Media literacy 101: part 1, introduction

This series will be a quick introduction to the concepts and goals of media literacy, as well as why it is important to everyday life. This series will aim to answer three questions, as well as to arm the reader with a powerful set of tools to use in their everyday contact with a wide variety of media formas.

What is media literacy and why does it matter?

The skill of media literacy enables someone to critically evaluate, take in and create different forms of media. This skill allows the individual to detect biases, goals and intentions of the piece of media in front of them. The most prominent goal of media literacy education is to help the student to acquire knowledge of, and the ability to detect propaganda, as well as ideologically and emotionally changed material. This will allow the consumer to make active choices in their interaction with the media in questions.

Being fluent in media literacy also allows an individual to get more out of the media they consume. By becoming aware of trends and tropes, as well as thinking critically about the media we consume, will we be able to detect biases in our society, as well as within ourselves. By becoming aware of these biases can we make more informed choices on what we as individuals wish to support, or work against. In this way is media literacy a powerful tool in citizen awareness and the spread and protection of human rights and democracy.

Even though you have no interest in critically analysing texts professionally, you  can still gain great advantages from being able to watch media with a more critical viewpoint. As mentioned before can these tools also be used on news, political debates or any other form of discourse that contains a form of message. Because of my educational background in literary studies, I have chosen to give these lessons and examples using pop culture, but these skills can be deployed in any of the above areas as well.

The Sender, the message and the receiver

We will focus on the dichotomy of the sender, or creator of the message, the message itself, the recipient, as well as how this relationship changes in various media forms. The sender in this equation is the creator of the message. This sender can be explicitly named and stated, or they can be implicit or implied. What is important is that there will always be a sender for a message to come into being, even if they are obscure or abstracted away.

The message in this context, is the very media itself, as well as the content that this piece of media is communication (more about this distinction later). Without this message, as well as the media that transports it, would communication not be possible. I am going to use the term Text in this series to describe a form of media that explicitly carries a message. In other words any form of media, like a book or a video game that sets out to communicate a set idea or message.

Finally we have the receiver or reader, the target for the message. A receiver is always implied, as even a message sent to no one in particular will have an intended recipient in order to be complete. Traditional communications theory presented the receiver as a passive and solely receptive part of this equation. Later studies centred the receiver or reader as an active participant in not only decoding the meaning of the message, but also as an active creator of meaning.

One theory holds that a message only gets a meaning once it is interpreted by a receiver. With the advent of social media and the web 2.0 has the lines between sender message and receiver, as the receiver is now able to directly interact with the message and the sender in the form of chat messages and comment fields and ratings. The one way communication has instead become a two way communication. A later chapter will deal exclusively with how these forms of participatory forms of communication have changed how we think about media literacy and communication in general.

Sender and intention

While consuming media is it fruitful to be aware of the fact that there is always a sender at the other end of the line, be that implicit or explicit. An explicit sender in this context would be a named author, creator or brand that is presented in the media itself. An implicit sender will be harder to detect, but is no longer present in order for the message to be sent, as discussed above.

It is a fruitful practice to analyse and try and discern the intended message of the sender. Furthermore can it be a good exercise to consider if the intended message is:
a) The sender being presented directly.
b) The sender that ends up coming across to the reviver.
c) The sender that is indirectly being presented.

By thinking critically about the sender and the intention of sending it, can we grasp a deeper understanding of the text itself. It is important that every intentional message has some form of sender. The goals, abilities and biases of this sender are all important parts of deconstruction and analysing a text.

When analysing a text, is it important to keep in mind that we are very rarely, if ever able to get to the actual intention of the sender, and often have to make due with deconstructing the meanings that can be found within the text itself. With this said, can it be a reading and informative exercise to, if the sender is known to you, investigate the context and social norms in which the sender worked. Understanding the context in which a person or team of people worked, might help us understand the messages they send out in the world.

The media and its content

I will give much time in this series to discuss various forms of texts, and how the makeup of these texts changes how they function, and how we interact with them. Our approach, even if its subconscious will naturally be different between a TV show, a film and a newspaper or a song. By understanding the forms and rules that each media form follows, can we gain a deeper appreciation for the text in front of us, as well as to start. To begin with we will focus on how these texts are traditionally understood, and we will later move on to more post structuralism approaches to creating and understanding texts.

Just as when discussing the sender, much each piece of media can be understood with its one frame of references and context. Nothing is after all, created in a bubble, and it’s important to try and understand where, when and how a text was created. It is equally important to be aware of our own biases, frames of references and prior experiences. Our world-views, opinions and experiences are very much going to colour our perception of a text. This is in and of itself not a bad thing, as long as we are aware that we are indeed colouring our perceptions of the thing we are examining.

Conclusions

These are a few of the topics that this series will include, and I will expand it as times goes on. For now this series is simply meant to be an introduction, and to aid in further reading and research in the subject of media literacy. The primary goal of this series is to make my readers more media savvy, as well as allow them to get more out of the media we all love to consume. This knowledge will also be useful to you in contexts out of pop culture and other entertainment.

This introductory chapter is a simple and quick start, as a way of dipping our toes into a rather large and complex topic that I will discuss over the coming months. I hope you are excited to go on this adventure with me!