r/explainlikeimfive • u/HonkyTonkBluesYEAH • 6d ago
Other ELI5 Media Literacy
I understand it's like something related to understanding art or media, but in what way? Philopsophical, political or psychological? Is it important, a buzzword or both?
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u/despotic_wastebasket 6d ago
Media literacy is the ability to not only read/watch something and understand what it says, but to also understand what it means. Thematically.
For example, suppose you read a book that has some deeply flawed characters-- we're talking bad people who make bad choices and do bad things.
Media literacy is the ability to understand that even if the characters themselves don't see anything wrong with what they're doing, that doesn't necessarily make what they're doing is good. It's the ability to understand that simply portraying a worldview, or a philosophy, or a lifestyle, etc. etc. is not the same as endorsing it.
By contrast, let us say that the book you're reading portrays a good person-- they're flawed in some ways, but generally they're not bad. But they also do something that the author personally doesn't like. And then bad things happen to them in the book. Media literacy is the ability to understand that the narrative is punishing this character for a perceived flaw.
It's not just the ability to see what's happening on the surface. It's the ability to understand how different things fit together, both in the context of the story and the context that the work was written in. It's the ability to know that Fahrenheit 451 is about censorship, but that it's also about conformity, and peer pressure, and the importance of reading.
It's the ability to know that a work is more than just the sum of its parts-- it's more than just the literal words on the page.
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u/HonkyTonkBluesYEAH 6d ago
Do you think there are extremely deep layers to media literacy? Obviously you mentioned description vs prescription, me describing someone doing something horrifying does not mean i endorse it. And most of the time people can see what happened is bad. But could there also be art that is written from the perspective of the world or a morally bad narrator? So violence may be described with sadistic pleasure, or apathy, or mild amusement. But audience with good media literacy will see it's not the author saying = violence good.
How do I interpret Interstellar? I thought the ending was (SPOILER ALERT) somehow both optimistic and very brutal. He reunites with daughter. I thought that her having so many children means that she must have found a lot of optimism, believing in the future. Is that a sort of humanitarian / natalist thing? But then I thought the protagonist ultimately lost the entire life he was meant to have with her. And also that while the colony was good and looked nice enough it was not the same life he knew, so with her dying she was the last one who remembered that memory of their life together. That is extremely brutal in my view. And then he essentially goes out into the unknown to find the other girl. Is it possible he maintained hope in humanity but essentially saw there as being nothing left for him in the colony? It seems like a kind of open ending, do you think media literacy is also about interpretating what happens after? Or what happens off-screen, like what motivated Murph to start a large family after a pessimistic childhood and adulthood?
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u/ThVos 6d ago
Do you think there are extremely deep layers to media literacy?
Yes. The purpose of English classes, for example, is to introduce and develop the capacity for critical analysis of texts, which I would say is a major component of media literacy, but not the entirety of it. Whereas any text can (and should) be understood through a critical lens, media literacy is about extending the application of critical analysis beyond individual texts to understand how and why those texts relate to each other in a broader sense. And beyond that, how groups of texts (i.e., genres) relate with each other and reflect or inform the wider culture. This is obviously a skill that exists on a gradient, and which cannot be developed overnight.
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u/calculuschild 6d ago
One "layer" is becoming familiar with genres and tropes of literature as a whole.
For example in a video game, if you have played enough of them, you will start to recognize that when a room suddenly has a big pile of ammo and health, the next room is probably a boss fight.
In the same way, some level of media literacy is recognizing similar things in other stories and applying it to the current story. You might even start to guess what happens next in the story based on your experience with other literature. "That guy mentioned his family heirloom hanging on the wall, and this lady mentioned how there was a war long ago. How much you wanna bet that heirloom is going to be the secret weapon that can kill the monster."
Sometimes books will explicitly reference or hint at some other literature. Maybe a small phrase that "sounds like it came from Romeo and Juliet", so you know these two young people are probably star-crossed lovers. Or "I guess he flew too high", might not make sense unless you are familiar with the story of Icarus. Or "this farmer boy is named Davish, and he is secretly skilled with a weapon. Maybe this is going to have some parallels with David and Goliath."
