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CHAPTER 2: MEDIA LITERACYIN THE DIGITAL AGE
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After studying this chapter, students should know:
- The definition of media literacy.
- The ways to improve critical thinking when consuming communication content.
- The three elements of media literacy: historical development of media, media grammar,andcommercial forces on media content.
- What makes digital media ubiquitous and different from other types of media.
- How traditional types of media content are changing, and will likely change further, in a world of digital media.
- The business models currently being tried with online media.
CHAPTER SUMMARY/LECTURE OUTLINE
- Vignette: A look at how Channel One News informs students about world events while promoting products through commercials. Debate rages over whether Channel One is an example of media literacy or merely an avenue for advertisers to reach public schools.
- Education and Media: Media pervade our lives, influencing our worldview and directly impacting our lifestyle. It is important to understand how we learn through interactions with media content and other people, in addition to the more formal academic settings such as a classroom.
- What Is Media Literacy?
A.Media literacy is the process of interacting with media content and critically analyzing it by considering its particular presentation, its underlying political or social messages, and ownership and regulation issues that may affect what media are presented in what form. In the age of digital media, additional issues include erosion of media-consumer privacy and tracking of consumer behavior.
B.Media literacy is a process, not a goal.
C.Media literacy scholar W. James Potter suggests building “knowledge structures” that help consumers discern inaccurate or misleading information.
- Historical Development of Media: The history of media shows that there were manyother possible outcomes to their development than what we currently take for granted.
A.Regulatory Factors: Politicians enact laws or government agencies create regulations that have profound effects on the type of media and media content available. Debates over net neutrality and low-power FM are examplesof the powerful role that regulations play.
B.Socio-cultural Factors: Social and cultural practices or codes of acceptable behavior sometimes play a greater role in hampering new technologies than regulations or lobbying efforts.
C.Technological Factors: The success or failure of new technologies often depends on distribution, marketing, and a willingness of consumers to learn new processes or make additional purchases.
D. Economic Factors: The costs of producing and distributing media affect the way consumers use and buy media, governments regulate and license media, professionals program and create media, and companies purchase and conduct media business.
- Media Grammar: This term encompasses an understanding of how media are created and produced, and how aspectsof different media types affect how stories and content are presented.
A. Print media grammar includes the size and design of books, the use of color photos and graphics in newspapers, the amount of advertising in magazines and the organization of the various elements of each medium.
B.Radio and recorded music grammar is based only on sound. Radio usessound effects, actualities, and voice-overs. Recorded music typically conforms to particular stylistic conventions andgenres.
C.Film and television grammar include the types of camera angles used, editing, lighting, sound effects, and music to help cue viewers.
- Commercial Forces on Media Content: Economic factors and corporatedecisions ofteninfluence what is and is not covered in the news and the kind of entertainment created.
- Profit and Nonprofit Media
- Most media companies follow a for-profit model for their business. In the for-profit model, ownership plays a key role in determining the nature of the media enterprise. For-profit media companies are either publicly held companies or privatelyowned operations. In recent history, media businesses have been among the most profitable of any industry.
- The other system is not-for-profit, and can rely on a combination of public funding, support from government or other public institutions, corporate gifts and sponsorships, and audience contributions. This system is used especially for electronic media.
- Commercial Forces in Public Service Media: Corporate sponsorship plays a large role in funding public television programs in the United States.
- Product Placement and Corporate Sponsorship: Advertisers can influence media content by paying to have their product displayed in a movie or show or by negotiating to have a product brand sponsor an event. Even entire channels of content are entirely based on corporate sponsorship.
- Concentration of media ownership is driven by the economies of scale that benefit those who own large, wide-ranging media companies by reducing costs and increasing profits.Greater concentration of ownership, or fewer owners owning more media results in less diversity of media voices, and the public is poorly served.
The trend of media concentration may result in media groups controlling industrial products as well as the symbols that define and shape the culture and political agenda of the country.
