Esguerra, Grace Anne M.

Media and Information Literacy

BABrC 3-1N

November 14, 2014

1. Definitions of Media Literacy

Media literacy empowers people to be both critical thinkers and creative producers of an
increasingly wide range of messages using image, language, and sound. It is the skillful
application of literacy skills to media and technology messages.
Media literacy is a repertoire of competencies that enable people to analyze, evaluate, and
create messages in a wide variety of media modes, genres, and formats.
2. Aims of Media Literacy
Media literacy aims to enable people to be skillful creators and producers of media
messages, both to facilitate an understanding as to the strengths and limitations of each medium,
as well as to create independent media
3. Characteristics of Media Literacy
Media Literacy 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.
4. Key concepts of Media Literacy
1. 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 (taking them apart to show
how they are made).
2. The media construct versions of 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 pre-constructed and have attitudes, interpretations, and conclusions already
built in. Thus the media, to a great extent, give us our sense of reality.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. Media messages contain ideological and value 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, the virtue of consumerism, the role of women, the acceptance of authority,
and unquestioning patriotism.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. Each medium has a unique aesthetic form. Just as we notice the pleasing rhythms of
certain pieces of poetry or prose, so ought we be able to enjoy the pleasing forms and
effects of the different media.
5. Reasons for studying Media Literacy
1. Like history, because the media interpret the past to us show us what has gone into
making us the way we are.
2. Like geography, because the media define for us our own place in the world.
3. Like civics, because the media help us to understand the workings of our immediate
world, and our individual places in it.
4. Like literature, because the media are major sources of modern culture and
entertainment.
5. Like literature, because the media require us to learn and use critical thinking skills.
6. Like business, because the media are major industries and are inextricably involved in
commerce.
7. Like language, because the media help define how we communicate with each other.
8. Like science and technology, because the media help us to learn technology by
adopting the leading edge of modern technological innovation.

9. Like family studies, because the media determine much of our cultural diet and weave
part of the fabric of our lives.
10. Like environmental studies, because the media are as big a part of our everyday
environment as are trees, mountains, rivers, cities and oceans.
11. Like philosophy, because the media interpret our world, its values and ideas to us.
12. Like psychology, because the media helps us understand ourselves and others.
13. Like science, because the media explain to us how things work.
14. Like industrial arts, because the media are carefully planned, designed and
constructed products.
15. Like the arts, because through the media we experience all the arts as no other age has
ever done.
16. Like politics, because the media bring us political and ideological messages all the
time - yes - all the time.
17. Like rhetoric, because the media use special codes and conventions of their own
languages that we need to understand.
18. Like drama, because the media help us understand life by presenting it as larger-thanlife, and compel us to think in terms of the audience.
19. Like Everest, because they are there.
20. BECAUSE THE MEDIA GO TO GREAT LENGTHS TO STUDY YOU!
6. Media Literature versus Media Education
Media literacy is the ability to encode and decode the symbols transmitted via media and
the ability to synthesize, analyze and produce mediated messages while Media education is the
study of media, including hands on experiences and media production.
7. Mass Media and Media Literacy Education
The mass media are diversified media technologies that are intended to reach a large
audience by mass communication. The technology through which this communication takes
place varies. Broadcast media such as radio, recorded music, film and television transmit their
information electronically.
Media literacy is the ability to encode and decode the symbols transmitted via media and
the ability to synthesize, analyze and produce mediated messages. Media education is the study
of media, including 'hands on' experiences and media production.

8. What are the effects of media exposure?

Heavy media exposure could have long-term effects on our bodies and brains that we
don't realize. Anderson noted that multiple claims are made of negative effects on social
behavior, health, education, and cognition (e.g., increases in aggression and obesity, interference
with reading, increase in problems with attention), as well as positive effects and opportunities in
the same areas (e.g., teaching or modeling prosocial behavior, providing a vehicle for public
health messages that reduce obesity, teaching reading and other skills, enhancing attention
skills). Some, he explained, view media in general as a toxin, exposure to which should be
controlled in the same way that environmental pollutants are permitted in small doses.
9. Why media ownership should not be concentrated to a moneyed individual or group?
Media ownership should not be concentrated to a moneyed individual or group for them
to avoid:
-

Commercially driven, ultra-powerful mass market media is primarily loyal to

sponsors, i.e. advertisers and government rather than to the public interest.
Only a few companies representing the interests of a minority elite control the public
airwaves.
Healthy, market-based competition is absent, leading to slower innovation and
increased prices.

10. How media influence government policies on politics, economics and even the social life
of the people?
The media plays a substantial role in the development of government. The media gives
people access to be able to choose a political party, devise attitudes on government parties and
government decisions, and manage their own interests. From newspapers to television to radio to
the internet, the media is the leading factor in political communication and fund-raising.
The mass media have a decisive influence on the collective behavior. They generate
specific conducts and attitudes in most members of society. Media are more powerful than guns.
People obey the weapons because of their potential for destruction, its ability to cause death; in
change, the mass media persuade and influence people decisions because their messages go
directly to the conscience. The weapons have an effect of coercion, the media an effect of
persuasion.
Most people place great credibility to the media and are willing to take its direction. So,
in the practice, the media has become an over-power, a power that is above all other powers in
society.
11. What are the laws that prohibit monopoly in media business?

12. How media ownership in the 20th century differs with the present 21st century?

The structure of ownership in the 20th century media consists of a small elite group of
producers who shape the public sphere of broadcasting, deciding what is and isnt deemed as
important information for the public to consume. For example, before the Internet, people relied
on newspapers and TV for new broadcasting, which are owned by large companies who have
selected only a handful of world news stories to publish. Therefore making the system hierarchal.
The 21st century media structure or internet model of media creates a more interactive
mode of communication as it allows all individuals to become agents in the distribution of news
and media. This therefore means that there is an increased choice in media consumption due to
the two-way communication system.
13. Compare the roles of media under the communist/ dictatorial regime with that of
democratic regime.
Freedom of information, speech and the press is firmly rooted in the structures of modern
western democratic thought. With limited restrictions, every capitalist democracy has legal
provisions protecting these rights. Communism, as a primarily economic system, is much quieter
on the issue of individual human rights. Two conflicting positions on these freedoms arise with
analysis of communist theory. The first is an argument against individual freedoms. In a
communist society, the individual's best interests are indistinguishable from the society's best
interest. Thus, the idea of an individual freedom is incompatible with a communist ideology.
The only reason to hold individual speech and information rights would be to better the society, a
condition which would likely be met only in certain instances rather than across time, making the
default a lack of freedom.
While in democratic regime, we have Freedom of Information that strengthens the public
service broadcasting, and develop and participate in alternative media and citizen journalism.
14. A certain survey research published recently found out that people living under a free
society were happier than that with their counterparts under communist or military
dictatorial state.