Educational Television Program: Aired as part of Sunrise Semester in the 1960s, offering college credit in communications through a collaboration between WCBS-TV and NYU.
Neil Postman:
Skeptical of media and technology's touted benefits.
Argued television is most dangerous when addressing serious subjects (news, education, religion, politics).
Believed television alters the meaning of being well-informed by promoting sensational and misleading information.
Knowledge from television can mislead people away from genuine understanding.
Media can trivialize human experience.
Advocated for media ecology: the study of media, technology, and communication and how they affect human environments.
Emphasized discussing media's impact on thought and democratic processes.
Believed media influences human capacity for good, compassion, and morality.
Warned against a population distracted by trivia and a culture redefined as entertainment.
Highlighted the risk when public conversation becomes superficial and people become passive audiences.
Culture-death is a clear possibility: "When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility."
If Neil Postman's trailblazing ideas have influenced your thinking about media, you can share a comment on the Grandparents of Media Literacy website at www.grandparentsofmedialiteracy.com.
Key Ideas
Developing Awareness: Heightened awareness of media use in daily life (social media, movies, video games, news, music) is the first step in media literacy.
Media Literacy: A lifelong learning practice involving:
Accessing
Analyzing
Creating
Reflecting
Taking action
Goal: To use information and communication to make a difference.
Related Terms: Various terms refer to the knowledge, skills, competencies, and habits of mind needed to participate in media culture.
Protection: Media literacy protects people from harmful media and empowers them to confront media as a form of institutional and social power.
Benefits:
Resisting distorted representations
Evaluating the quality of media messages
Participating as citizens in democratic societies
Competencies: Asking critical questions about media, creating media, and reflecting on media’s role in society build media literacy competencies.
Lifelong Learning: Media literacy is always changing in response to media, technology, and societal shifts.
Vocabulary
Active Audience: Audiences actively engaged in the meaning-making process.
Audience: Receivers of a media message.
Authenticity:
Psychology: Being true to oneself.
Media: Characteristics making a message seem real and believable.
Author: Creator of any type of media message.
Authority:
Person: Social power rooted in title, role, knowledge, etc.
Media: Characteristics making a message trustworthy and credible.
Context: Environment and background factors influencing how authors and audiences create and interpret media messages.
Crisis of Authority: Information flow reverses power balance between public and institutions.
Cultural Studies: Explores political dynamics of culture and its foundations.
Empowerment: Belief that people can actively engage with and create media to address their needs.
Expectancy Theory: Individuals behave based on expectations; prior media experiences influence consciousness.
False Consciousness: Misrepresentation of beliefs among a group, leading them to ignore oppression.
Firehose of Falsehoods: Rapid, repetitive broadcasting of messages without regard for truth.
Generative Artificial Intelligence: Tool for creative expression using machine learning to produce original work.
Inquiry-Based Learning: Asking questions, searching for information, evaluating it, and representing what is learned.
Language Model: Computer program using a text database to predict the next word in response to a query.
Literacy: Sharing meaning through symbols (reading, writing, speaking, listening, media production).
The Arts: Intellectual and artistic activities (music, literature, film, etc.)
Media Ecology: The study of media, technology, and communication and how they affect human environments.
Media Effects: Approach focusing on media’s influence on behavior.
Media Reform: Efforts to improve media through citizen and consumer coalitions.
Prompt Engineering: Interacting with generative AI to produce original work.
Protectionism: Protecting people from media risks.
Representation: Constructed nature of media depictions.
Resilience: Leveraging assets for support against risks.
Stereotypes: Oversimplified expressions or mental representations.
Why Do People Use Media?
Billionaire Influence:
Jeff Bezos (Amazon, Blue Origin, Washington Post), Elon Musk (PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter/X): Examples of billionaires shaping industries and media.
Motivations: Autonomy, breaking constraints, managing interpretations, making a difference (not always money).
Jeff Bezos:
Founder of Amazon, which started as an online bookstore and is now the world's largest retailer.
Amazon controls 80% of the book publishing market.
Elon Musk:
Started PayPal, invested in Tesla, owns Starlink.
Starlink controls nearly half of the satellites used in telecommunications technology.
Active social media user, attracted to contrarian and controversial ideas.
Media Ownership:
Bezos purchased the Washington Post for 250 million to boost readership and expand digital content.
Musk bought Twitter for 44 billion and rebranded it as X, modifying content moderation policies.
Musk aims to make X more open to all points of view, relaxed hate speech policies, and removed COVID-19 misinformation policy.