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 ...
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...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.
The article, “Critical Thinking? You Need Knowledge” by Diane Ravitch, discusses how in the past people have been deprived from the thinking process and abstract thinking skills. Students need to be given more retainable knowledge by their teachers to improve their critical thinking skills. (Ravitch).
“What counts as literacy, how literacy changes in response to the new media landscape, and what value we should ascribe to the new forms of communication that continue to emerge and evolve online? (Jenkins, 2009)"
According to Dr. Jean Louis Ntang Beb and Dr. Shantella Sherman, people are largely impacted by entertainment and different forms as media when they become more readily available and prominent in people’s lives. Postman refers to this as ‘media – metaphors’ that “classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, color it, [and] argue a case for what the world is like” (10). The media is able to do this because it knows it has a heavy influence in an individual's life. When an entity has knowledge of power, it is able to manipulate its delivery in anyway it wants. This is because at the end of the day, even if the information received is not practical, society will still end up talking about with
Newspaper, radio, film, television. These are only a few of the various forms media can take. From the moment we open our eyes to the instant we shut them, we are surrounded by media and absorb the information it hurls at us in an osmosis-like manner. The news ranges from the latest terror attack and political scandals to supposed UFO sightings and scandals involving sandals. We as an audience tend to focus more on the message the media relays rather than on the medium in which it is presented to us.
Media is the most powerful sector of an economy. It is a tool to maintain a balanced society which is characterized by well informed people, effective democracy and social justice. In fact, media has unparallel influence on all aspects of human life in modern times.
Everyday we encounter the media in some form. It could be waking up to the sound of the radio, or passing billboards in the streets or simply just watching television. They are a lot of different forms of media, for example, verbal or written media, visual media and aural media. Examples of media would include newspapers, magazines, film, radio, television, billboard advertisements as well as the internet. Media studies came about because of the developments in mass communication and it provokes the generation of exigent questions about what we think we know as well how we came about knowing it. There are always changes in the media and the term “media” refers to the many ways of physically forming meanings as well and carrying them. The term “media studies” on the other hand, means different courses priorities different media; different theories and different learning outcomes (Bazalgette, 2000).
What is Media? Did you ever wonder how we can find out information we need, or just want to know what is going on around the world? We use it in all different types of ways to retain the knowledge and communication that we use on a day to day basis. Media is one of the many ways of communication that is used to receive and deliver information to influence people across the world. The use of media is communication being advertised through televisions, radios, internet, magazines and newspapers.
Joseph STRAUBHAAR and Robert LaROSE (2002). Media Now. Communications Media in the Information Age. 3rd Edition. Belmont, Wadsworth/Thompson Learning.
Perhaps the strongest foundation for media education rests in the fact that increased awareness of media transforms students from passive to active participants in society. Learners must be offered hands-on application opportunities to increase their own knowledge and enjoyment of the media. The integration of formal media analysis with media production is an essential constituent of media literacy. Creative ventures, such as television or radio production, the development of a rock video or song, photography classes, script-writing, web-page development, or hypertext projects should be made available for students' participation and perusal. Students must be exposed to various forms of communication before they can recognize logical disparities, determine the strength of an argument, evaluate mass media, and actively join our democratic society as partners.
worry about what is media and culture. The question of literacy in the face of such
Media literacy requires the skill to realize that the messages taken from media are reconstructed in the media. An individual needs a different skill, background knowledge and educational organization in order to be media competent. In order to be media literate, we should be in touch with media. The individual who is in touch with media can begin to access information about mass media. (Sur)
According to Ministry of Education’s Resource Book “Media literacy is one of the few instruments that enables teachers and students to challenge the great inequalities in knowledge and power that exist between those who manufacture information in their own interests and those who consume it innocently as news or entertainment.” Media literacy is a course to help students separate fantasy from reality in the media. Media literacy is a set of skills that enables people to critically analyze messages in the media. By using an inquiry-based instructional model, media literacy encourages people to ask questions about what they watch, see, and read.
Media literacy gives us the ability to understand the information and process the underlying meanings within. According to the video “Media Literacy in the 21st Century Classroom” (2009), media literacy is defined as the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media in all its forms. The video “Media Literacy in the 21st Century Classroom” (2009) refers to media literacy as a skill that allows people to be critical thinkers, which makes it more difficult for others to influence a person’s thoughts and ideas. With the massive amounts of media available, we need to be able to decipher the meanings beneath the messages. Media literacy is more important than ever in today’s society because of the advancements in technology and the increase of all forms of media. In today’s society, we should make an effort to change our ways and use a culturalist approach to media literacy. “A culturalist approach to media literacy education views mass media as an integral part of the cultural lives of youth, not an outside force to be resisted or overcome” (Mittell 391). With the amount of media we are all exposed to, we need to give our younger generation the appropriate education on how to analyze and evaluate the media that they will be bombarded with. With the evolution of technology and media, it is absolutely crucial that we include media literacy in the education process for the sake of the younger
The evolution of media, from old media to new media, has transformed the way we understand the world around us. New media is interactive and is user-generated while old media is a more traditional way of communicating through television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, etc (Lecture Notes. January 12, 2011). New media gives us a new perspective by allowing us to interact with one another through the Internet. Media has become much more personal and diverse as user-generated content becomes more prominent in our lives (Lecture Notes. January 24, 2011). We are exposed to various viewpoints shape our understanding and knowledge of the social world, but does the form of media actually affect the way we understand the content which is presented to us? For my paper, I will determine whether or not the medium is the message by analyzing two different types of media sources and how they affect our understanding of the content. For my old media source I have chosen a news clip from the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric that deals with the ongoing Egyptian uprising. For my new media source I have chosen a video blog, or ‘vlog’, by an Egyptian man named Omar who discusses the crisis in Egypt from a personal point of view. Both media sources deal with the same topic, but result in different understandings of the crisis.
During our second seminar of the fall semester, Mr. Jordi Torrent, who is the Project Manager of the Media and Information Literacy Education at U.N. Alliance of Civilizations, discussed his work at the UN and how it helps the UN establish its aims. His project focuses on the intersectionality of migration, media, education, and youth and he explored with how it was necessary to create within U.N., but to mindful of the project not conflicting with other organizations in the UN. It announced the importance of civilians understanding media in today’s age, due to the commonality of media technologies around the world. He argued that it is important for everyone around the group to be technologically literate. He stated that it is not enough to read or write. It is much more important for people to engage in society by being able to apply critical thinking in media messaging. I thought that this was a very powerful statement because I often take for granted that I am technologically literate and able to develop those skills further due to my privilege of living in a nation like the Unit...