What Is Happening
Countermeasures against fake news have been institutionalized. Fact-checking organizations now number over 400 worldwide, and Japan has several NPOs and news organizations operating permanent fact-checking units. School curriculum guidelines include items on information literacy education, and teaching materials are in place. Even so, the production of ignorance is not slowing. It is accelerating.
The cause lies on the side of educational design. Conventional information literacy education has focused on "how the individual receiving information should judge it." Learners are taught to recognize cognitive biases, consult primary sources, and cross-reference multiple sources. As a set of techniques, this is correct. But this design excludes the structure that produces ignorance from the scope of education.
Who fabricates misinformation for what purpose, disseminates it through which channels, and delivers it to which readerships? Unless this structure is taught, the range of what the recipient side can decode remains limited. Education based only on individual responsibility leaves the production structure of ignorance intact while shifting the cost of coping onto recipients.
Current media literacy education continues to train only the recipient side. This asymmetry is a defect in educational design.
Background and Context
Epistemic Injustice as a Measure
Miranda Fricker (2007) sorted epistemic injustice into two types in Epistemic Injustice: testimonial injustice (in which a speaker is disbelieved due to prejudice) and hermeneutical injustice (in which the concepts required for a party to articulate their own experience do not exist in society).
When information literacy education places "improving recipients' judgment" as its sole goal, these two types remain untouched. Whose voice is not trusted, whose experience remains unarticulated — these questions occupy a dimension separate from recipient judgment. Analyzing the production structure of ignorance requires bringing epistemic justice in as a measure.
The Lineage of Counter-Design
Sasha Costanza-Chock (2020) argued in Design Justice that design always chooses "whose worldview to reinforce and whose to exclude." There is no neutral design. The book is available as MIT Press open access.
Counter-design belongs to this lineage. It refers to the practice of analyzing how existing designs (teaching materials, curricula, information environments) implicitly reinforce certain positions, and deliberately embedding a force that runs in the opposite direction. Brought into information literacy education, this adds the work of surfacing "which voices are not addressed" in existing materials.
Strategic Ignorance as a Problem
Linsey McGoey (2019) argued in The Unknowers that power is sustained by the capacity "to keep things unknown." The book is accessible via Bloomsbury Collections. Deliberate production of ignorance is observed in cases ranging from the financial crisis to the tobacco industry to the evasion of administrative accountability.
McGoey's analysis carries the following implication for educational design. No matter how much recipients are trained in critical reading, the asymmetry does not resolve as long as the producing side continues its strategy of "keeping things unknown." Individual literacy improvement is necessary but not sufficient. Collective intervention into organizations and institutions is required as a paired complement.
Limits of Japanese Policy Frameworks
The OECD's DeSeCo project (1997-2003) and PISA (2000-) form the core of Japan's information literacy policy. Critical evaluation of information is included as a subcomponent of reading literacy. This framework has produced results, but the structural analysis of the producing side is not among the measurement targets.
Sonia Livingstone (2004) presented four competencies of media literacy: access, analysis, evaluation, and creation. Even here, "creation" is the capacity for the recipient to turn into a sender, not the capacity to analyze the production structure itself.
Japan's policy frameworks largely inherit these international frameworks. The perspective of incorporating the production structure of ignorance as an educational target does not exist at the policy level.
Reading the Structure
Five Curriculum Design Principles
A curriculum that implements counter-design can be built on the following five principles.
Principle 1: Prioritize the mechanism axis
Who is delivering what, using which technology, through which channels, to which readership, at what timing, and for what purpose? Place these six items on the producing side at the starting point of the materials. Techniques for recipient judgment come afterward. If this order is reversed, the production structure is treated as a "given environment" and drops out of the educational target.
Principle 2: Operationalize epistemic justice as a measure
For every case the materials address, keep a section that asks "whose voice is being excluded." Explicitly introduce the two types of testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice, and determine which type applies to each case. This work is on a separate axis from training in recipient judgment.
Principle 3: Include collective intervention
Do not close the curriculum with individual reading practice alone. Treat interventions into the producing side (platform regulation, advocacy toward advertisers, institutional design of corrective reporting) as part of the materials. Sort out what NPOs, civic groups, municipalities, and firms can each do, and address both implementation cases and failed cases.
Principle 4: Analyze the implementation of counter-cases
Extract successful counter-cases as "types." The case-teaching design that Carl Bergstrom & Jevin West (2020) built in Calling Bullshit (callingbullshit.org) is a representative example of this principle. Do not stop at exposing individual cases; extract the shared type.
Principle 5: Self-referentiality
Embed within the curriculum the possibility that the educational design itself produces ignorance. Keep sections that make explicit "what domains this material does not address" and "from whose viewpoint this material is written." As long as educators remain unaware of their own tacit assumptions, principles 1 through 4 will remain hollow.
Three Constraints on Implementation
Institutional constraints
Negotiation with the national curriculum guidelines, university establishment standards, and curriculum accreditation will be required. The realistic solution is to preserve the existing frame of information literacy education while adding the viewpoint of production structure analysis. Building the five principles into existing subjects (contemporary society, information, Japanese language, integrated study time) presents a lower institutional bar than standing them up as a new subject.
Resource constraints
The cost of developing teaching materials is high. Collecting cases, analyzing production structures, interviewing affected parties, and producing diagrams all require specialized labor. A structure that distributes the work across NPOs, research institutions, and publishers is required. A design in which a single organization tries to complete this alone is not resourceable.
Epistemic constraints
The tacit assumptions of educators themselves are the hardest to handle. Where an educator unconsciously trusts a specific information source, the self-referentiality of Principle 5 does not function. Educator training must be designed as "an audit of one's own information environment" rather than as "the transfer of knowledge." Its guiding idea differs from existing educator training systems.
Evaluation Criteria and Outlook
What should measure the success or failure of counter-design? "Improvement in the participant's judgment" is not enough. The following three indicators are proposed as additions.
- Whether the participant can describe the production structure across the six items (comprehension of the mechanism axis)
- Whether the participant can identify "excluded voices" in the cases they have addressed (operating capacity for epistemic justice)
- Whether the participant can cite three or more implementation cases of collective intervention (learning of intervention design)
These belong to portfolio evaluation rather than written examination. They are in tension with existing frames of academic measurement. Institutionalization will take time.
This lab plans to develop the details of counter-design theory in a separate working paper. Related analyses include the treatment of how authority-dependence reproduces ignorance in "The Reproduction of Ignorance through Authority" and the treatment of epistemic injustice in NPO settings in "Epistemic Injustice in NPOs." Tsuruta and Tsukahara (eds.) (2025), An Invitation to Agnotology (Akashi Shoten), is the first systematic introductory volume in Japanese and provides a starting point for connection with educational practice.
References
Media Literacy and the Challenge of New Information and Communication Technologies — Livingstone, S.. The Communication Review, 7(1), 3-14
