Unit 4: What is Media Literacy?

What is media literacy and why do we care about it? In a nutshell, media literacy our ability to identify different forms of media and find a way to analyze the messages this media is sending to us. In such an information saturated world, we must pay close attention to what is being placed in our minds. According to our text, the average person in the U.S. consumes fifteen hours of media a day. With this excessive amount of information being poured towards us, we need to be media literate in order to organize all of that information. By becoming media literate, we can try to turn off autopilot mode more often and analyze what is being showed to us.

There are many ways in which being media literate can help in a person’s everyday life. By knowing how media companies try to entice you, you can make more informed decisions, not just based off of the looks of an advertisement. It can also make you question the truth to some of them media you see day to day. For example, our course uses a cropped picture of soldiers to demonstrate this. When it is cropped, you only see things in a negative connotation. When you see the entire picture, you can see that the soldiers are actually helping each other. This analysis is especially helpful when determining if articles seen online are truthful or “fake news”.

Some ways that I have tried to become more media literate is by decreasing my amount of mindless scrolling on my phone. By decreasing my total amount of exposure to information, I pay attention more when I actually am on my phone. Another way I have tried to improve my media consumption is my checking my sources and doing research on stuff that I have seen or heard in the media. For example, I listen to a lot of podcasts about true crime events. Those are often heavily saturated with information and I sometimes listen to them while doing other things. To ensure I am getting all of the information factually, I look up whatever the podcast is talking about and research it from different sources. This ensures that I am storing information that is correct.