Media Literacy Week: What Does it Mean?

Media Literacy Week: Day one, definitions

Image courtesy of Fiona Otway

This week in Canada is Media Literacy Week, November 2-8th; seven days focused on increasing awareness of the messages carefully constructed in the information we are constantly consuming.  While it may be a foreign holiday for most of our readers, we feel that it’s vitally important for people to have a grasp on the ideas and manipulations that can be hiding in anything from a book to an advertisement to a movie to charts/graphs to the news to a blog post.  In the ever-ready, up-to-the-minute-news world of the internet, it’s more important now than ever before that people are actively engaging their brains when they read/hear anything that’s been passed off as “factual”.

So, what exactly is media literacy?  What does it actually mean?

Very basically, it’s the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate information in both print and non-print sources.  It’s not about being right or wrong, but about learning to question the motivations of the producer (author, director, photographer, journalist,etc).  Are they reorganizing and reshaping data to look more favourable towards their cause?  Are they using manipulative language or literary devices to evoke a certain response?  Are they choosing to show some elements but not others in order to push us to agreeing?  Yet, this is not to say that there’s some mass diabolical, malicious scheme going on across all media everywhere (although some conspiracy nuts believe otherwise); all producers of media inevitably write from their own viewpoint and only a small percentage are intentionally designed to “hurt” you.  If we are questioning and evaluating the works themselves, we can learn more than what is outwardly presented and grow in our understanding of the world.

Here are some key concepts, courtesy of the MedicaLiteracyWeek.ca site:

1. Media are constructions: Media products are carefully constructed. They are created with a purpose and from a particular perspective, using specific forms and techniques. Media literacy works towards deconstructing these products, taking them apart to show how they are made and exploring the decisions and factors behind them.

2. Audiences negotiate meaning: We all bring our own life experience, knowledge and attitudes to the media we encounter. Each person makes sense of what he or she sees and hears in different ways. Media literacy encourages us to understand how individual factors, such as age, gender, race and social status affect our interpretations of media.

3. Media have commercial implications: Most media production is a business and must, therefore, make a profit. In addition, media industries belong to a powerful network of corporations that exert influence on content and distribution. Questions of ownership and control are central because a relatively small number of individuals control what we watch, read and hear in the media.

4. Ideological messages underpin all media: Explicitly or implicitly, the mainstream media convey ideological messages and notions of values, power and authority. In media literacy, what or who is absent may be more important than what or who is included.

We’ll be talking about being media-literate, and what it means, today, tomorrow, and Thursday.  Our goal here is to encourage everyone to look more critically at what messages they’re consuming and how they may be inadvertently manipulated (for good or ill).  We’ve got to make sure that we can ask the right questions about the right topics in order to fully understand what we’re reading/viewing/hearing.  It’s vitally important that people take responsibility for their thoughts and not allow a fancy graph or cleverly-worded article to throw them off the truth.