Introducing the Ethics of Actors in SYstems (EASY) approach to digital advertising literacy
In this webinar, we’ll explore an approach to advertising literacy education that takes an ethics- and systems-approach to analyzing digital ads.
DATE: Wednesday, March 25, 2026
TIME: 4 PM PST | 7 PM EST
LOCATION: Online
Click here to Register
The EASY (Ethics of Actors in SYstems) approach helps students map out the many kinds of human and non-human actors that are working behind the scenes to produce and circulate digital ads, who often have conflicting interests that are competing within this system.
In this webinar, we’ll lay out the EASY approach and then share what we learned when we facilitated an EASY-based digital advertising literacy program in three 6th grade classrooms. We’ll also discuss together why digital ads are such a rich topic for exploration in digital and media literacy education, and how the EASY approach might be used within your own learning contexts to explore issues of algorithmic curation, datafication, personalization, and more.
READ THE PUBLICATION:
Ciccone, M., Zhou, C. Y., Underwood, T., Ali Durrani, A., McCauley, B., Miller, L., & Scharrer, E. (2026). Introducing the Ethics of Actors in Systems (EASY) Approach to Digital Advertising Literacy Through the Views of Early Adolescents. Journal of Advertising, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2025.2602476
PRESENTERS:
Michelle Ciccone is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a former K-12 technology integration specialist. She is currently conducting her dissertation research, which is an ethnographic study of how one local high school community is negotiating the arrival of AI.
Cecilia Yuxi Zhou is an assistant professor in the Academy for Educational Development and Innovation at the Education University of Hong Kong. She achieved her PhD in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research focuses on youths’ digital wellbeing, digital parenting and media literacy through community-engaged research.