Ask an expert: The importance of media literacy

October 17, 2000
Web posted at: 5:21 PM EDT (2121 GMT)

By Fran Trampiets

Question: Why is media literacy important?

Fran Trampiets teaches graduate courses in media education

Answer: Media literacy is really a necessity in today’s world. We live in such a media-saturated environment. We’re continually bombarded with messages from newspapers and magazines, movie and television screens, Internet Web sites, chat rooms and listservs. We have to know how to filter out what we don’t need or want and how to access and then interpret, analyze and evaluate what’s useful. Media literacy is about asking smart questions and making smart choices; it’s about using media selectively and reflectively.

Media literate people want to know the source of a message, its purpose and the source’s credibility and reliability. They can recognize bias, distortion, stereotyping and sensationalism. They try to get information from multiple sources and to consider any issue from multiple perspectives.

Media education develops critical thinking skills. It cuts across all areas of the curriculum and can be integrated into every subject area.

George Gerbner, former dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, spent much of his professional life studying the impact of television. He has said that television is the primary agent of socialization in our country. It brings countless images and stories into our homes and our classrooms each day. Pictures and stories are powerful forms of communication. They appeal to our imaginations and emotions and play an important role in shaping our worldview, our attitudes and opinions, our values and lifestyles.

When dealing with print media, we can adjust our reading speed and level of attention to our purpose for reading. We can take time to analyze and reflect on the words, relate them to personal experience and prior knowledge, and decide if we agree or disagree with the statements.

Electronic media, on the other hand, bombard us with fast-paced, stimulating sounds and images that have been carefully designed to capture and hold our attention. These sounds and images sort of “wash over us” and leave us with impressions that we don’t have time to sort out or consider. That’s why understanding how media work and how they affect us is so important. It’s so easy to be captivated by television entertainment, electronic games, surfing the Net and popular music. It’s important to live intentionally, to consider the trade-offs involved every time we use media (the other worthwhile things we could be doing with our time) and to spend our valuable time only in worthwhile media activities.

Fran Trampiets teaches graduate courses in media education at the University of Dayton's School of Education.

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