Media Literacy

Media literacy serves the discipline of mass communication research methodology in numerous and diverse ways. Media literacy includes the acquired skills needed to develop awareness of media use or exposure and analyze media messages with an understanding of social/cultural context and effects. This holistic method includes media’s use of persuasion and social change strategies. Understanding media begins by developing consciousness about media consumption—the personal choices and habits of audiences. Once audiences honestly record and reflect on their own consumption habits, they become aware of immense time spent with media, and the potential influence such messages have in their everyday lives. Media literacy includes understanding how the communication industries are structured, how they create media content with specific intents, and how messages operate across diverse audiences. By understanding media message strategies, audiences/users understand larger social knowledge structures within political, cultural, and economic contexts. Finally, media literacy is about citizens creating alternative media to influence beliefs, attitudes, values, and behaviors within the critical, democratic process.

This entry focuses on media literacy as a multiperspectival approach. Media literacy includes intersecting methodological branches within the complex system of mediated communication. Media literacy initially started as an educational and curricular initiative, inviting teachers and their students to reflect on their media use, habits, and patterns. Media literacy invites citizens to critically interpret media messages, understanding these messages in greater depth and context. Through this, audiences understand how meaning is created within media forms and through genre conventions, which are [Page 969]then disseminated through powerful multinational media corporations, local/regional media organizations, or by individuals via newer media technologies. Media literacy is also about the credibility of sources, recognizing stereotypes, oversimplification, generalizing and bias, as well as the maintenance of power among media organizations. Media-literate consumers recognize the strong social influence of media in everyday life. More recently, media literacy acknowledges the importance of citizens creating their own media messages for circulation. Citizen-producers employ media literacy competence in their consumption, understanding, and creation of messages. Thus, media literacy works on within any of the following contexts:

• 1.
  Media literacy as education curriculum starts with discovering consumption habits and the potential effects media messages have on users.
• 2.
  Media literacy explores the grammar of media through analysis of messages, recognizing that all media messages are constructed. Each media text, and the medium through which it is distributed, have different characteristics and unique visual/aural/spatial/interactive genre structures.
• 3.
  The political economy of media focuses on research about media content creators, as well as how media laws (policy) influence content and distribution. Literacy develops by exploring who creates mediated message, and for what purpose within a larger political and economic context.
• 4.
  Acquiring the skills to produce diverse media such as video, audio, or interactive web design develops maturity in media literacy. This methodology includes knowledge of research, script writing, preproduction planning, and visualization as well as navigation in interactive media forms (e.g., websites or games).

Media literacy was initially recognized as a curriculum initiative. Thus, media literacy was synonymous with media education to develop critical and reflective analysis. Ownership of media became an issue when deregulation changed regarding who could own media companies and how many. Media literacy matured into a social movement empowering citizens to create their own media. Since media literacy addresses the juncture of message creation, consumption, economics, policy, and context, a useful visual model is to think about literacy as a tree with distinct but connected branches (see Figure 1).

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