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Characteristics Of Media Literacy

Decent Essays

The 21st Century has seen a huge boom in the amount of media being created and consumed. It seems as though the world revolves around media content, with people having more ways of consuming media than ever before, and this consuming more media than ever before. The average American spends over half of their day consuming some sort of media. It is because of this that it is more important than ever for people to be able to read, interpret, critically assess, and productively use media texts; a practice called media literacy. People who are media-literate should be able to display seven key characteristics that are necessary for true media literacy. The first characteristic is that media literate people need to develop critical thinking skills which will enable them to make independent choices about which media content they select and how they interpret the information received through the media. All media sends some sort of message to the person consuming it. It is important to question and interpret the meaning of those messages, rather than just passively absorbing them. People need to be able to question and weed out material that doesn’t meet our individual values in order to become smarter consumers. Most media material doesn’t have one concrete interpretation, instead it is considered to be polysemic, or open to different interpretations. Because of this, we need to choose whether to interpret the preferred reading (the producer intended meaning), or the negotiated

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