Media doesn't want people to be truly media literate

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Media doesn't want people to be truly media literate

You can call me naïve, but I just understood today that media doesn't really want to encourage better media literacy among people.

If we all were better in media literacy, it would put much more pressure on media itself. So it is easier for media to try to make all the content not produced by itself look little suspicious. For media being media literate seems to mean that people are taught not to trust anything not created by media.

Media doesn't seem to want to make people better in citizen journalism either. Media professionals have plenty of skills and insider knowledge that they could share to help people do better journalism on their own, but that doesn't really happen as much as it should.

We don't want people to be as good as they could, because we want to protect ourselves. I think we should stop acting like this.

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Posted November 2, 2009 by Pirkka Aunola

Nov 02, 2009

mace said...

A little similar critique has been pointed at "information literacy", which has been said to be a project of librarians to keep themselves important. I forget the name, but i can get the name and paper for you to see.

It could be also argued that requiring some specific skills for something is also part of it's value-building. F.ex. media that doesn't require any skill (that you can just use) appears less valuable than media in which use you need to be proficient. What do you reckon?

Nov 02, 2009

Halo E said...

Oh, I thought that media wants us to be dumber than we are. All the gossip about senseless reality shows in the front page...

Nov 03, 2009

Pirkka Aunola said...

mace: That kind of information literacy is just what I was thinking, would be interesting to hear more, if you can remember the name of the paper.

I find also your value ideas very interesting. I agree that media does need to try to make things which are easy to understand, it's most definately part of our business.

But media has to make sure it tells people to apply same kind of media literacy skills to itself than it tells people to do for other sources. We can't just act like total outsiders, the only ones with objectivity!

Halo E: Luckily there are choices one can make, and thank god front pages tell just part of the reality.

Nov 03, 2009

mace said...

Quote from Kimmo Tuominen's "Information literacy as a sociotechnical practise" says:

One of the goals of the IL movement has been to reconceptualize the library profession’s role and to strengthen its status [2, p. 10; 26]. As put by Shirley Behrens [20], the adoption of IL goals and programs was the library profession’s response to having its role ignored or overlooked in the educational reform process. The central thrust of the movement is to integrate library and information skills more fully with the learning process. From 1974 on, the IL movement has been connected with concerns over the future role of libraries and librarians, and the library profession has established its central role in the IL movement [20].

That referenced Shirley Behrens article is [20].Behrens, Shirley J. “A Conceptual Analysis and Historical Overview of Information Literacy.” College & Research Libraries 55 (July 1994): 309–22.

I hope you've got access to the article via EBSCO or somesuch. Ask your librarian :)

Nov 04, 2009

Pirkka Aunola said...

Thanks Mace! Luckily we have a great library with a great bunch of good librarians at our workplace, they can surely help me!

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