ABSTRACT

In this chapter, an exploratory sampling is made of a number of broad categories of young people’s media artefacts in Australian society (see Table 3.1) and of what epistemological assumptions they may reveal about ‘the future’. The object is not to claim definitive decodings of particular artefacts on a putatively ‘exact’ science model of semiology. Rather, it is to argue how important it is for schools and teachers to encourage critical and imaginative readings of guiding or attenuated images of the future that are often implicit in young people’s media artefacts. Crucial questions are raised about the possible functions of multimedia literacy in challenging assumptions that ‘trend is destiny’ and in educating for the twenty-first century.