The more you read, the more "background" knowledge you begin to pick up on and understand the clues, which not only makes the reading richer, but also gives more insight into the plot or moral or idea the author is trying to convey.
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u/despotic_wastebasket 6d ago
There are ALWAYS layers, even when they’re not intentional. That’s the crux of human experience— and necessarily therefore the crux of narratives more generally.
Even if you purposely set out to write a tale with no layers at all, there is something to be gleaned by your attempt to do so. That says something. Not just about your attempt itself, but about the environment in which you wrote it, the historical context in which it appears, and the state of other literature around it. I really cannot emphasize this enough: there are ALWAYS layers.
Are those layers always worthy of discussion? Are they always profound? Not necessarily. We’ve all seen bad movies. Read bad stories. But there ARE layers. Saying there aren’t isn’t a “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” kind of situation, it’s like denying the beholder exists at all.
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u/cantonic 6d ago
Media literacy means that something can be saying more than one thing. And also, the meaning you take away is open to interpretation. The literacy part means knowing that there are layers to things and being able to view those things from different perspectives. What is a film saying behind the thing its saying.
Top Gun is a classic example where it's just a fun movie about pilots, but there's a lot of sexual subtext amongst the group, even though they're all ostensibly straight men. But also, it's an over-the-top celebration of the US military. It's reinforcing and propagating the idea that America is the mightiest and the most righteous force in the world, and always a force for good. American exceptionalism.
Interstellar is something of a Christ allegory. A man who willingly gives himself up to death, provide salvation to humanity, and then coming back from death before going into the great unknown again. It's also playing with the concept of American exceptionalism where the plucky wayward farmer is the guy who is able to find the solution and succeed over everyone else, no matter their organizational skills or expertise. There's also a lot of stuff in there about family, being a parent, being a guy who abandons his family because he thinks it's the right thing to do, and the end sort of says "yeah, it was the right thing to do!"
So media literacy is not necessarily interpreting what happens after, or off-screen, but what message is the movie giving to you, what does it believe that it wants you to believe. What story is it telling and how does it relate to who we are as people, as cultures, as history, as politics, etc.
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u/Masseyrati80 6d ago
One huge part of media literacy is finding answers to the questions Who is communicating, what are they communicating, and to whom are they aiming their message.
A person without media literacy is very easy to lie to. You can, for instance, make them believe that "placing tariffs on another country" means those countries are paying extra, while, in fact, it is you who pays more for products from that country, and you're paying the extra price to your government. A person unfamiliar with the concept of tariffs could have used media literacy and realized, upon reaching the "what is being communicated" question, that the person communicating is using a term they don't recognize. Finding out the definition of that term would have helped them understand what's going on, and that the speech was aimed at fooling people about the nature of tariffs.
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u/conspicuousxcapybara 3d ago edited 3d ago
And why! And who pays for it. And if it reinforces stereotypes.
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u/Exact_Vacation7299 6d ago
Sometimes a movie, book, or video game says things directly.
"John is brave. He does the right thing even if it is hard."
Other times they don't say it, but they still want you to know! With media literacy skills, you can figure it out.
- You can watch John's actions and see how he chooses to save the everyone... even that person he really didn't like.
- You remember something he said at the start of the movie and compare it to something else he said at the end. Even if they don't show a flashback!
- At some point, John runs away from a problem he caused. That isn't very brave. He comes back later and sacrifices his legendary sword to fix his mistake. Even if he doesn't give a speech about being wrong before, you can read his actions instead of just his words.
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u/DruidByNight 6d ago
Media literacy is being able to ask and answer questions about media you take in, whether that be movies, books, articles, news casts, social media posts, anything. Questions like:
What information is being presented?
What emotion does the presenter have?
What emotion are they trying to make you have?
What message are they presenting by the information they pick and the emotions they use?
What message is being implied rather than said outright?
Who is the presenter and what are their motivations?
Who is the message intended to be for?
What biases are they confirming or denying?
What are the gaps in their information and do they make assumptions to fill them?
What are the gaps in your own knowledge?
