WHAT IS MEDIA
LITERACY?
What Is Media literacy?
This section presents some current
viewpoints on how media literacy is
defined.
Media literacy
 Media literacy is a 21st century approach to
education. It provides a framework to access,
analyse, evaluate and create messages in a variety
of forms – from print to video to the Internet.
 Media literacy builds an understanding of the role
of media in society as well as essential skills of
inquiry and self-expression necessary for citizens
of a democracy.

Center for Media Literacy (2006, June 21)
Media literacy
 Today's definition of literacy is more than reading and
writing.
 In order to be functionally literate in our media-
saturated world, children and young people – in fact,
all of us – have to be able to read the messages that
daily inform us, entertain us and sell to us.
 As the Internet becomes a fact of life, the critical
thinking skills that help young people navigate
through traditional media are even more important.

Media Awareness Network, (2006, June 21)
Media literacy
 Understanding media now requires far more than
traditional media forms such as film, television,
radio, and print texts.
 It also requires an understanding of how new
digital media forms have transformed or
"remediated" (Bolter, 1998) these traditional
media forms.
 And, it requires an understanding of how students
can learn to use these new digital media forms as
tools for producing their own media and
participating in media culture.
CODES AND
CONVENTIONS IN MEDIA
Codes and conventions in Media
The codes and conventions in media can be
separated into 3 distinct groups:
- Technical (camera techniques & shots),
- Symbolic (ie clothing, colours)
- Written and audio (music etc).
These give the text meaning and determine the
response of the viewer.
What are codes?
Codes are systems of signs, which create meaning.
Codes can be divided into two categories – technical and
symbolic.
 Technical codes are all the ways in which equipment is
used to tell the story in a media text, for example the
camera work in a film.
 Symbolic codes show what is beneath the surface of
what we see. For example, a character's actions show
you how the character is feeling.
Some codes fit both categories – music for example, is
both technical and symbolic.
What are conventions?
Conventions are the generally accepted ways
of doing something.
There are general conventions in any medium,
such as the use of interviewee quotes in a print
article, but conventions are also genre specific.
How codes and conventions
apply in media studies
Codes and conventions are used together in any
study of genre – it is not enough to discuss a
technical code used such as camera work,
without saying how it is conventionally used in a
genre.
For example, the technical code of lighting is used in
some way in all film genres. It is a convention of the
horror genre that side and back lighting is used to create
mystery and suspense – an integral part of any horror
movie.
MEDIA LITERACY KEY
CONCEPTS
Media Literacy Key Concepts
 Media educators base their teaching on key
concepts and principles of media literacy.
These concepts provide an effective
foundation for examining mass media and
popular culture.
Eight Key Concepts for Media
Literacy
1. All media are construction
The media do not present simple reflections
of external reality. Rather, they present
carefully crafted constructions that reflect
many decisions and result from many
determining factors. Media Literacy works
towards deconstructing these constructions,
taking them apart to show how they are
made.
Eight Key Concepts for Media
Literacy
2. The media construct reality
The media are responsible for the majority of the
observations and experiences from which we build
up our personal understandings of the world and
how it works. Much of our view of reality is based
on media messages that have been preconstructed and have attitudes, interpretations
and conclusions already built in. The media, to a
great extent, give us our sense of reality.
Eight Key Concepts for Media
Literacy
3. Audiences negotiate meaning in the media
The media provide us with much of the
material upon which we build our picture of
reality, and we all "negotiate" meaning
according to individual factors: personal needs
and anxieties, the pleasures or troubles of the
day, racial and sexual attitudes, family and
cultural background, and so forth.
Eight Key Concepts for Media
Literacy
4. Media have commercial implications
Media Literacy aims to encourage an awareness of
how the media are influenced by commercial
considerations, and how these affect content,
technique and distribution. Most media
production is a business, and must therefore make
a profit. Questions of ownership and control are
central: a relatively small number of individuals
control what we watch, read and hear in the
media.
Eight Key Concepts for Media
Literacy
5. Media contain ideological and value messages
All media products are advertising, in some sense,
in that they proclaim values and ways of life.
Explicitly or implicitly, the mainstream media
convey ideological messages about such issues as
the nature of the good life, the virtue of
consumerism, the role of women, the acceptance
of authority, and unquestioning patriotism.
Eight Key Concepts for Media
Literacy
6. Media have social and political implications
The media have great influence on politics and on
forming social change. Television can greatly
influence the election of a national leader on the
basis of image. The media involve us in concerns
such as civil rights issues, famines in Africa, and
the AIDS epidemic. They give us an intimate sense
of national issues and global concerns, so that we
become citizens of Marshall McLuhan's "Global
Village."
Eight Key Concepts for Media
Literacy
7. Form and content are closely related in the
media
As Marshall McLuhan noted, each medium has
its own grammar and codifies reality in its own
particular way. Different media will report the
same event, but create different impressions
and messages.
Eight Key Concepts for Media
Literacy
8. Each medium has a unique aesthetic form
Just as we notice the pleasing rhythms of
certain pieces of poetry or prose, so we ought
to be able to enjoy the pleasing forms and
effects of the different media.
