Media literacy
Media literacy is a broadened understanding of literacy that encompasses the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media in various forms. It also includes the capacity to reflect critically and act ethically—leveraging the power of information and communication to engage with the world and contribute to positive change. Media literacy applies to different types of media, and is seen as an important skill for work, life, and citizenship.
Examples of media literacy include reflecting on one's media choices, identifying sponsored content, recognizing stereotypes, analyzing propaganda and discussing the benefits, risks, and harms of media use. Critical analysis skills can be developed through practices like constructivist media decoding and lateral reading, which entails looking at multiple perspectives in assessing the quality of a particular piece of media. Media literacy also includes the ability to create and share messages as a socially responsible communicator. The practices of safety and civility, information access, and civic voice and engagement are sometimes referred to as digital citizenship.
Many of the competencies that make up media literacy are derived from traditional literacy, though adapted for the modern age and digital landscape. These competencies include the ability to access information, analyze and evaluate messages, as well as creating content responsibly, while considering how it might influence the audience. Since social media is an extension of the broader online media environment, social media literacy has become increasingly relevant, functioning as a subset rooted in core media literacy principles. Researchers argued that a deep understanding of media literacy, done through media literacy education, can be especially important today, as it plays a significant role in assessing the credibility of new information. Short-form content's rise has made instant information sharing easier, often without verification. Due to their quick, catchy, and attention-grabbing nature, people consume and share them rapidly without fact-checking. This speed creates a cycle where misinformation spreads quickly before verification.
Media literacy education is the process used to advance media literacy competencies. It is intended to promote awareness of media influence and create an active stance towards both consuming and creating media. Media literacy education is taught and studied in many countries around the world. Finland has been cited as one of the leading countries that invests significantly in media literacy.
Media literacy education
Education for media literacy often encourages people to ask questions about what they watch, hear, and read. Some examples of media examined include, but are not limited to television, video games, photographs, and audio messages.Media literacy education provides tools to help people develop receptive media capability to critically analyze messages, offers opportunities for learners to broaden their experience of media, and helps them develop generative media capability to increase creative skills in making their own media messages. Critical analyses can include identifying author, purpose and point of view, examining construction techniques and genres, examining patterns of media representation, and detecting propaganda, censorship, and bias in news and public affairs programming. Media literacy education may explore how structural features—such as media ownership, or its funding model—affect the information presented. Media literacy is interdisciplinary by nature. Media literacy represents a necessary, inevitable, and realistic response to the complex, ever-changing electronic environment and communication cornucopia surrounding us.
The speed and reach of new information today may increase access to knowledge for a broader audience, but during an infodemic, when both true and false information spread simultaneously, it becomes much more difficult to determine what is accurate. When individuals encounter information for the first time, assessing its reliability can be challenging. Without strong media literacy strategies, the internet becomes even harder to navigate. This makes it important to recognize that no single strategy is sufficient on its own. Using a combination of different approaches is what truly helps individuals evaluate information more effectively.
As health professionals increasingly share advice online, media literacy may influence individuals' health decisions. While this trend expands access to health information at little or no cost, it can also complicate the identification of accurate versus inaccurate content. This challenge is partly due to the ease with which individuals can claim health expertise on social media without verifiable credentials, highlighting the role of media health literacy. The concept of media health literacy encompasses the skills and competencies required to grasp, and apply health information to positively impact one's own health and that of others. In a world increasingly saturated with media and digital content, these skills enable individuals to access and use health-related information and tools across various platforms, including television, the Internet, and mobile applications. Research suggests that these skills are associated with how younger individuals and older adults acquire and evaluate newly consumed information about their health.
Goals might include developing the habits and skills to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act using all forms of communication. Education about media literacy can begin in early childhood by developing a pedagogy around more critical thinking and deeper analysis and questioning of concepts and texts. As students age and enter adulthood, the use of learning media literacy will be impactful in identifying ethical and technical standards in media as well as understanding how media ties to their cognitive, social, and emotional needs.
In North America and Europe, media literacy includes both empowerment and protectionist perspectives. Media literate people can skillfully create and produce media messages, both to show understanding of the specific qualities of each medium, as well as to create media and participate as active citizens. Media literacy can be seen as contributing to an expanded conceptualization of literacy, treating mass media, popular culture and digital media as new types of 'texts' that require analysis and evaluation. By transforming the process of media consumption into an active and critical process, people gain greater awareness of the potential for misrepresentation and manipulation, and understand the role of mass media and participatory media in constructing views of reality.
Media literacy education is sometimes conceptualized as a way to address the negative dimensions of media, including media manipulation, misinformation, gender and racial stereotypes and violence, the sexualization of children, and concerns about loss of privacy, cyberbullying and Internet predators. By building knowledge and competencies in using media and technology, media literacy education may provide a type of protection to children and young people by helping them make good choices in their media consumption habits, and patterns of usage.
This pedagogical project questions representations of class, gender, race, sexuality and other forms of identity and challenges media messages that reproduce oppression and discrimination. Proponents of media literacy education argue that the inclusion of media literacy into school curricula promotes civic engagement, increases awareness of the power structures inherent in popular media and aids students in gaining necessary critical and inquiry skills. Media can have a positive or negative impact on society, but media literacy education enables the students to discern inescapable risks of manipulation, propaganda and media bias. A growing body of research has begun focusing on the impact of media literacy on youth. In an important meta-analysis of more than 50 studies, published in the Journal of Communication, media literacy interventions were found to have positive effects on knowledge, criticism, perceived realism, influence, behavioral beliefs, attitudes, self-efficacy, and behavior.
Media literacy also encourages critical thinking and self-expression, enabling citizens to decisively exercise their democratic rights. Media literacy enables the populace to understand and contribute to public discourse, and, eventually, make sound decisions when electing their leaders. People who are media literate can adopt a critical stance when decoding media messages, no matter their views regarding a position. Likewise, the use of mobile devices by children and adolescents is increasing significantly; therefore, it is relevant to investigate the level of advertising literacy of parents who interact as mediators between children and mobile advertising.
Digitalisation and the expansion of information and communication technologies at the beginning of the 21st century have substantially modified the media and their relationship with users, which logically modifies the basic principles of media education. It is no longer so much a question of educating critical receivers as of training citizens as responsible prosumers in virtual and hybrid environments. Media education currently incorporates phenomena such as social networks, virtual communities, big data, artificial intelligence, cyber-surveillance, etc., as well as training the individual in the critical use of mobile devices of all kinds.
However, due to the rapid pace of technological advancement and the widespread migration of audiences to digital platforms, media literacy studies have struggled to keep up with these developments. Two seminal texts that have shaped 21st-century media literacy education—James Potter's and Stanley Baran's works—do not address several emerging and highly relevant concepts, such as post-truth, mob censorship, or the growing role of artificial intelligence in the production and dissemination of online information.