History of Media

Literacy
By: Jay Smooth
Media Literacy as a term or a field didn’t
become a thing until around the 1960s

Before, Thinking about comminication was

led by philosophers, psychologist,
sociologists, linguists, and critical thinkers.
In the Phaedrus, a dialogue he wrote around 370
BCE, Plato had a conversation between his
teacher, Socrates, and one of their friends,
Phaedrus.
Socrates and Phaedrus start off talking about love
and up debating the best way to give a speech.
According to Socrates the biggest problem in
Greek society is writing things down.
• “If men learn this, it will implant
forgetfullness in their souls; they will cease
to excercise memory because they rely on
that which is written, calling things to
remember no longer from within
themselves, but by means of external
marks. What you have discovered is a recipe
not for memory, but for reminder.
He thought that leaving your words on a
paper, just lying around, would encourage
others to use them out of context.

If you were there in person, you could defend

your thoughts and talk them out with the
listener.
The root of media literacy concerns
is really just straight up literacy,
learning to read and write.
For the past centuries, information was often
shared by word of mouth and, for most people,
education was informal.
Letters, codices (a type of pre-book book), and
hand made manuscripts are available, but these
were very expensive and time consuming to
make. so very few people had the means to
become educated and literate.
Everything changed when Johannes Gutenberg
invented the movable type printing press in 1452.
As media became cheaper, more people had the
means to become literate.
The History of media literacy closely follows the history
of media.
Technology- with each new invention.
Discussions and fears follow.
Media literacy becomes important three centuries later
after the invention of printing press. It was made
possible because of the world first mass media, the
news paper.

News paper was controlled by the government(British).

But by the early 1800’s the newspaper begins to
become a democratizing force. This was the era of
penny press.
Penny Paper
Newspapers were not just about educating
the masses but they were also about making
lots of money.
Benjamin H. Day- The owner of Penny paper.
The object of this paper is to lay before
the public, at a price within the means
of everyone, all the news of the day,
and at the same time offer an
advantageous medium for
advertisements
By the mid 1800’s, the penny presses
were making so much money from
ads that people worried about
publishers choosing profit over
truth.
In the late 1890’s, Joseph Pulitzer, a self-
made, traditional newspaper man who
owned the New York World.
William Randolph Hearst, a young mining
heir who wanted to emulate Pulitzer and
owned the New York Journal, went head
to head.
Yellow Journalism
•Focusing less on getting the
facts straight and more on
getting more readers and more
cash.
Yellow Journalist used bold, scary or
misleading headlines; faked
interviews and exaggerated stories;
and used lot of splashy pictures and
illustration, and did anything else
they could do to sell a paper.
They prioritized sensationalism over
professionalism and journalistic
ethics.
They thrived on scandals, sports,
crime, and self-promotion.
Yellow Jurnalism, then and now, helps
remind us of those ancient questions
-what happens when we rely on media?
-should everyone have access to it?
-what happens if that access is exploited?
Media literacy is nothing new,
but it’s adapting and changing
all the time.