Source: John Pungente, S.J. From Barry Duncan et al. Media Literacy Resource Guide, Ontario Ministry of
Education, Toronto, ON. Canada, 1989.
FIVE PRINCIPLES OF
MEDIA LITERACY
FIVE PRINCIPLES OF
MEDIA LITERACY
All visual texts are constructions.
The media construct reality.
Audiences negotiate meaning in media.
Most visual texts are produced to make
money.
5) Visual contain ideological and value
messages.
1)
2)
3)
4)
Five principles of media literacy
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
All visual texts are constructions.
The media construct reality.
Audiences negotiate meaning in media.
Most visual texts are produced to make money.
Visual texts contain ideological and value messages.
DEFINITION: A visual text is any document
or object that makes its meanings with
images or with meaningful patterns. Visual
texts include charts, maps, diagrams,
photos, illustrations, paintings, animation
and motion pictures, to name a few.
PHOTO RIGHT: J.R.R. Tolkien used maps and runes he
created to make his books come to life. This map is
from “The Hobbit.”
All visual texts are constructions, Part I
The media do not present simple reflections of external
reality.
Media texts are subjected to a broad range of decisions.
Even unplanned events allow the media producer considerable
control over the final text.
PHOTO RIGHT: A firefighter attends a
memorial service for victims of the 9/11
terrorist attacks.
Consider the decisions the photographer
made to produce this image: Why this
firefighter? Why this angle? Should the flag
be in the background? Which frame of many
taken should be used? What is the best facial expression?
The answers add up to a powerful ideological, political and cultural message.
All visual texts are constructions, Part II
1) The events we see in the media as “reality” are more often
carefully constructed productions with specific purposes.
2) The goal often is to “fix the meaning” of an event, in the
words of cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall.
PHOTO RIGHT: Political and business
leaders carefully manipulate cultural
symbols in what the social critic
Daniel Boorstin has dubbed the pseudo
event.
Boorstin wrote that public life is full of
these staged and scripted events that are
a type of counterfeit version of actual
happenings. The news conference is an example.
The organization staging a pseudo event chooses the venue, the backdrop, the symbols on
display and increasingly the audience. Members of the media are confined to a specific
location, ensuring that their cameras will produce the desired images.
All visual texts are constructions, Part III
A successful production looks natural.
From a technical point of view, they are often superb.
Coupled with our familiarity with such productions, their high
quality tricks us into seeing them as seamless extensions of
reality.
Our task is to expose the complexities of media texts and
thereby make the seams visible.
PHOTO RIGHT: The drive by media to
produce a natural look is most evident in
the world of advertising. The production
itself of advertising images is far from
natural.
In this photo, the lighting equipment and
the intensity of the makeup artist tell us that
the “natural look” is carfully contrived.
A good thing to remember while viewing media texts is that nothing is left to
chance in such productions.
The media construct reality, Part I
A “construct,” is the picture we have built up in our heads since birth of what
the world is and how it works. It is a model based on the sense we have made of
all our observations and experiences.
A major part of those observations and experiences come to us preconstructed by
the media, with attitudes, interpretations and conclusions already built in.
Another way to think of it is that the media “re-presents” reality, as Stuart
Hall writes, and that becomes our reality.
PHOTO RIGHT: Tami Silico took this photo of flagdraped coffins returning from Iraq and allowed it to
be published in the Seattle Times. She was fired
from her job with Maytag Aircraft Corp. as a result.
Some in the Bush administration did not want
Americans to see pictures of coffins coming back from
Iraq, ostensibly because the photos would upset to the fallen soldiers’ families and
undermined the effort of troops abroad.
Culture can be defined as those symbols of expression that individuals, groups and
societies use to make sense of daily life and to articulate their values.
Powerful symbols such as the flag are used to affix meaning to events, the cultural theorist
Stuart Hall writes. Meaning can be fixed by those who control media, but that meaning is
difficult to maintain in a free society. Silico’s photo or one like it was bound to be published,
causing the patriotic meaning of the war to “fray,” as Hall says.
The media construct reality, Part II
To understand visual texts we must understand the “practices that
produce meaning,” in the words of Stuart Hall.
Hall says the production of meaning does not just happen; a word or
picture is not fixed in its meanings and the meaning can change.
The production of meaning is a kind of symbolic work, an activity, a
practice, that has to go on in giving meaning to things and in
communicating that meaning to someone else.
Hall calls these “signifying practices” — practices that are involved
in producing meaning.
PHOTOS RIGHT: A flag is a purely arbitrary
symbol that nevertheless takes on deep
cultural meaning — or perhaps it is capable
of deep cultural meaning because it is
arbitrary and abstract.
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001,
Americans took comfort in the flag, and is
often the case, the flag became part of an iconic photo that seemed to sum up the
meaning of the event.
Of course, the flag soon became part of popular events such as professional sports. Is
this manipulation of the symbol for commercial gain? Or a heartfelt gesture?
Audiences negotiate meaning in media
When we look at media text, each of us finds meaning through a wide
variety of factors:
personal needs and anxieties
the pleasures or trouble of the day
racial and sexual attitudes
family and cultural background
These “frames of reference” have a bearing on how we process
information.