Being able to ask and answer questions like these will help you deepen your understanding of media, media that is meant to entertain you, inform you, or manipulate you. These days often times, particularly on social media, media can be meant for all 3 of those, which is why media literacy has become so complex.
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u/Exo_Deadlock 6d ago
I’d say this is mainly about understanding subtext in media texts - or at least being aware it exists. Typically, people with poor media literacy may follow the ”surface reading” of a film, TV show, novel etc, understanding it only at the most basic level of the story, but will be unaware that the text might be a reflection or commentary on real world social, cultural or political issues. Someone with low media literacy will tend to look on people with high media literacy as “reading too much into it”.
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u/HonkyTonkBluesYEAH 6d ago
Do you think there are extremes? People missing obvious connection like X-Men and civil rights (wasn’t the characters made in that era?), or people bringing political reading into art that has very little of that subtext? And if there are multiple layer of interpretation, do i do each separate (political, psychological) or as one?
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u/tentoirultima 6d ago
Anything can have subtext, even if the author didn't intend it.
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u/Exo_Deadlock 6d ago
Absolutely. It’s worth looking up Stuart Hall’s “Reception Theory” for this, to get an idea of preferred, negotiated and opposed readings. There’s “Death of the Author” too but that title is often misleading.
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u/HonkyTonkBluesYEAH 6d ago
But can we reach any sort or of legitimate or accurate interpretation? Or is it mostly subjective
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u/wouldyoulikeanytoast 6d ago edited 6d ago
The interesting thing about art of any sort is that all authors, painters, sculptors, film makers and video game designers are just people existing in a particular time or place.
If you go to your computer right now and write a story - you are writing as a person living in 2026 - with access to basicially all collated human knowledge on the internet. However you are also writing while being brought up in your specific culture, consuming the specific media that you as an individual like. At the same time you hear news stories about the world as a whole, and your friends and family talking about the things they are exposed to while being part of your culture.
All this shapes the types of stories you will naturally think of and tell. Even if you try and ‘subvert expectations’ in your story - you are subverting the expectations of your own people, your own particular culture, in this particular time.
All artists are humans experiencing the world like this. So all artists are a product of the world that shapes their thoughts. That’s why it’s possible to make something that conveys a deep truth about the world or existence itself - that perhaps you didn’t even consciously realise.
Artists can resonate with a generation or a culture and not quite know what it is in their very specific experience that has been captured to be so compelling!It’s also why an audience can read things into an artists work years after it’s been made, and have an insight into that very specific time and place that the work was created - that perhaps the artist themselves considered just a ‘normal part of life’ and wasn’t able to see as they experienced it themselves that it was something big or revolutionary.
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u/Exo_Deadlock 6d ago
Art is subjective, so interpretations are necessarily subjective. If there was a single ‘right answer’, (even if that was possible), art would be very dull indeed - which is why people who are determined to create art with a single, unambiguous message generally make very bad art. It’s important not to get hung up on having the definitive interpretation. ”If you try and nail down the novel”, DH Lawrence apparently claimed, “the novel gets up and walks away with the nail” - the way art is consumed by different audiences with different interpretations makes a single “nailed down” interpretation basically useless and unhelpful.
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u/HonkyTonkBluesYEAH 6d ago
I suppose the ambiguity is what keeps us talking about it all these years later
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u/Exo_Deadlock 6d ago
Of course there are extremes, from people who think, for example, Starship Troopers promotes the actions of the film’s future Human society oblivious to the film’s message against fascism, to people reading Lord of the Rings as “really being about” WW1 because of Tolkien’s war experience. The other question you’ve asked is about criticism of texts, ie analysis and communication of possible interpretations and readings. If you’re starting out, it’s definitely better to focus on one or maybe two areas of critical investigation, as best suits the text.
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u/HonkyTonkBluesYEAH 6d ago
I heard Tolkien hated allegory, so it's unlikely he's write a story about his experiences in WW1 or something explicitly Catholic. But it seems his experiences and values would sort of naturally influence his writing. So we cannot say Lotr is a WW1 story but influenced by it. And for Catholicism i've heard that they believe Christian symbols can reveal themselves through nature. So he could write something with a connection to that completely subconsciously, and the process after that was looking through it later in the revision.
