When looking at media literacy you first have to understand which each word means. Media is defined as “the means of communication, as radio and television, newspapers, and magazines that reach or influence people widely.” Also literacy means the ability to read and write. Together you could define media literacy as the way in which people interpret the world of media; the ways in which humans form ideas through what they see from devices that try to get our attention intently. So why is media literacy so important? Media literacy can define us as human being from the way it can shape our decisions and the innate power it has on our culture.
The literacy portion of this phrase is the most important part. This is in fact how people interpret what they see and what this understanding means can create a thought in a person’s head. The ability to make someone think is one of the most powerful methods created in human kind. The ability to control what someone thinks by the way in which it is presented can define a person’s being and can make someone act accordingly. It is important for people to be educated on how to filter or sift out what is being said in our media. Many times this does not occur however, and the media can be the only way in which and individual acquires knowledge about a particular topic. When this is the case bias can be displayed depending on what type of media outlet a person is referred or displayed too.
The populaces in charge of media have more power then they realize and those people can control how a culture sees certain aspects. For example, one of the Republican candidates running for the 2012 presidential election Mitt Romney is Mormon. A lot of people will not vote for him for this reason alone because our media is controlled mostly by people of a different faith (Christianity). Because these people have power to control what is being shown on television or what is being written in magazines, they may criticize the religion in a negative fashion. This allows people who have weak filters to be influenced quite easily by accusations being made in the media.
It is important for people to have a good media education and media study before they choose to be media literate. That is a huge problem though because more and more we see that people would rather be entertained then educated and this creates it easier for people of power to influence those who are not media educated. Media literacy is the skill of experiencing, interpreting/analyzing and making media products. I believe it is more important to be media educated to an extent before we interpret what the meanings are. Most of the time media literacy is referred to those people who analyze what they see and construe an entity from there, but for those who are not media educated they will not analyze media, rather they will merely soak up what is in front of them and not truly look into if the media is showing facts or not.
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