My relationship to the media is a rather convoluted one. I was born in the early 2000s as the youngest of four children, my siblings were born six, eight and ten years prior. My mom was 39 and my dad was 41 when I was born. I give this information as a preface as I believe that it inherently has affected the way I view and interact with the media.

Facebook was launched before I was born, Twitter before I was two and Instagram before I was ten. Yet as the youngest I watched my siblings start to interact and engage with these new media platforms and I watched my parents struggle to keep up with this new wave and all that it entailed.

In middle school when most other of my peers were joining these platforms I was not allowed to partake. This became a bit of a struggle for me since most trends I did not know or did not understand, I felt as though I was being left behind in a way.

While now, in retrospect, I can much better grasp my parents’ wariness in allowing me to join my peers, as these sites tapped into unrestricted reaches of the internet. Yet I still do find myself questioning their decision and thinking that they perhaps let fear guide them a little too much in the matter. Furthermore, I find myself wondering what I would have done in their place.

Since I was born on somewhat of a precipice of the media revolution I had classes in which so-called “media literacy” was discussed. In the discussions I have had on this topic in school and with people much older than I, it has always had a sense of fear and danger tinted within it. 

Now as an adult I find these conversations often lack the depth that I think they require. Yes, the media has changed, and  drastically at that, with new dangers being introduced. To not acknowledge that would be, on my part, folly but in all that danger, great things have come out of this revolution. Platforms are given to people who otherwise would be voiceless. And yes, platforms have been given to people who should probably have a quieter voice. But honestly these platforms are created by those who are engaging so really what we need to consider when talking about “media literacy” is the power of the individual masses. 

Before diving into the bulk of this topic, I like to define things when beginning to discuss them to avoid unnecessary disputes/semantics. With that respect I would be transparent about the definition of “media literacy”. “Media Literacy”, which I have taken from National Association of Media Literacy Educators is: “The ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create and act using all forms of communication”.

Since this media revolution we have increased the access to information exponentially and with that not all information we are exposed to is indeed factual yet in our exposure it can directly and indirectly, consciously and unconsciously affect us. In a PBS crash course video they say “The creator’s experiences and environment affect everything they create. Their messages are filled with tons of baggage. And we consumers have our own baggage, too, which determines how we react to and interpret messages.”. I like this quote because it places responsibility on both the media and the consumers acknowledging that neither are impartial. This is a keystone piece in understanding media and gaining literacy.

In preparation for this post I was introduced to British sociologist Stuart Hall and his theory of encoding and decoding. This theory pushed back on the current beliefs of the time that media messages’ meaning remained unchanging throughout the process of communication (Mambrol, 2020). Hall instead argued meaning cannot be fixed by the sender despite all their attempts to do so. In a lecture Hall, referring to the attempt of fixing meaning, says: “what we are looking at is a practice, which is always going to be subverted; and, you know, the purpose of power, when it intervenes in language, is precisely to absolutely fix” he goes on to say that this practice is what “ideology” is attempting to do, fix certain meanings onto people, events and other such things saying “a relationship between the image and a powerful definition of it to become naturalized so that that is the only meaning it can possibly carry…Whenever you see that event, you will assume it has that political consequence.”

Thus I come back to what I believe is a keystone piece in understanding media and gaining literacy; we, the audience, have to fully acknowledge that neither we nor the media we are consuming is unbiased. 

So it is then on us to recognize what media we are accessing. What messages is it sending us? Who is delivering these messages? How are their opinions coloring those messages? And then in turn when we create and add to the media of our world we must acknowledge the responsibility we in turn carry.

References

National Association for Media Literacy Education. (n.d.). Media Literacy Defined. NAMLE. https://namle.org/resources/media-literacy-defined/

Mambrol, N. (2020, November 7). Analysis of Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding. Literary Theory and Criticism. https://literariness.org/2020/11/07/analysis-of-stuart-halls-encoding-decoding/#google_vignette

Bishop, K. (2021, November 30). Representation and the Media by Stuart Hall. http://Www.youtube.com. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84depWskwu0