BUCAS GRANDE

Brgy. Taruc, Socorro, Surigao del Norte

FOUNDATION

Reporter: JACOBE, Christian Joy E.

Topic: Chapter 5: Media and Cyber or Digital Literacies - Media Literacy

Media and Cyber or Digital Literacies

OBJECTIVES
At the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
1. develop a working understanding of Media and Cyber or Digital Literacies and how they relate to one another;
2. appreciate the importance of developing Media and Cyber or Digital Literacies both in ourselves and one another in
the information age; and
3. realize that practical steps must be taken to develop these literacies early in children and cannot wait “until they are
older.”
Media Literacy
 Media is the plural form of medium, which describes any channel of communication. This can include
anything from printed paper to digital data, and encompasses art, news, educational content and numerous
other forms of information. Literacy is the competence or knowledge in a specified area.

 According to Aufderheide (1993), media literacy is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate
messages in a wide variety of forms.
 While Christ and Potter (1998) desfines it as “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create messages
accross a variety of contexts.”
 Hobbs (1998) posits that it is a term used by modern scholars to refer to the process of critically analyzing and
learning to create one’s own messages in print, audio, and multimedia.

 According to Boyd (2004), media litearcy education began in the United States and United Kingdom as a
direct result of war propaganda in the 1930s and the rise of adveritisng in the 1960s.

 A few generations ago, our culture’s storytellers were people – family, friends, and others in our community.
For many people today, the most powerful storytellers are television, movies, music, video games, and the
Internet.
 Advertising tries to get us to buy products. To do this, they use specific techniques , we call “the language of
persuasion.”
 The “subtext” is your interpretation of a piece of media. The subtext is not actually heard or seen; it is the
meaning we create from the text in our own minds after viewing or listening to it.
 Tools used in media:

At the 1993 Media Literacy National Leadership Conference, it did identify five essential concepts necessary
for any analysis of media message:
1. Media messages are constructed.
2. Media messages are produced with economic, social, political, historical, and aesthetic contents.
3. The interpretative meaning-making processes involved in message reception consists of an interaction
between the reader, the text, and the culture.
4. Media has unique “languages,” characteristics which typicaly various forms, genres, and symbol systems of
communication.
5. Media representation play a role in people’s understanding of social reality.

What these five concepts boil down to is that while the producer of a particular media has an intended meaning
behind the communication, what actually gets communicated to the consumers depends not only on the media itself,
but also on the consumers themselves and on their respective cultures
 An immediate example of this is the media portrayal of Mindanao. Because
so little good news coming from the island is communicated by the news
networks, the average Filipino - who might never have been to Mindanao -
comes to believe that the entire island is involved in armed conflict, that
anyone from Mindanao is somehow involved in the conflict, and therefore
(understandably) refuses to go there, nor allow any of his or her relatives to do
so. It is unlikely, that this was the news media's intention, but it is the viewer's
interpretation that ultimately determined his or her beliefs and behavior.