Students are often portrayed as mindless consumers of popular culture, but a spike in social media engagement by Millennials and Generation Z reveals that K-12 youth are often at the helm of creating media content and impacting the trends which constitute popular culture. Coupled with the realities of this shifting landscape, an increasingly diverse student population throughout the United States is faced with a static literary canon within English and language arts (ELA) classrooms that continues to prioritize white, Eurocentric texts. Much research has delineated the kinds of harm this lack of representation perpetuates for all students, but particularly for racially and linguistically minoritized students who continue to be marginalized by curriculum. New perspectives are urgently needed in ELA to help teachers critically engage media and popular culture to avoid continued harm and to center students as critically engaged members of a new digital social reality. One crucial orientation for doing this is understanding that the existing digitally mediated reality is neither ideologically nor politically neutral. For this reason, critical media literacy must attend to the politics of digital tools and platforms. This brief is divided into three sections that discuss: (1) unpacking the sites of media (and pedagogy); (2) moving beyond media consumption toward production, dissemination, and invention; and (3) recommendations for policy and practice.