- Historical Development of Digital Media: Digital media are those that have beencreated in or transformed into machine language, or computer readable form. This form of media alters or threatens existing media business models, creates new opportunities for media-content creators, and causes shifts in how media consumers access, use, and interact with media.
VIII.Discussing Digital Media: Networks are Key
A.“Online,” though used synonymously with the Internet, refers to the interconnected, networked media that permit the direct, electronic exchange of information, data, and other communications. Everything from local area networks (LANs) to wide area networks (WANs), such as the Internet, is part of the online world.
B.The Internet/World Wide Web reached 50 percent of U.S. households faster than any other media technology. And, as far as adoption, the Internet is more complex in its requirements.
IX.The World of Digital Media
A.Digital Print: For much of the history of the Internet, the use of text has beenfavoredoveraudio or video mainly because of limited computing power and slow Internet connection speeds.
- Digital Books: Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader was heralded in its 2007 launch asthelatest technology breakthrough that may spur interest in digital books. The iPad and other tablet computers have helped increase the market for eBooks, which experienced a 193 percent increase in sales from 2009 to 2010.
- Digital Newspapers and Magazines: Online “newspaper” sites contain audio,multimedia features and video clips so they directly compete with “broadcast” and “cable” television news sites.
- They face direct competition with blogs, citizen journalism Web sites, newsaggregators such as Google News and social media sites. Online magazines such as Slate.com and Salon.com are two of only a few magazines created to be solely online.
B.Digital Audio
- Major record labels and others in the recording industry complain that their profits and investments are threatened by the relatively new phenomenon of peer-to-peer file sharing, which enables millions of users to exchange hundreds of millions of files. Most of the files being shared are music files.
- The concept of radio is starting to change in the digital world with consumer use of podcasts, web radio and online radio stations. Satellite radio also is competing with traditional radio programming.
C.Digital Visual Media
- The Internet provides a venue for Web sites that promote independent and short films, video-sharing sites like the popular YouTube and major network Web sites that allow their television coverage online for viewing.
- Digital Media Grammar: The language used in online media still is developing. One new term is Hypertext, which enables users to jump to other Web pages. RSS fee tracks what multiple people are saying about a certain subject.
D.Main Concepts that Underlie the Digital Media World.
- Multimedia or combining various media types into one package. Video can sit side-by-side with a text transcript, and audio can play while the media consumer reads the lyrics of a song or reads information about the artist or even watches a concert by the artist.
- Interactivity that involves two or more parties to a communication engaging in an ongoing give-and-take of messages. Elements of interactivity are a dialog between a human and a computer program that affects the nature or type of feedback or content that is received, and an audience with some measure of control over media content.
- Automation or programming computers to automate many complex and time-consuming tasks. Automation plays a crucial role in the ability of online media to be personalized and localized or to provide user-specific or geographic-specific information.
- Ethereality: The “immaterial” quality of digital information has far-reaching consequences for distribution of content, media companies, the law, and society. Traditional activities like “checking out” library books and watching television shows at a certain time or night of the week become meaningless.
E.Commercial Forces on Digital Media Content: The digital age is forcing a change in the notion of capital investment. Almost anyone who is online can create a Web site and potentially compete with established media companies, so capital costs are reduced. Few media enterprises have found a formula for making profits in the online world.
1.The Open Source Movement challenges the traditional business modelsbecause consumers have access to free software and the source code that created the programs.
2.Revenue Models for Digital Media
- Advertising: Media companies both offline and online charge advertisers forthe cost per 1,000 (CPM) of audience members. Types of ads include banner ads, search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO).
- Subscriptions: Revenue-producing media sites have carved out a content niche, produced original, quality content, and designed an effective, efficient online presence—and charged a subscription for their site. Some media sites try partial subscriptions, including one called “freemium,” a model that allows nonsubscribers to read up to 20 articles per month for free from the site and thereafter must subscribe.
- eCommerce enables consumers to get information about products on demand while media and other organizations collect vast amounts of data on the behavior of their online visitors.
