Are You Media Literate?

Some experts would have society believe that media enhances our lives. Others would say that it has attacked our substructure of profound reading and education for that matter. The definition of media is as follows:

MeŸdiŸa: noun 1. plural form of MEDIUM. 2. the main means of mass communication (esp. television, radio, newspapers, and the Internet) regarded collectively.

The latter is the most pertinent in today’s standards. Len Masterman’s article titled, “The Media Education Revolution” sketches the leading principles of media education. Masterman investigates the following questions through media, “Where are we today? How did we get there? Where might we go from here?”(p.5) Education is not what it used to be; there have been profound changes in teaching objectives. The teachers are no longer the experts in the classroom, they’re primarily on the same level of the students or as Masterman puts it, they are “co-investigators” of media. The “banking concept” and “pill-sugaring” of education is dead. Banking as in the teacher depositing information upon a benighted student and pill coating is dead because the students are now more motivated than ever to learn with the help from media.

The authors of the second article, “Critical Media Literacy, Democracy, and the Reconstruction of Education” would disagree with Masterman. Douglas Kellner and Jeff Share believe that students are in reality savvier in media than their teachers. This article is practically a follow up article in that is dives deeper into four specific techniques of teaching critical media. The techniques are as follows:

1. The Protectionist Approach
2. Media Arts Education
3. Media Literacy Movement
4. Critical Media Literacy

A quote that thoroughly sums up the article goes like this, “The new technologies of communication are powerful tools that can liberate or dominate, manipulate or enlighten, and it is imperative that educators teach their students how to critically analyze and use these media.”(Keller 2004a). (p.9) In other words, the teachers must encourage their students to do research, be informed and question what they see in media and in life for that matter.

           

As I brainstormed and did some research about what to write for this mini-paper, I came across this clip, “Cause and Effect: How the Media You Consume Can Change Your Life”, which in fact was posted on a fellow bloggers page.

The link: ----> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv5Z2Xv8iJU

The video is concise and informative, for example I had no idea that the average teenager spends approximately 10 hours and 45mins everyday “consuming media”, weather it be on the computer, watching TV, or even reading a magazine. It is obviously geared more towards females, because the latter half of the clip goes into female leadership and power, which was also a major topic in the second article, “Critical Media Literacy, Democracy, and the Reconstruction of Education”.

A quote from the article mentioned above went like this, “Critical media literacy should be a common thread that runs through all curricular areas because it deals with communication and society.”(p.19) Consumers of our generation generally need to learn how to pose wise questions, because media is a powerful forced that is not to be reckoned with unless good judgment is used. For as described in the article, media can advance the –isms, which is not necessarily a good thing.

Among my peers I have seen the impact of media through collaborative media production. For example, when my class was learning about Transcendentalism, our teacher created groups and assigned each group with a quote by a different transcendentalist such as Emerson and Thoreau to name a few. With the quote we had to create an interpretation through art. She said, it could be a song, a dance, a drawing; it just had to be some form of an artistic interpretation. As a dancer, I of course made up a little improve while my friend played the piano and I called it my interpretation of the quote. When other groups presented their artistic interpretation I was stunned at the hidden talent of some of my classmates. For example, a boy in my class (that was very shy) made a video that included his own electronic music that he had made with a new fancy application. We all really saw him come out of his shell after that group project!