What is Media Literacy? Response and DQ

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"What is Media Literacy?", was the media text that resonate most with me this week in our course. I found applicable initially because I didn't realize that media literacy related to every form of media - since a main focus is on text media. However, it made sense it would be all forms and that media literacy was the understanding of messages in each medium of media. The article also addresses perspective which I think it highly important when trying to understand the text and subtext of a media source. This is something we should strongly keep in mind when addressing media sources. How does our background or past experiences shape our perspectives? And how do these cause the message to be interpreted differently from person to person?

With these perspectives come levels of information. There are three: message conventions, media industries and recognizing effects on society. These three are important to keep in mind because the shape the depth to which we understand the message being produce and how the message with affect the world around us. The final aspect of the article and media literacy that we should keep in mind is that media literacy is multi-dimensional, there is cognitive, emotional information, aesthetic information and moral information. We need all three when interpreting a message from the media and the most important thing to note is that you cannot have one form of information without the other. For example too much cognitive and not enough emotional makes it hard to understand peoples feelings and causes someone to just focus on the facts of a media message. Overall the purpose of incorporating all these dimensions of media literacy is to give us a better understanding of the medias messages being conveyed to us.

DQ: Even when operating at a higher level of media literacy can we be in control of the media messages, as the article suggests? Or does media literacy simply provide us with a greater understanding of the media's message rather than controlling the message we see?

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This page contains a single entry by brock219 published on January 31, 2013 10:41 AM.

"Defining Media Literacy" blog and discussion question was the previous entry in this blog.

Better Off Ted and Advertising is the next entry in this blog.
