Seven Skills of Media Literacy

W. James Potter

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781544378565
• eBook ISBN: 9781544377056
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In Seven Skills of Media Literacy, best-selling author and renowned scholar W. James Potter provides readers with the practical guidance they need to make substantial improvements on seven major skills required to increase their media literacy. For each of these seven skills, Potter provides easy-to-follow algorithms and heuristics that structure the process of using the skill. Chapters also offer many exercises to help readers practice using these algorithms and heuristics while avoiding traps in thinking. The book is organized to guide readers progressively through the sequence of media literacy skills, starting with the most fundamental and building to the more complex skills. This book is a must read for those people serious about becoming more strategic in using the media to satisfy their own needs for information and entertainment and thereby avoid being exploited by media messages. 

Chapter 1 Skills in the Context of Media Literacy

• I. What Is Media Literacy?
  • Shared Ideas
    • Broad Perspective on Media
    • Purpose of Protecting and Empowering
    • Belief in a Continuum, Not a Category
    • Faith That Skills Can Be Developed
  • Components
    • Skills
    • Knowledge Structures
    • Personal Locus
• II. Nature of Skills
  • Skills Versus Competencies
  • What Are the Essential Skills of Media Literacy?
    • 1. Analyzing
    • 2. Evaluating
    • 3. Grouping
    • 4. Inducing
    • 5. Deducing
    • 6. Synthesizing
    • 7. Abstracting
• III. Chapter Review

Because the focus of this book is to help you develop the key skills of media literacy, it is important to start with some context so you can understand why these skills are essential to developing higher levels of media literacy. In this chapter, I will first highlight the main ideas that people use when talking about this broad idea we label as “media literacy.” Then I will present some key ideas about the nature of skills. This information will provide you with a good foundation to understand why the seven skills highlighted in this book are so essential to media literacy.

I. What Is Media Literacy?

Many people evoke the term media literacy as a way of dealing with a wide range of problems they perceive as being generated by the mass media. These people include politicians, consumer activists, parents, educators, and academics. As you might imagine, there is a wide variety of meanings circulating about this term. Setting aside all the nuances of different meanings, we can see that there is a core set of ideas that almost everyone who uses the term seems to share. It is important that you understand what these ideas are so that you can appreciate why increasing your own levels of media literacy can significantly help you in your everyday life.

Shared Ideas

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:

1. Media literacy skills should be regarded broadly so their utility is not limited to any one medium or any one type of message;
2. The purpose of skills of media literacy is twofold; that is, using these skills can do more than simply protect people from unwanted effects—these skills can also empower people to use the media more strategically to satisfy their individual needs;
3. These skills are best regarded along a continuum where we all have some level of ability with them; and
4. The skills of media literacy are not static and therefore they can be developed with the right kind of training.

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.

Faith That Skills Can Be Developed

There is a widespread belief among media literacy scholars that people’s levels of media literacy can be improved with the development of their skills. We all have a natural level of media literacy and that is good enough to enable us to do many things with the media. But there are also many things we cannot do with the media mainly because we have skills that are not developed well enough to allow us to examine many things that we simply take for granted. If we are to expand our understanding about the media so that we can see more opportunities for using the media to achieve our own goals while protecting ourselves from threats that we have been unable to perceive, then we need to increase the level of our essential media literacy skills.

Components

Although skills are essential to our development of greater levels of media literacy, they do not work alone. Skills are tools, so we need raw materials of information in order to build knowledge structures. Also, we need some drive energy to motivate our use of skills. Therefore, the key components of media literacy are skills, knowledge structures, and personal locus. All three components work together.

Skills

Many people write about media literacy as essentially being a skill. These definitions highlight the importance of people learning how to analyze media messages to see underlying meanings and to evaluate those messages along all kinds of dimensions such as credibility, realism, usefulness, and entertainment value.

What is the skill of media literacy? While many definers of this term offer no name for the skill they are arguing for, many do offer a name—typically “critical thinking.” Although the term critical thinking sounds good, its use creates confusion because everyone seems to have a different meaning for it. Some people regard critical thinking as a willingness to criticize the media; other people define it as the need to examine issues in more depth; still others suggest a meaning of being more systematic and logical when interacting with the media; others imply that it means the ability to focus on the most important issues and ignore the rest; and the list goes on and on. In order to avoid this conglomeration of meanings, I avoid using this term; instead, I will try to be more clear by showing you how media literacy relies on seven specific skills. These are the skills of analysis, evaluation, grouping, induction, deduction, synthesis, and abstraction (see Table 1.1).

These skills are not exclusive to media literacy tasks; instead, we use these skills in all sorts of ways in our everyday lives. We all have some ability with each of these skills, so the media literacy challenge is not to acquire these skills; rather our challenge is to get better at using each of these skills in our encounters with media messages.

Table 1.1

Knowledge Structures

Another often-mentioned component in definitions of media literature is information, or the term I prefer—knowledge structures. In everyday language, the terms information and knowledge are often used as synonyms, but in this book, they have meanings very different from one another (see Table 1.2). Information is piecemeal and transitory, whereas knowledge is structured, organized, and of more enduring significance. Information resides in the messages, whereas knowledge resides in a person’s mind. Information gives something to the person to interpret, whereas knowledge reflects that which has already been interpreted by the person. Information is composed of facts. Facts by themselves are not knowledge any more than a pile of lumber is a house. Knowledge requires structure to provide context and reveal meaning. Think of messages as the raw materials and think of skills as the tools you use to build your knowledge structures.

Knowledge structures are sets of organized information in your memory that help you see patterns that organize your world. We use these patterns as maps to tell us where to get more information and also where to go to retrieve information we have previously encoded into our knowledge structures. To help visualize this, think about your bedroom. Are your books, papers, clothes, food wrappers, and everything else randomly scattered all over your bed, desk, closet, and drawers? If so, is it difficult for you to find things?

Table 1.2

Information is the essential ingredient in knowledge structures. But not all information is equally useful in the building of a knowledge structure. Som...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Detailed Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Skills in the Context of Media Literacy
• Chapter 2 Importance of Skills
• Chapter 3 Analyzing: Digging Into the Meaning and Structure of Media Messages
• Chapter 4 Evaluating: Making Judgments About the Value of Media Messages
• Chapter 5 Grouping: Classifying Elements in Media Messages
• Chapter 6 Inducing: Looking for Patterns Within and Across Media Messages
• Chapter 7 Deducing: Reasoning with Logic from General Principles
• Chapter 8 Synthesizing: Assembling Novel Configurations
• Chapter 9 Abstracting: Communicating the Essence of Media Messages
• Chapter 10 Putting It All Together
• References
• Glossary