Monique Adams's List: CredibleConnections2

• Why teach media literacy? Barry Duncan of Canada's Association of Media Literacy lists six reasons:

    

   
  1. media dominate our political and cultural lives.  
  2. almost all information beyond direct experience is "mediated."  
  3. media provide powerful models for values and behavior.  
  4. media influence us without our being aware (McCluhan's "the environment is invisible").  
  5. media literacy can increase our enjoyment of media.  
  6. ML can make a passive relationship active.  

• mation in a variety of forms-is int
• erdi

  sciplinary by nature
• : The ability to ACCESS, ANALYZE, EVALUATE, and COMMUNICATE infor

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• "Media Literacy is a 21st century approach to education. It provides a framework to access, analyze, evaluate and create messages in a variety of forms – from print to video to the Internet. Media literacy builds an understanding of the role of media in society as well as essential skills of inquiry and self-expression necessary for citizens of a democracy.”

   
• All media are constructions. This is arguably the most important concept. The media do not simply reflect external reality. Rather, they present carefully crafted constructions that reflect many decisions and are the result of many determining factors. Media Literacy works towards deconstructing these constructions (i.e., to taking them apart to show ho
• All media are constructions.
• w they are made).
• The media construct reality. The media are responsible for the majority of the observations and experiences from which we build up our personal understandings of the world and how it works. Much of our view of reality is based on media messages that have been preconstructed and have attitudes, interpretations, and conclusions already built in. Thus th
• e media, to a great extent, give us our sense of reality.
• Audiences negotiate meaning in media. If the media provides us with much of the material upon which we build our picture of reality, each of us finds or "negotiates" meaning according to individual factors: personal needs and anxieties, the pleasures or troubles of the day, racial and sexual attitudes, family and cultural background, moral standpoint, and so
• forth.
• • Media messages have commercial implications. Media literacy aims to encourage awareness of how the media are influenced by commercial considerations, and how they impinge on content, technique, and distribution." Most media production is a business, and so must make a profit. Questions of ownership and control are central: a relatively small number of individuals control what we watch, read and hear in the media.
   
  • Media messages contain ideological and val
• ue messages. All media products are advertising in some sense proclaiming values and ways of life. The mainstream media convey, explicitly or implicitly, ideological messages about such issues as the nature of the good life and the virtue of consumerism, the role of women, the acceptance of authority, and unquestioning patriotism.
• Media messages contain social and political implications. The media have great influence in politics and in forming social change. Television can greatly influence the election of a national leader on the basis of image. The media involve us in concerns such as civil rights issues, famines in Africa, and the AIDS epidemic. They give us an intimate sense of national issues and global concerns so that we have become McLuhan's Global Village.
• Form and content are closely related in media messages. As Marshall McLuhan noted, each medium has its own grammar and codifies reality in its own particular way. Different media will report the same event, but create different impressions and messages.
• Each medium has a unique aesthetic form. Just as we notice the pleasing rhythms of certain pieces of poetry or prose, so we ought to be able to enjoy the pleasing forms and effects of the diffe
• rent media.

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• Media Literacy is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and create media in a variety of forms.