Essay On Media Literacy

784 Words2 Pages

Text: Potter, W 2001 'What is media literacy?', Thousand Oaks, California, pp. 2-14.

Description:
Media literacy is an outlook that we familiarize ourselves with, and it translates the meaning and the message that we obtain from the media. Our outlook of media is build from knowledge structures, which are made from information using skills.

Being media literate does not only mean that you can follow plots in movies and television shows, knowing what flashbacks are, having enough knowledge to gather that a scary thing is about to happen when soft music is played in the background or being familiar with celebrities’ faces. We can always be more media literates.
Media literates are people who reveal themselves to the media in order to understand and interpret what the true meaning behind the messages that we receive from the media.

To learn how to develop this understanding there are steps that help you gain the skills on becoming a better media literate:

1. Build knowledge structure (we need tools/skills and raw materials)
2. Use your perspective to study and learn about the earth (the more perspective you have, the broader your understating of the earth is going to be)
3. Get good information and organize them into useful knowledge categories
4. Use gathered information in the right place and structure

Media literacy is not a category it is a continuum/field. Media literacy has more than one dimension, it touches on mental, emotional, visual and moral dominions in order to build a strong knowledge structures.
The reason it is important to be media literate is to take in and understand the message that they spread, and also to have control over the interpretive process but mainly to increase our appreciation of the ...

... middle of paper ...

...d layout and the language was easy to understand.
The text was divided into sections and each section maintained a good explanation about the topic. Each section was well detailed and very informative.
There were some parts that contained dot-points on learning how to think critically, this section was very well set up because it had headings and the subheadings below them explained the headings. This text helped me a lot with learning to think more critically because of the amount of the useful information that it contained.
At the end of the text there was a page of summary and it summarized the whole document very well, if I was not going to read the whole text then it would be very useful to have a summary like this text, it would save me lots of time but yet I would still learn and have a basic idea about what critical thinking is and why is it important.

Open Document