22 Oct Considering Access, Taking Action: The Importance of Media Literacy in Our Work
It’s Media Literacy Week, and this year’s themes are Access, Analyze, Evaluate, Create, and Act. As a researcher studying how children and families interact with media and technology, I see the need for media literacy in nearly every project we work on, so I thought I’d reflect on how each of these themes have shown up in our work.
Access:
How, when, where, and how often people have access to the tools, technology, and digital skills necessary to thrive.
Access to media literacy education is key to all of our work. Too often in the media and technology space people assume that everyone has equal access to the internet or to quality devices. On top of that is the assumption that having technology is the same as understanding and being skilled with technology. Engineers and researchers make this assumption, but parents often make it as well. Remembering that everyone has something to learn as they access and navigate technology and digital spaces—not just parents or technophobes, but kids and early adopters as well—helps to check these assumptions, be more inclusive, and ask good questions in our research.
Analyze:
The process of asking questions about a piece of media in order to identify authorship, credibility, purpose, technique, context, and economics.
Imagine taking everything you read at face value, trusting everything as true and right, and starting that process over again with each new piece of information without weighing it against the first. It sounds like an anxiety-inducing, exhausting existence, one bound to create confusion or a tendency to jump to conclusions as you try to make sense of the world. I’ve seen this firsthand when talking to parents who have teens and tweens with access to the internet. What threats are out there? What controls do you have to protect against them? How can you protect others when you feel helpless yourself? The parents who seem the least harried are the ones who know how to analyze information and who arm their children with the skills to analyze for themselves.
Evaluate:
Drawing one’s own meaning, judgment, and conclusions about media messages based on the information gathered during media access, thoughtful analysis, and self-reflective interpretation.
One key component of recent children’s media research has been the power of co-viewing. One of the benefits is being there to help young children evaluate what is happening and draw connections between what they are seeing and what happens or could happen in their own lives. These evaluation skills go beyond children’s media—the idea of taking those separate pieces of information and drawing one’s own conclusions seems basic but should actually be something everyone considers with each swipe, each article, and when interpreting data.
Create:
Media creation is a form of expression. It encompasses learning how to express ideas through media and communication tools and using that power to create media narratives beyond those that exist in mainstream media.
Creating media is actually at the heart of so much of Fluent’s work. Every time we ask a participant to submit a written response, we have to assume that they have all of the other media literacy tools at their disposal before considering our questions and developing their own unique responses. It’s a skill we often take for granted, but we benefit so much from those who have facility with media creation.
Act:
The culmination of accessing, analyzing, and evaluating media messages.
This one is my favorite because it’s the one we do as researchers and as human beings all the time. Taking in the information around us and making sense of it, to ourselves, to friends and family, to coworkers and vendors, and to participants, is something we do every day. It is a privilege to be able to act on the information we have at our disposal, one that we can do best when we are media literate. This is why it is so important that everyone can analyze, evaluate, and create their own ideas and their own story.
I hope everyone has a wonderful Media Literacy Week!
By Tiffany Salone, Senior Researcher.