Education: Study of practices and institutional environments where learning and teaching occur, enabled through law, business, and government.
Political Economy: Study of how goods and services are enabled through law, business and government.
Psychology: Study of the human mind and human behavior.
Sociology: Study of the structure and function of human society.
Core Concepts of Media Literacy
Major concepts have been discussed and debated for over 30 years.
Ideas emerged through transdisciplinary dialogue and discussion.
In 2023, several members of NAMLE and other media literacy leaders met to revise a framework first developed in 2007.
Fundamental practices of media literacy education:
Expands the concept of literacy to include all forms of media and integrates multiple literacies.
Envisions all individuals as capable learners who use their background, knowledge, skills, and beliefs to create meaning from media experiences.
Promotes teaching practices that prioritize curious, open-minded, and self-reflective inquiry while emphasizing reason, logic, and evidence.
Encourages learners to practice active inquiry, reflection, and critical thinking about messages they experience, create, and share across the evolving media landscape.
Necessitates ongoing skill-building opportunities for learners that are integrated, cross-curricular, interactive, and appropriate for age and developmental stage.
Supports the development of a participatory media culture where individuals navigate myriad ethical responsibilities as they create and share media.
Recognizes that media institutions are cultural and commercial entities that function as agents of socialization, commerce, and change.
Affirms that a healthy media landscape for the public good is a shared responsibility among media and technology companies, governments, and citizens.
Emphasizes critical inquiry about media industries' roles in society, including how these industries influence and are influenced by systems of power, with implications for equity, inclusion, social justice, and sustainability.
Empowers individuals to be informed, reflective, engaged, and socially responsible participants in a democratic society.
Media Literacy DISCourse Model
Represents the main theoretical claims of media literacy.
Consists of nine theoretical concepts in three broad groups:
Authors and Audiences
Messages and Meanings
Representations and Realities
Authors and Audiences
Authors create media messages for different purposes and target specific audiences.
Media communication tools for self-expression, sharing information, persuasion, and entertainment.
People also create media messages for social influence and/or profit.
Authors visualize a group of individuals with common characteristics, attitudes, or beliefs, targeting that audience with a carefully constructed message.
Audience interpretation matters in how authors and audiences create and interpret media messages.
Media meanings are dependent on audience members' interpretation.
Consider the time period of production when interpreting media.
Audiences have a shared understanding; different nuances emerge as people interpret and apply it to their own lives.
Economic and political systems shape how authors and audiences create and understand media messages.
Knowledge of political, economic, and business contexts of media industries and institutions helps understand how and why media messages circulate in culture.
Authors may or may not receive financial compensation for their creative work.
Audience attention is a highly valuable commodity.
The scale and importance of the media industry in the global economy are undeniable.
Messages and Meanings
Production techniques are used to construct messages.
The sharing of meaning occurs through the creation and interpretation of symbols.
Each genre and form of communication uses different production techniques to attract and hold audience attention.
Examples of production techniques:
Photography uses strategic choices deployed by the photographer.
Film uses dialogue, characters, plot, action, and special effects.
Writing uses sentence structure, vocabulary, and narrative devices to develop ideas.
The form and content of media messages contains values, ideology, and specific points of view.
Every word choice suggests values. Point of view is embedded in the works of art, expression, and communication.
Messages affect people's beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.
Authors invest time and money to create media because they know that information, entertainment, and persuasion have social influence.
Influence can be an emotional sensation or substantial and life changing.
Representations and Realities
Messages are selective representations of reality.
"The map is not the territory"
Developed by Alfred Korzybski, the founder of general semantics.
Encourages people to distinguish between symbols and the things that symbols stand for.
Heightened awareness of the differences between media representations and the realities that we inhabit.
It's easy to confuse the map with the territory, because you depend on media representations, especially when lacking direct experience of the world.
Messages use stereotypes to express ideas and information because they are selective and incomplete.
Stereotypes are a form of media representation that depicts people, events, and experiences using widely shared, simplified ideas.
Stereotypes can be an effective shorthand for depicting personalities, relationships, events, and experiences.
Creative authors play against the stereotype by creating characters that may seem stereotypical but then break with expectations in interesting ways.
You can analyze their rhetorical functions in news, advertising, information, literature, games, films and other media.
Trustworthy media messages extend your perception and widen your view of the world.
Authority is established through community norms about what counts as legitimate information.
Understanding how authority and authenticity are expressed in news, advertising, etc., can lead to better discernment of the quality and value of media messages.
Media Literacy Is a Moving Target
Media literacy is constantly evolving as the media environment changes.
The rise of generative AI is significantly reshaping the kinds of knowledge and skills that are needed to be an informed media consumer and creator.
Prompt engineering refers to the skill-set needed to write effective prompts with language that can be used to enable generative AI to produce high-quality and useful results.
The future of media literacy is hard to predict.
Some fear focus on critical questions may lead to mistrust of institutional power in ways that contribute to cynicism and disengagement.
Others wonder whether democracy can flourish if people are passive followers and not active and engaged as critical thinkers.
If citizens are empowered to ask questions and demand answers, their deeper engagement in the political process may present a profound challenge to the status quo establishment.
As media literacy education becomes more widespread, its potential influence on social and political processes remains to be seen.
Trailblazers of Media Literacy
Neil Postman:
Professor of education at New York University.
Books on teaching, including Television and the Teaching of English (1961) and Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1971).
Early advocate for media literacy, believing that all students benefit from opportunities to critically analyze and reflect on the media and popular culture that surround them.
Postman contributed the following key ideas to media literacy: