Blog 4: What is media literacy?

One question comes to my mind when I read the textbook and I go through this class. The question is What is Media Literacy? I didn’t know what media literacy was before I started this class. Back in middle school, we had a class called media literacy but that was a class where we just designed video games and shared it with the class. Media literacy is all around us. When we go on social media and start to read articles, we criticize them, that’s media literacy. When I first heard about media literacy, I thought it was always about reading but it’s not. Media literacy could be used for dissecting logos,describing characters and just simply using the search engine to find information for a research paper. I love to look at logos and slogans and dissect them. I like to see where the origin of the logo and slogan is formed and why they chose that instead of something else. Designing video games is also a part of media literacy. You can create different video games based on themes,age or gender. Media literacy is the ability to identify different media and understand different messages. Another huge media literacy platform is text messages. People get a lot of text messages each day, I know my phone blows up with text messages everyday. Media literacy in text messages is us understanding that the person that sent us a text is trying to say to us not face to face.  We create media messages for a reason. It might be us voicing our opinion on something we like or don’t like or it might be us just reaching out to long lost friends or relatives. Media literacy is a skill that is necessary today. We are living in a digital age where all of our messages and news are on online and we need to know what they are saying to us to understand.