In the Preface, I pointed out three ideas that pervade the media literacy literature. Now, I will narrow our focus down to the ideas of skills and point out four ideas about how authors regard the nature of skills as tools of media literacy. These four ideas are as follows:
Let’s examine each of these four ideas in more detail.
Broad Perspective on Media
All definitions of media literacy are broad in the sense that they refer to skills that can be used to address challenges across all kinds of media and messages. They are not limited to one medium. Initially, the term literacy referred to a person’s ability to read the written word—that is, translate arbitrary symbols of letters, words, and sentences into various levels of meaning. However, with the advent of technologies to convey messages visually in addition to print, the idea of literacy was expanded to include terms like visual literacy (the ability to translate flat two-dimensional images into real-world three-dimensional understandings), story literacy (the ability to follow narratives in film and video that use truncated action, limited frames, editing, sound, and other storytelling conventions), and computer literacy (the ability to record one’s own messages, to send them to others electronically, to search for messages, and to process meaning from electronic screens). Most people who use the term media literacy refer to people’s ability to perceive meaning from any medium or type of message.
Purpose of Protecting and Empowering
Early writing about media literacy focused on using skills exclusively to protect people from unwanted negative effects from the media. This meaning grew from the public’s generalized fear that as each new medium was introduced (especially film, radio, and television), the population was being exposed to risks of negative effects from political propaganda, violence, and sexual portrayals. It was believed that the mass media were powerful influencers and that people needed to be protected from this constant, pervasive influence. Therefore, the initial purpose of media literacy was to help people avoid, or at least reduce, these risks of experiencing negative effects.
Now most authors who write about media literacy also argue that skills can be used in a proactively positive manner by empowering people to use the media to satisfy their own needs better than they could if their skills were weak. These authors do not reject the claim that the media often exert negative effects; instead, these authors also include the belief that the media exert many positive effects and that when media literacy is conceptualized as empowerment, its purpose is to help people increase the probability of experiencing positive effects while decreasing the probability of experiencing negative effects. Thus, media literacy is less about criticizing the media and more about analyzing potential media effects to identify the good as well as the bad. This expanded vision for media literacy makes it even more important for people to understand the skills they will need to achieve greater empowerment.
To illustrate this distinction between protection and empowerment, consider the way many people criticize the growth of social media. For example, there are critics who complain that the newer forms of technology have harmed people’s ability to write well, because texting, instant messaging, and tweeting have pushed aside letter writing and longer forms of communication. An illustration of this belief is John Sutherland, an English professor at the University College of London, who has argued that texting has reduced language into a “bleak, bald, sad shorthand,” that Facebook reinforces narcissistic drivel, and that PowerPoint presentations have taken the place of well-reasoned essays (quoted in Thompson, 2009). He says that today’s technologies of communication that encourage or even require shorter messages, like Twitter, have shortened people’s attention spans and therefore have limited their ability to think in longer arcs, which is required for constructing well-reasoned essays. In contrast, other people regard these newer formats for communication more positively. For example, Andrea Lunsford, a professor emerita of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, argues that the newer information technologies have actually increased literacy. She says “I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization” (quoted in Thompson, 2009). In addition, she argues that these new technologies of communication are not killing our ability to write well but instead are pushing it in new directions of being more personal, creative, and concise. She reached this conclusion after systematically analyzing more than 14,000 student writing samples over a 5-year period. She explains that young people today are adept at understanding the needs of their audiences and writing messages especially crafted to appeal to them. For today’s youth, writing is about discovering themselves, organizing their thoughts concisely, managing impressions, and persuading their readers.
It is faulty to regard the media’s influence on our skill set as being either all good or all bad. The challenge of developing higher levels of media literacy requires that we all improve certain skills so that we can more effectively tell the difference between potentially negative and potentially positive effects in our exposures to media messages.
Belief in a Continuum, Not a Category
While most authors regard media literacy skills as existing along a continuum, there are still some authors who seem to indicate that skills are categorical; that is, either a person has a skill or does not. This is a subtle but important distinction because if we regard skills as being categorical, then it gives people a false sense of preparedness when they believe they have any of these skills. Instead, people need to regard media literacy skills as existing along a wide continuum where there is always room for improvement.
We all occupy some position on the media literacy continuum. There is no point below which we could say that someone has no media literacy, and there is no point at the high end of the continuum where we can say that someone is fully media literate; there is always room for improvement.