Surrounded by it everywhere, everyday: Why we need media literacy

The Alliance for a Media Literate America website at www.amlainfo.org has a quote that says “we must prepare young people for living in a world of powerful images, words, and sounds. –UNESCO/1982” In order to accomplish this they must become media literate.

In Media Literacy by James W. Potter, he defines Media Literacy on page 22 as “a set of perspectives that we actively use to expose ourselves to the media to interpret the meaning of the messages we encounter.” Media literacy is very important for today’s society because we spend more time with the Media than we do outside of these technologies. It is hard not too, because we are surrounded by all different forms of media everyday. Because of this, we are subject to information overload from all of the information we are receiving from the different forms of media. This leads to information fatigue which says on page 7 of Media Literacy that “the media present so many messages and aggressively compete for our attention that we have no choice but to retreat into the state of automaticity.” Automaticity “is a state where our minds operate without any conscious effort from us (5).” This is bad news, and is the trap that many individuals fall subject too. However, becoming media literate is a good way to fight this trap.

There are five things individuals need to be aware of when becoming media literate. These are: being aware of media affects, media content, and media industry, as well as have a good sense of the real world, and a clear sense of self and how we interact with the media. There is a quote from David Considine, on www.mediachannel.org that says “Media Literacy: the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate information in a variety of formats.” We should be media literate because as www.mediachannel.org says “the mass media affect how we perceive and understand the world and people around us. From what we wear, eat, and buy to how we relate to ourselves and others.” The purpose of media literacy is “to empower individuals to control media programming (25)” and construct their own meaning from the media messages.

Becoming media literate is hard to instill into an adult, much less a child, but becoming so is being incorporated into classrooms and homes everywhere, for a good reason. It is important to understand though as said on www.medialit.org, that media literacy “is not about “protecting” kids from unwanted messages.” Because even though you can turn the TV off, or not let your kids get video games with any sort of violence, media is surrounding us, and is almost completely unavoidable. So instead of just watching, or listening, or observing different forms of media passively, students should be urged to “become competent, critical, and literate (www.medialit.org)” in the different media forms. Team Media Literacy says on www.preventionalliance.com that “just as children not only need to be taught to read, but also comprehend what they are reading, media literacy teaches people how to comprehend what they are consuming.”