Why Media Literacy Matters: Understanding the Information Problem and Developing Control Over Media

The Challenge of Motivation

The first challenge we all face when confronting a new body of information is motivation. We ask ourselves: Why should I expend all the effort to learn this? How will learning this help me enough to make all that effort worthwhile?

With media literacy, our initial answers to the above questions are likely to make us feel that learning about media literacy is not worth the effort because we feel that we already know a lot about the media. We are familiar with a large number of websites, apps, recording artists, and celebrities. We are already able to access a wide range of entertainment and information, so why would we need to learn a lot more about the media? This book will show you the answer to that question. By presenting you with some key insights about things you don’t know about the media, this book will expand your perspective into new areas. Your growing perspective will allow you to exercise more control over your media exposures so that you can get more value from those messages. Let’s get started!

In this chapter, I will show you the big picture of our media environment so that you can see how enormous the information problem is. The way you deal with this problem typically works well on a day-to-day basis, but its effectiveness is questionable over the long run. That is, the disadvantages in the long term greatly outweigh the advantages in the short term.

Our culture is saturated with media messages—far more than you may realize. Hollywood releases more than hours of feature films each year, which adds to its base of more than hours of films it has already released in previous years. In addition, users of a video platforms such as YouTube upload more than new hours of video every minute of every day. Commercial television stations generate about million hours of video messages every year worldwide, and radio stations send out million hours of original programming each year.

We now have more than 140 million book titles in existence, and another new book titles are published throughout the world each day. Then there is the World Wide Web, which is so huge that no one knows how big it really is. Google is attempting to index all webpages, and that index has now reached over 67 billion webpages on its 900,000 company servers (Statistic Brain Research Institute.

The Information Problem

Apple CEO Tim Cook debutes the Apply Watch collection in San Francisco. This wearable technology allows you to text and make calls, as well as tell the time.

Not only are we already saturated with media messages, the rate of that saturation is growing at an accelerating pace. More information has been generated since you were born than the sum total of all information throughout all recorded history up until the time of your birth. And the rate continues to accelerate! It is estimated that it now takes only 2 years for the total amount of information to double.

Why is so much information being produced? One reason is that there are now more people producing information than ever before. Half of all the scientists who have ever lived are alive today and producing information. Also, the number of people in the United States who identify themselves as musicians has more than doubled in the last four decades, the number of artists has tripled, and the number of authors has increased fivefold (U.S. Bureau of the Census.

Another reason is that the technology now exists to provide easy-to-use platforms to share information. Thus everyone can generate and share information to large numbers of people every day. You no longer need to be a musician to create songs; you can use GarageBand or other computer synthesizers. You don’t need to be signed to a recording contract by a record company to distribute your songs. You can also be a journalist, a fiction writer, a photographer, a filmmaker, or even a video game designer as a hobby and make your messages easily available to millions of people, just like professional artists. Or you can generate and share smaller forms of information such as e-mails and tweets.

There are now billion Internet users worldwide, and they send and receive billion e-mail messages each day; users of Twitter generate more than million tweets per day; and Facebook reports that million photos are uploaded each and every day. Social media continues to be the fastest growing area for media exposure, being consumed mostly on smartphones and other mobile devices.

1. Choose one of the seven (7) skills of media literacy described in your textbook.  Why is this skill important?  Provide an example of its significance based on your own experiences.

2. What is a media message?  Give two examples of media messages you have encountered today.

3. The text talks about having “more control over media  What is meant by this, and why is it important for you as an individual, and for society?

4. How might media literacy help you in your personal life?  How might it help you in your professional life?