X.Conclusion: Looking Back and Moving Forward
A.Media literacy is the process of critically thinking of the media and understanding the historical development of media types, media grammar and how commercial forces shape media content. It is an ongoing process in which one can always improve to become a better mass media consumer and user.
B.Commercial forces shape the type of content we see and may put profits ahead of the best interests of the public. It is arguably the most important aspect of media literacy.
C.The Internet promises transformational communication technology but its success depends on how media literate the public becomes and how well moral reasoning and ethical thinking are developed.
LECTURE LAUNCHERS/DISCUSSION TOPICS
- The Internet, Twitter, and such social media as Facebook have helped create an anything-goes media landscape, giving life to marginal, flimsy or suspect news stories that years ago would not have claimed the attention of mainstream news organizations. Have students brainstorm (with the help of the Internet) to develop a list of suspect stories or conspiracy theories about U.S. presidents. Many students are too young to have firsthand knowledge of the theories about President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. But what are some of the unsubstantiated theories about the current president? Discuss the possible sources of the information and possible reasons for the misinformation.
- List the news outlets that have, in recent years, launched fact-checking operations. Poke through some of the sites and note which areas/topics/subjects are the main focus of the truth-squad operations.
- Have students examine advertisements in several popular print and online magazines, including a few from other countries. Discuss the messages, both overt and the subtext. How do the ads reflect the cultural values of the countries?
- Show a piece of media content such as a music video clip or excerpt from a TV show or film and ask students to name as much as they know about the people appearing in the clip, how high the song went in the charts, information on personal lives of the people in the clip, and what projects they mightbe currently involved in. Then have them describe the record company or media company it comes from, name the parent company, explain subtext messages the clip may be showing, and describe how editing and lighting affect the atmosphere of the clip.
- Show a clip from a movie or TV show that uses product placement, preferably more than once in the scene or scenes, and ask students to identify whether they see any advertising taking place.
- Show students some of the Internet hoaxes that have been perpetrated over the years (suggested Web site is Hoaxbusters at and ask students why they think these hoaxes and scams worked and whether they would have worked in other forms of media.
- Discuss with students the high-profit lawsuit by music-industry officials against Joel Tenenbaum, who downloaded and made available to others thousands of copyrighted songs over the Internet while he was an undergraduate at GoucherCollege. Do students say that the $675,000 fine against the student was too much or appropriate? Have them explain their position. What role does the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit play?
SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES
- As a class, have students review the photos of President Obama and his national security team monitoring the hit on Osama bin Laden. (They can be found on How many of the team members can they identify? Based on what they see, what are the personalities being exhibited? List the gadgets that are visible in the room. How do the students describe the tension and anticipation on the faces? Then, have students look at photographs taken of bin Laden. What messages are sent through those pictures? Have students write a succinct one-page paper of their observations that they can share with the class.
- Assign students the task of creating a chart of the albums from sixto tenof their favorite recording artists, listing the album and artist’s name and the record label. Have them draw an organizational chart to show who owns the various record labels. A useful resource is CJR’s Who Owns What at
- Have students make a list of devices used in film that help impart messages as part of their media grammar.
- Have students check six different Web sites that include extensive “useful links” pages within the sites and see if they can tell what the political bias of the Web sitemightbe based solely on checking the links. Have them count how many sites have links to Web sites of opposing views to theirs.
- Assign students to find a piece of information from a news article and look for other places on the Web where that information is either proven incorrect or called into question. Have students evaluate which is the correct one and why the incorrect information mighthave been published.
- Have students watch one of the Sunday news programs or a news show with a particular slant and report what they learned on the topic based solely on the news show (they should try to avoid getting other news about the topic). Have other students who watched other shows report on the same topic and try to determine how political bias mighthave affected news coverage or the way the topic was presented.
- Have students research the case of Joel Tenenbaum, who was sued by music-industry officials for downloading and making available to others copyrighted songs over the Internet. Based on your information, can you develop a profile of him or outline his reasons or motivations for his actions?
WEB SITERESOURCES
Hoax Busters
White House
Columbia Journalism Review
The Front Page of the Internet
The Poynter Institute
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