EDU 790 Media Literacy

 Media Literacy

  Source: Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House 

Media Literacy: 

Media Literacy is an important topic for students to investigate before they graduate high school.  Media Literacy is defined as the ability to decode media messages, including the systems in which they exists.  Media Literacy also assesses the influence of those messages on thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.  In the state of Illinois, legislators recently passed a law beginning in the 2022-2023 school year where schools must teach one unit of Media Literacy.  I believe this new law in Illinois is great and needed.  It is important that young adults entering the the adult stage of their lives should understand how media plays a role in their lives and that media is targeted to influence their behavior and spending habits. 

Hobbs and Rheingold: 
Hobbs and Rheingold have an interesting takes on Media Literacy.  Hobbs speaks about 5 communication competencies: access, analyze, create, reflect, and act.                                                   

Access: involves finding and sharing appropriate and relevant information using media texts and technology tools.

Analyze: involves using critical thinking to analyze message purpose, target audience, quality, veracity, credibility, point of view, and potential effects or consequences of messages. 

Create: involves involves composing or generating content using creativity and confidence in self-expression, with awareness of purpose, audience, and composition techniques into the world of digital and media. 
Reflect: involves examining the impact of media messages and technology tools on our thinking and actions in daily life.  

Rheingold believes when thinking about literacies, we need to expand our thinking of digital skills or informational literacies to include social media literacies. Rheingold focuses on 5 social media literacies: attention, participation, collaboration, network awareness, and critical consumption. 

Attention: is the fundamental building block for how individuals think, how humans create tools and teach each other to use them, how groups socialize, and how people transform civilizations.

Participation: gives a student a different sense of being, being productive, and becoming active citizen rather than simply a passive consumer.

Collaboration: using the technologies and techniques of attention and participation allows people to work together collaboratively in ways that were too difficult or expensive to attempt before the advent of social media.

Network Awareness: The technical networks amplify and extend the fundamental human capability of forming social networks.

Critical Consumption: is the literacy of trying to figure out what and who is trustworthy and what and who is not trustworthy online. 

Reflection: 

Marshall McLuhan writes, "Imagine learning to talk from recordings rather than people. If you learned how to have a conversation from movies, you might think that people regularly hang up the phone without saying goodbye and no one ever interrupts anyone else. If you learn to think out loud from news programs, you might believe that no one ever “ums” or waves their hands while searching for an idea, and that people swear rarely and never before 10 pm. If you learned to tell stories from audiobooks, you might think that nothing much new has happened with the English language in the past couple hundred years. If you only ever talked when you were public speaking, you'd expect that talking always involves anxious butterflies in your stomach and hours of preparation before facing an audience.".  I believe that McLuhan's message is to be aware of where you get all your information as if that is the only information you look at it is all that you will know. Hobbs and Rheingold try to teach people how to be literate with their interactions with media and understand how media influences their behavior and lives.  One particular competency that Rheingold speaks to is Critical Consumption; this is also explained as "crap detection" in his article.  I believe this is one of the most important competencies that young adults and all people that come in contact with media should be in tune with.  Being able to detect what type of media trustworthy is an important skill that people must have.  A lot of media is out there there influence our behavior in order to make profits for others.  Being able to detect trustworthy media gives consumers a fair shot in a capitalistic economy.