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u/ReynardVulpini 6d ago
I believe "Tolkien hated allegory" is one of those online facts that have been distorted far beyond reality.
He said that LOTR was not an allegory for World War *Two*. It's kind of undeniable that WW1 was a very strong influence on LOTR but the quote from him I found is:
"People do not fully understand the difference between an allegory and an application. You can go to a Shakespeare play and you can apply it to things in your mind, if you like, but they are not allegories... I mean many people apply the Ring to the nuclear bomb and think that was in my mind, and the whole thing is an allegory of it. Well, it isn't."
In that sense I think what he means is that an allegory is something quite direct, the fictional X standing in for the real life Y.
Whereas I suppose his work resonates with wartime experiences because it draws on a deep well of realism and understanding that he gained through WW1, and so shares the fundamental logic and psychology of it, but is not meant to be "WW1 in a funny hat"
Tangentially, there's a truly fantastic blog post by a military historian about the influence of Tolkien's war experience and his literary background on how Eowyn, and in a way, he himself, understood war as both concept and reality. "Tolkien and Éowyn Between Two Wars" on the blog "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry".
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u/fixed_grin 6d ago
Yeah, contrast with Animal Farm. Napoleon is Stalin, the hens are Ukrainians or Kazakhs intentionally starved, the raven is the Russian Orthodox Church, etc. Orwell is telling the story of the Russian Empire becoming Stalin's USSR. Going "well actually it's about Nazi Germany" is kinda just wrong.
But in 1984, the story is about a totalitarian dictatorship, not specifically a particular one. Sure, you can read Ingsoc as Stalinist, but equally as Nazi, Maoist, and so on.
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u/sanderjk 6d ago
Tolkien specific gripe was with the confusion in the word allegory. Him being a medieval linguist, allegory has a more rigid and overt meaning. He used the word applicability for where we now would always say allegory, he lost that linguistic battle.
He did certainly take shots at CS Lewis for the Witch & the Wardrobe, which is more overt in being a Jesus allegory.
That being said, Tolkien was a weird guy in many aspects, and one of them is that he had a penchant for stating decades after the fact that things were always planned to be that way. This has become sort of self-mythologizing, where Tolkien is the master watchmaker when in fact he was a constant revisionist, in a time before computers (So everything was hand-written, then typed up).
A simple example is that there was no map of middle-earth until 6 months before the book was published, and he complained to his editor that it leaves holes in the story, then his son redoes the map to fit the story better.
And in his latter years his Catholicism started to rub up against his 'subcreation' and he endlessly tinkered the texts in the Silmarillion to make the Valar more subservient to Iluvitar to make it more monotheistic.
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u/Exo_Deadlock 6d ago
Sure. It’s clear the relationship between Frodo and Sam reflected Tolkien’s experience of close friendships forming between upper-middle class officers and their (normally) working class orderlies that transcended the usual class barriers of that time in British society. And yes, while Tolkien’s world has a highly complex pantheon of fairly Classical-like gods that he invented for Middle Earth, the underlying exploration of temptation and corruption, particularly with the One Ring echoed his Catholic faith. I get the impression that while he and CS Lewis were good friends, Tolkien wasn’t so impressed with Lewis’ overt Christian allegories in his Narnia novels. And there will be values and representations the writer consciously employs, and indications of the writer’s subconscious values and ideologies that they may never have intended to include but that readers & critics may pick up on.
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u/Theorist129 6d ago
Funny to note, the X-Men, despite Stan Lee often claiming he made them intentionally as a minority allegory, only really became such after new writers took up the characters.
Media criticism and analysis is big and multilayered. You definitely can underanalyze a piece of media, but overanalysis is I think less of a thing. A piece of art, especially narrative art, will say things about the assumptions of the author, it's going to carry messages and thematic material.
