Log #4

Media Literacy

By doing this project, I found that the problems of media chaos are more serious than my expectation. Thus, not only the journalism but also we ourselves, the readers, should attach importance to this issue. After reading some articles, I discovered that media literacy is an essential ability to everyone nowadays. According to the participants at the 1992 Aspen Media Literacy Leadership Institute, “Media Literacy is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and create media in a variety of forms.” We all know that literacy, which means the ability to read and write, is important; however, it’s not enough in modern times. Nowadays, we received messages from many types of media; therefore, we should have the ability to recognize and evaluate the information we obtained.

Education for media literacy is not the professional journalism education for journalists. It aims at help people to develop the ability of analyzing and evaluating messages they received properly. Media literacy can also help people learned critical thinking, which my group members Jay and Penny mentioned in their previous logs. With these skills, the readers have the ability to understand the information from the media in a critical way, and they will also not be misled easily. In addition, the journalists should also possess the skills of media literacy because it enables them to create adequate media messages. In modern society, we access various kind of media every day; as a result, I consider that all of us should have the skills of media literacy.

The problems of media chaos is getting more and more serious. We can’t ignore this issue anymore. To deal with media chaos, media literacy, which both journalists and readers should learn, is one of the solutions of this issue.

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_literacy

https://medialiteracyproject.org/learn/media-literacy/

http://www.medialit.org/media-literacy-definition-and-more