Media Literacy Notes

Education and Related Disciplines

  • 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:
      • Learning needs to be relevant.
      • Everyone can be an informed media consumer.