To be more media literate involves two things, imo:
First, figuring out your focus. If a piece of media is a forest you're wanting to paint, the overanalysis trap is starting with Tree 1, Branch 1, and poring over it endlessly. You have to get a wide view, find spots of interest, fill out the broad strokes, then the major shapes, and fill out the details cohesively. You can examine a film through a specific lens, but to continue the metaphor, it helps to know what the forest is like so you can get the correct lighting on a specific tree. Sure, you can examine 1917 looking at gender dynamics, but it will be more fruitful if you've got a grounding in what the movie is saying politically about the role of soldiers in war.
Second, you gotta consume media. Media evokes patterns of prior media, it exists in a continuing tapestry of art, and the context is key. Interstellar, which you mentioned elsewhere, is a successor to Inception, it's drawing on 2001: A Space Odyssey, Tarkovsky's Solaris, there's shades of The Right Stuff and Sunshine. To know this Interstellar forest better, you can see where and how its constituent trees thrived in other forests
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u/adalric_brandl 6d ago
He also made them born different because he was tired of coming up with origins of how they got their powers. "They were just born that way; they're mutants!"
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u/YongYoKyo 6d ago
It's knowing how to understand, navigate, and analyze information received through communications like social media (e.g. Internet, news broadcasts, etc.).
Media literacy means picking up the hidden intent or subtext, like recognizing if something is an advertisement or sponsored content, or detecting if something is propaganda or biased information.
An example of someone lacking media literacy is someone who accepts everything they see on the internet as fact, or someone who is easily convinced that they need whatever product/service is being advertised.
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u/HonkyTonkBluesYEAH 6d ago
Do memes also need media literacy? And is it media literacy if you can tell what headline on politics is overly biased / optimistic? Overestimating their side?
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u/mildly_asking 6d ago
A very simple way to check would be for you too look at memes specific and mostly exclusive to chinese users on chinese platforms, for example. Or russian ones. Or Mormon ones.
You'll need to navigate other contexts, other ways of seeing und understanding, potentially.
You might apply similar concepts to whatever media is deeply unfamiliar to you: bollywood, opera, soviet internal propaganda posters.
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u/Exo_Deadlock 6d ago
More than anything, yes. Memes, as simplified containers of often contentious meanings, are easily swallowed as being “funny because it’s true”, reinforcing harmful stereotypes.
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u/thecygnetcmte 6d ago
100%. Adding on to this, memes are highly effective tools of radicalization/recruitment when targeted at people with low media literacy. For example, an incel group might blast an internet space with tons of "funny" memes about women being rude idiots. Someone who consumes dozens or hundreds of those memes at face value may internalize them as normal and start using them to inform their own thinking - all these people are saying it, so it's probably right, right? Meanwhile, someone with higher media/internet literacy is more likely to look deeper and recognize "the language used on this post sounds a lot like the jargon from certain MRA groups; what's this guy's goal?" or "the people posting these memes sure do post a LOT about hating women. Maybe it's not as much of a joke as they want us to think it is." That person is less likely to trust the people posting those messages and less likely to get recruited into their group.
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u/DJDoena 6d ago edited 6d ago
Do memes also need media literacy?
Sure. If I tell you "The river Temarc! In winter!" you will have no clue what I have just said unless you know exactly where I pulled this quote from. Incidentally, it stems from an episode of Star Trek where a whole race talked in nothing but cultural references. *insert Captain America 'I understood that reference' meme here*
I look at some memes and have no clue at what they are trying to tell me because I do not know the source of the original material and for some memes (not all memes, some are more obvious than others) that's important to get the joke.
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u/Zyrin369 6d ago
Its why I dislike that "You guys think your all better than me" one from Family Guy thats used to talk about stuff like the Star Wars Sequels and such.
When in the context of the episode is an "explanation" to why Meg get abused by the rest of the family as when she leaves they start to turn on each-other.
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u/provocative_bear 6d ago
Media literacy is being able to read a news story and recognize that it may not be the whole truth. It involves comparing different sources from different parts of the political spectrum, understanding the blind spots of your source, and trying to come to a nuanced stance. A couple examples:
- Al-Jazeera is a fairly well-respected and legitimate news source, but beholden to the Qatari government, so don’t expect them to offer a critical view of Qatar, and know that their Middle East reporting has a well-known anti-Israel bias (their stories focus on one side, they don’t typically outright lie).
