MEDIA LITERACY

Media literacy is a repertoire of competences that enable people to analyze, evaluate, and create messages in a wide variety of media modes, genres, and forms. Education for media literacy often uses an inquiry-based pedagogic model that encourages people to ask questions about what they watch, hear, and read. 

Media literacy education provides tools to help people critically analyze messages, offers opportunities for learners to broaden their experience of media, and helps them develop creative skills in making their own media messages. Critical analysis can include identifying author, purpose and point of view, examining construction techniques and genres, examining patterns of media representation, and detecting propaganda, censorship, and bias in news and public affairs programming (and the reasons for these). Media literacy education may explore how structural features—such as media ownership, or its funding model -- affect the information presented. Media literate people should be skillful creators and producers of media messages, both to facilitate understanding of the specific qualities of each medium, as well as to create independent media and participate as active citizens. Media literacy can be seen as contributing to an expanded conceptualization of literacy, treating mass media, popular culture and digital media as new types of 'texts' that require analysis and evaluation. By transforming the process of media consumption into an active and critical process, people gain greater awareness of the potential for misrepresentation and manipulation (especially through commercials and public relations techniques), and understand the role of mass media and participatory media in constructing views of reality.

Media literacy education is sometimes conceptualized as a way to address the negative dimensions of mass media, popular culture and digital media, including media violence, gender and racial stereotypes, the sexualization of children, and concerns about loss of privacy, cybernetics and Internet predators. By building knowledge and competencies in using media and technology, media literacy education may provide a type of protection to children and young by helping them make good choices in their media consumption habits, and patterns of usage. practical media literacy related abilities can be used to create new learning and teaching methods such as through mobile phones, interactive whiteboard and internet based learning. Media literacy teaches the language that is understood by the human condition worldwide and so is used to convey messages.