Media Literacy Notes

Trailblazers of Media Literacy

  • 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 250250 million to boost readership and expand digital content.
    • Musk bought Twitter for 4444 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.
    • Musk removed or fired 80% of Twitter's employees.
    • Musk sees