In this day and age, it is very necessary to be literate in many different things. Being literate essentially means that you are able to understand, and possibly recite back in your own words, the information provided to you. A person can be literate on any topic ranging from things like the English language, to more precise things like astrology or the economy.
With the amount of growing technology and media intake that we have now, it is very important for a person to have media literacy. According to our textbook, Media Literacy (8th edition) by W. James Potter, the term essentially means “a set of perspectives that we actively use to expose ourselves to the mass media in order to interpret the meaning of the messages we encounter.” It also mentions that, “media literacy is multidimensional, consisting of cognitive, emotional, aesthetic, and moral dimensions, and media literacy is a continuum, not a category” (Media Literacy, 499)
Media literacy has 3 building blocks: Personal Locus, Knowledge Structure, and Skills. To start, the building block “personal locus” provides mental energy and direction, and its main goal is to shape information processing tasks. The second building block, “knowledge structure”, is carefully constructed and helps us see patterns in our memory, as well as sets organized information in our memory. Our notes indicate that media literacy involves the building block knowledge structure when it comes to media effects, media content, media industries, the real world, and ourselves. The last building block, “Skills”, is used to construct knowledge structures and helps us mine through piles of facts. There are 7 skills included in this building block: analysis (breaking down a message into meaningful elements), evaluation (making a judgement about the value of an element), grouping (determining which elects are alike in some way, then determining how a group of elements are different from other groups of elements), induction (inferring a pattern across a small number of elements, then generalizing the pattern to all elements in the larger set), deduction (using general principles to explain particulars, typically using syllogistic reasoning), synthesis (the assembling of elements into a new structure), and abstracting (creating a brief, clear, and accurate description capturing the essence of a message).
There is a lot of learning that comes with having media literacy, but with practice and an open mind, it can be achieved by anyone and everyone!
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