PHOTO RIGHT: Muslim women wear the
hijab to protect themselves from the lustful
gaze of men,” Syed MA Rahman writes on
the Web site Islam Today. “She should not
attract attention to herself in any way. It is
permissible for a man to catch the eye of a
woman, however it is [unlawful] for a man
to look twice as this encourages lustful thoughts.”
Given the cultural imperative described above, how do Muslim women and men
negotiate the overtly sexual images used in Western advertisements?
Most visual texts are produced to make money, Part I
The economic basis of mass-media production impinges on
content, techniques and distribution.
Media production is a business and must make a profit.
PHOTO RIGHT: Visual texts are everywhere,
thanks in large part to advertising. TNS Media
Intelligence on its Web site estimated that
total U.S. advertising spending will come to
$152.3 billion in 2007. Advertising permeates
every part of our lives.
Sut Jhally of the University of Massachusetts
in Amherst writes: “Advertising absorbs and
fuses a variety of symbolic practices and
discourses, it appropriates and distills from an unbounded range of cultural
references. In so doing, goods are knitted into the fabric of social life and cultural
significance. As such, advertising is not simple manipulation, but what admaker
Tony Schwartz calls "partipulation," with the audience participating in its own
manipulation.”
Top 10 TV shows
For week ending July 1
Most visual texts are produced to make money,
Part II
Take for example television:
All programs — news, public affairs, or
entertainment — are judged by the size of the
audience they generate.
A prime-time American network show with fewer than
20 million viewers will not generally be kept on
the air.
Audience sampling and rating services provide
advertisers with detailed demographic breakdowns of
audience
for specific media.
Program content is
designed to target the
viewer for advertisers
by organizing viewers
into marketable groups.
SOURCE: zap2it.com/tv
AMERICA'S GOT TALENT
NBC 11,514,000
CSI
CBS 9,913,000
CSI: MIAMI
CBS 8,947,000
SO YOU THINK CAN DANCEWED
FOX 9,829,000
TWO AND A HALF MEN
CBS 9,117,000
LAW AND ORDER:SVU
NBC 8,648,000
PRINCESS DIANA TRIBUTE
NBC 8,818,000
SO YOU THINK CAN DANCETHU
FOX 9,393,000
NCIS
CBS 8,445,000
CSI: NY
CBS 8,171,000
SMARTER THAN 5TH
GRADER
FOX 9,319,00
4. Most media texts are produced to make money, Part II
The tendency has been towards increased concentration of
ownership of the individual media in fewer and fewer hands,
with integrated ownership across several media.
A relatively small number of people decide what television
programs will be broadcast, what issues will be investigated
and reported.
The few rule
Over the past 25 years, dozens of media companies have been
absorbed and recombined so that today eight big corporations
have a huge say in what media is and what it produces:
Walt Disney
Time Warner
Viacom + CBS
NBC Universal
News Corp.
Yahoo
Microsoft
Google
Total market value: $1.17 trillion
Source: Mother Jones (download PDF)
Visual texts contain ideological and value messages, Part I
All media productions are advertising in some sense,for themselves, but
also for values or ways of life.
Media texts usually affirm the existing social system.
For example, the ideological messages contained in a typical television
narrative are almost invisible to North Americans, but they would be
apparent to people in developing countries.
PHOTO RIGHT: Our culture has
become an adjunct to consumerism.
Its job is to sell us things. As it does this
it changes how we think about the
world and ourselves. Take for example
the role diamonds play in our rituals surrounding courtship and marriage.
The idea that a diamond is connected to engagement is almost universally accepted
in the West. Yet this idea emerged from a 1947 DeBeers ad campaign with the slogan
Зa diamond is forever.”
DeBeers uses its advertising campaigns to link love with the purchase of diamonds
— the diamond engagement ring, the diamond anniversary band, the 25th
anniversary diamond. Our love relationships are being used as a vehicle to sell
diamonds.
Visual texts contain ideological and value messages, Part I
Mainstream media convey explicit and implicit ideological messages, such as:
the nature of “the good life”
the role of affluence
the virtues of “consumerism,”
the proper role of women
the acceptance of authority
unquestioning patriotism
Understanding the codes can uncover these ideological messages and values
systems.
PHOTO RIGHT:“High School Musical,
” produced by Disney for only $5 million,
has been a marketing phenomenon. The
DVD sold 1.2 million copies in the first six days
it was on the market. Its success is attributed
to the connection it makes with “tweens”, kids
between childhood and adolescence.HSM reflects
the simplistic values that Disney is known for.
Newsweek’s Johnnie L. Roberts wrote that HSM “is set in a fantasy world, which in its way is no
more real than ‘The Little Mermaid.’ Sure, there are cliques and rivalries at East High, but there's no
sex, no drugs, no racial or ethnic tensions, no dropouts and no violence. Everyone is good-looking,
well-dressed and talented. Classrooms are spacious and clean. In the end, the home team wins, all
conflicts are resolved and everybody dances together in the gym. It's not high school; it's high school
the way we wish it could be.”