W. James Potter - Media Literacy

Eighth Edition

Media Literacy

Eighth Edition

• W. James Potter
• University of California, Santa Barbara

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Copyright 2016 by W. James Potter.

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Most of us think we are fairly media literate. We know how to access all kinds of media to find the music, games, information, and entertainment we want. We recognize the faces of many celebrities and know many facts about their lives. We recognize a range of musical styles and have developed strong preferences for what we like. We can easily create messages through photos, videos, and text then upload them to various sites on the Internet. Clearly, we know how to expose ourselves to the media, we know how to absorb information from them, we know how to be entertained by them, and we know how to use them to create our own messages and share them with others.

Are we media literate? Yes, of course. We have acquired a great deal of information and developed remarkable skills. The abilities to speak a language, read, understand photographs, and follow narratives are significant achievements, although we often take them for granted.

While we should not overlook what we have accomplished, it is also important to acknowledge that we all can be much more media literate. In many ways, your overall level of media literacy now is probably about the same as it was when you became a teenager. Since that time, your information base has grown enormously about some types of media messages, such as popular songs, Internet sites, movies, and TV shows. However, your information base may not have grown much in other areasabout the economics of the mass media industry, who controls that industry, how decisions are made about the production of content, and how that constant flow of content affects you and society in all sorts of subtle ways. Thus, your current level of media literacy allows you to do many things with the media, but you could be exercising much more control and getting more out of your media exposuresif you grew your knowledge in additional areas.

The more you are aware of how the mass media operate and how they affect you, the more you gain control over those effects and the more you will separate yourself from typical media users who have turned over a great deal of their lives to the mass media without realizing it. By turning over a great deal of their lives to the mass media, I mean more than time and money, although both of those are considerable. I also mean that most people have allowed the mass media to program them in ways they are unaware of. And because they are unaware of these ways, they cannot shape or control that programming.

The purpose of this book is to show you how the media have been shaping your beliefs and behavioral patterns. Until you become aware of how much your beliefs have been formed by media influence and how the media have accomplished all that shaping, you will continue to float along in a flood of media messages oblivious to their constant, subtle influence. However, once you begin to see things from a media literacy perspective, you can see how this process of influence works, and this understanding will help you to gain control over this shaping process.