Media literacy in the 21st digital century is an extremely important and necessary skill to develop. As defined by the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE), “Media refers to all electronic or digital means and print or artistic visuals used to transmit messages. Literacy is the ability to encode and decode symbols and to synthesize and analyze messages. Media literacy is the ability to encode and decode the symbols transmitted via media and synthesize, analyze and produce mediated messages.”
How media is interpreted is decided by an individual. The rapid growth of technology and adaptation of the internet into modern lives has had a significant impact on billions of people. “As of October 2023, there were 5.3 billion internet users worldwide, which amounted to 65.7 percent of the global population. Of this total, 4.95 billion, or 61.4 percent of the world’s population, were social media users.”
Siva Vaidhyanathan of Slate states that media conglomerations, also known as a parent company that owns numerous media businesses, can be categorized into three unique levels:
“The base level would be the cable and telecommunication companies like Comcast, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. These companies control the wireless networks and fiber-optic pipelines that flood our lives with data. Until recently these companies had been trying to integrate vertically, gobbling up media production and content companies to lock in viewers and users. The second level would be the Google-Facebook duopoly, two of the 10 most valuable companies in the world and the masters of our attention. Google and Facebook manage what we (and they) consider important, interesting, and “relevant” to us. They do so through pervasive surveillance of billions of people around the world and massive computational power that guides both companies in their advertisement-targeting efforts.”
This level is where many people find a news source. News articles, social media, videos, and podcasts are how some individuals access current events. “Though digital devices are by far the most common way Americans access their news, where they get that news on their devices is divided among a number of different pathways. Today, news websites, apps and search engines are the digital pathways most Americans get news from at least sometimes. Half of Americans at least sometimes get news from social media, and three-in-ten say the same of podcasts.”
There is a wide range of reliability among these aforementioned sources. Some news can be biased. Some news can be misinformation, intentionally or through error of facts. A person should look at a news source objectively, keeping an open mind but analyzing whether they are being told a fact, an opinion, or something else entirely? “It’s this second level, the great gatekeepers of our attention, that threatens democracy through its massive, unchecked global power and its effect on our collective ability to think clearly about the problems we face.”
A person must remind oneself that their selected source of seeking out the news may be leaving things out. Algorithms and advertisements impact what messages are conveyed to whom. Can a person trust their respective source to give them unbiased reporting? That is for them to analyze.
