasn’t presented as a prediction regarding educational institutions or learning environments. However, the reasoning was present, silently waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
At the time, Gauntlett’s argument focused on identity, the notion that people don’t just take in information from the media. They make use of it. They selectively choose from it, turning whatever the culture presents them with into something unique. He was challenging the more archaic and patronizing idea that viewers were passive recipients of influence, like sponges absorbing whatever they were told to believe by magazines or television. His portrayal of the audience was, to be honest, more engaging, self-aware, and active.
These days, it’s remarkable how easily that argument can be applied to education. If identity is, in Gauntlett’s words, a process rather than a final product and people discover who they are through interacting with stories, characters, and representations, then a classroom that doesn’t tell stories is going against human nature. When students are forced to sit motionless during a forty-minute monologue about the causes of the First World War after being glued to fifteen-second videos during break time, you can sense the tension in any school hallway.
Education still finds it difficult to acknowledge what the entertainment industry knew about attention. Being involved is not a luxury. It is the complete process by which information genuinely moves from one human mind to another. Unintentionally, Gauntlett’s criticism of the “effects model”—the notion that media merely imprints itself onto passive viewers—was also a critique of conventional pedagogy. Teaching is not the same as telling. Learning is not broadcasting.
Perhaps his timing was just too early for the educational establishment to take notice. The foundation for what we now refer to as entertainment-driven learning was essentially nonexistent in 2001. Four years remained until YouTube. It would have seemed truly bizarre for a young child to learn to code by watching a charismatic stranger on a laptop screen. However, Gauntlett was already outlining a society in which meaning-making was collaborative and people learned by creating, sharing, and doing rather than by receiving.
Ironically, the most popular educational platforms of the last ten years resemble Gauntlett’s description in many ways: they are brief, narrative-driven, personality-driven, and sensitive to what the audience genuinely wants to learn. The idea behind MasterClass’s entire enterprise was that learning is more enjoyable when it resembles a movie. Millions of people now feel bad for ignoring a cartoon owl because Duolingo gamified language learning so thoroughly. These weren’t mishaps. They were implementations of a concept that Gauntlett had developed years before the market took off.
It’s still genuinely unclear if the conventional educational system will ever fully address this. Some educators have completely internalized it, creating lessons that resemble group storytelling rather than teaching. Additionally, some organizations still view participation as a diversion from rigor, as if boredom were a sign of seriousness. Gauntlett may find the entire situation eerily familiar as he observes it all from the perspective of media studies. He argued for years that the audience was more intelligent and engaged than the broadcasters thought. It turns out that the students were as well.
