The Making of a Media Literate Mind

By Rob Williams
Issue 127, November/December 2004

We live in the most media-saturated society in the history of the world. Americans spend between 10 and 12 hours a day consuming media through ever-more sophisticated technological delivery systems, including (for the average household) three televisions and radios, two VCRs and CD players, one computer, one video game player, and a bewildering variety of newspapers, comic books, magazines, books, and other print media.¹

As we enter the 21st century, this situation might seem to call for celebration—more media theoretically means more voices, more diversity, more channels for information, entertainment, and education. A closer look, however, reveals a more disturbing reality. Most of the stories told in our media culture—by some estimates, as much as 90 percent of our media content—are ultimately owned by a handful of giant transnational corporations, including Time Warner, News Corp., Disney, Viacom, Vivendi, and Sony.²

Veteran media critic George Gerbner explains that whoever is telling the stories within a culture has enormous power to shape how people think, act, and buy. For the first time in human history, Gerbner notes, most of the stories about people, life, and values are told not by parents, schools, churches, and others in the community who have something to tell, but by a group of distant conglomerates that have little to tell and everything to sell.³
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As a result, our 21st-century world has ceded much of the cultural storytelling process to a small number of large media corporations whose primary concern is not our society’s health or our children’s well-being, but to maximize profits. The tools of their trade are media messages and content embedded within the worlds of the Internet, video games, television, and other media technologies. These corporations devote their energies to expensive efforts designed to mold our young people, from as early an age as possible, into brand-loyal consumers of corporately produced lifestyles, goods, and behaviors.

Spending more than $1 trillion in marketing each year, Big Media companies and their Fortune 500 allies use media to target our children with a wide variety of products, wrapping their appeals in suggestive stories that model compulsive consumerism; push sugar, caffeine, nicotine, and other addictive products; and advertise precocious sexual, violent, and other kinds of antisocial behavior.⁴ Parents, teachers, and caregivers now find themselves on the front lines of a struggle over stories, as corporate media owners wage increasingly sophisticated advertising, branding, and marketing campaigns to win the hearts and minds of our children from ever younger ages.

At its best, education provides people with the knowledge, skills, and confidence to become healthier, wealthier, and wiser, and it fosters a sense of compassion and mission to do good work within the larger communities to which we all belong. How do we help ourselves and our children make sense of the troublesome nature of our 21st-century media culture without dismissing media’s power and importance in our lives? One powerful answer is media literacy, an educational approach that seeks to give media users greater freedom by teaching them how to access, analyze, evaluate, and produce media.

The word literacy traditionally refers to one’s ability to read and write print-based media sources—books and newspapers, for example. This new century demands that we expand our definition of literacy to include a wide variety of media, including computers, video games, television, and the Internet. All of us can practice “reading” messages and stories across multiple media platforms, as well as “writing” (producing) our own media in multiple forms.

We must also take the media in media literacy seriously, recognizing that most of our media outlets are owned by powerful industries that not only make products but also promote certain sets of values—including ones that often run counter to our own as parents, teachers, and citizens—and play significant roles in shaping our culture.⁵ We can begin practicing media-literacy education in our classrooms and communities by daily asking fundamental questions about media, and by teaching our children to do the same. Asking questions helps demystify media’s power, allows us to understand the goods and the bads inherent in any experience of media, and gives us the tools necessary to understand the deeply rooted ways media influence our thoughts and behaviors.

Let’s begin by asking, early and often in our classrooms and communities, these five sets of essential media-literacy questions.

1. How does this media make you feel?
Remember the frightening flying monkeys in the film The Wizard of Oz? Or the first time a descriptive passage in a book made you chuckle? Or the thrill that came with playing a new video game for the first time? Media make us laugh and cry, and can often scare or even disorient us. (Think of Christopher Nolan’s film Memento, a story told in reverse in ten-minute chunks of flashback, each one taking place earlier in the story than the one it follows; or the six o’clock news, a pastiche of disconnected events punctuated by ads for aspirin and automobiles.) Commercials, political advertisements, and other powerful media experiences operate primarily at an emotional level and are often designed to evoke certain sets of feelings, then transfer those feelings to the desired idea, product, candidate, or behavior. Asking young people to think more deeply about how media move them emotionally is a powerful way to help them understand media’s unique power.