21st Century Media Literacy
Asking Americans in 2009 to objectively consider the media messages all around them is like expecting fish to consider the water they live in. Cable TV, billboards, business logos, fashion, food packaging — we swim in this stuff all day without the least amount of scrutiny, as though they were naturally occuring phenomena.
Thus the media literacy kit’s #1 core principal: “All media messages are constructed.” This notion, as “duh” as it may seem at first, is the key, I think, to media literacy. Not to get too dorky, but it’s kind of like the The Matrix: our media-created culture is the matrix, and getting out requires you to, in the words of Morpheus and the ML kit, “Free Your Mind.”
O.K. That’s seriously the nerdiest reference I’ve made in a while, but I thought it was apt.
Two elements of the ML kit I really liked were 1) it’s emphasis on letting students make their own anlysis of media messages, rather than telling them what this or that means. Media Literacy must be about training them to be critical media consumers outside the classroom. And 2) the kit distinguishes between cynicism toward media and taking them in with a critical eye. We shouldn’t teach students to avoid these messages — as if it were possible — or to consider them all evil. We should teach how to be smarter media readers, which translates to being smarter consumers, voters, and citizens.
"Free Your Mind."
June 25, 2009 at 3:03 pm
The metaphor is apt, and one I sometimes consider…it’s a challenge for some to see their cultural view as just that, to see the frame through which our perspective is ordered (or lens, or prism, or whatever analogy applies). For some people it’s too threatening to their worldview, as it reveals the shakiness of previously firm assumptions. And I’m sure that there are interests in society that would prefer that people not pose such questions. The Matrix, indeed.