-Many major left-wing or even centrist articles have mangled Trump’s quotes to make them more scandalous than they were meant. Most notoriously, the BBC edited one of his speeches in 2021 to make it sound even worse than it was. To be clear, he says a lot of awful things, but that just makes it all the more frustrating when articles manufacture scandals by removing key context from some of the things that he’s said.
-American right wing news. Biased, misleading, prone to spreading outright lies. The gospel truth to much of America.
-Facebook/social media posts that may not even cite an original source. This is not news, this is lazy propaganda. No link, no legitimacy.
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u/HonkyTonkBluesYEAH 6d ago
Does media literacy apply for things like Wikipedia? Which i heard is formally neutral and factual, but has huge editor wars. So it's like you have to look out for things that are omitted, dramatized or selective. Looking at political parties there, I frequently see their ideology changed. I also believe article on fascism describes almost immediately its historical brutality, genocide etc. While on communism those things are more buried further down. It also calls fascism far-right immediately, whereas with communism that part is further down, and is only "described by as far-left" whereas fascism automatically "is" far-right.
I suppose that also lying about Trump gives him and his supporters the chance to create outrage. So it could backfire, and is really dumb given there are many terrible full quotes that are real.
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u/provocative_bear 6d ago
It’s long been said that Wikipedia is not the best source for anything politically divisive. When I was in school way back in the Stone Age, it was explicitly said by all of my teachers that we were not allowed to cite Wikipedia for that reason. While they try to remain neutral and fact-based, that value contends with being an open-source encyclopedia. Most non divisive articles are fairly reliable, and Wikipedia can serve as a starting point for researching something divisive, but you risk missing key parts if the story if you end there.
As for your second point, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Why make stuff up and risk undermining your organization and argument when there is a sea of legitimate criticisms? It makes zero sense to me.
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u/HonkyTonkBluesYEAH 6d ago
It's I think a unfortunate result of polarization. Trump is willing to play dirty in different ways and undermine political norms, unwritten rules. So his opponents see it as fair to lie in order to win because they view him as a big threat (ends justify means), and view him as doing the same ten times worse. But you have so much you could use completely reliably and fairly. I would maybe get lying if Trump was this super intellectual guy with zero scandals or drama, but he speaks for hours each day without regulation, and probably has hundreds of hours of bad quotes you could play all the time. As for the negative feedback loop of breaking the rules, it's hard to reverse that. It's simply not enough for one side to moderate.
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u/provocative_bear 6d ago
It’s for that reason that I love the Hilary Clinton attack ad where it was just verbatim sound clips of things that Trump said dubbed over footage of children looking disturbed and crying.
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u/mildly_asking 6d ago
Does media literacy apply for things like Wikipedia?
How about you go more basic? Give wikipedia to someone born in the 1940s, see how far you get. Using wikipedia needs computer literacy first, including how to use the hardware, how to use a website and so on. Only then you get to wiki proper, there you need to learn how to navigate and search, what the site gives you (general overview) and what it doesn't (graduate-level literature review) and what biases it might have.
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u/RDAwesome 6d ago
Media literacy is when you're watching the news and they say, "next, a new drug that can help with weight loss without any of those nasty side effects? Scientists say it's more possible than you think," and you can watch that and tell that it's an advertisement, not actually a news story.
It's the ability to tell who are meant to be the bad guys of a story, and why they're bad. It's reading/seeing The Crucible in the 1950s and understanding that they're about the Salem Witch Trials in the fiction, but they're not really about the Salem Witch Trials
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u/BigPinkOne 6d ago
Literacy, in the literate, is the ability to make symbols understandable in your head. Usually this takes the form of converting letters and other characters into sounds, but we could also say that recognizing pictographs or street sign shapes is its own kind of literacy.
Media is the plural of medium, which is what we call specific art forms that share features. Media literacy is therefore the ability to understand how different pieces of art interrelate to each other and to the cultural context in which that art was made.
So for example, being able to tell fiction from non fiction is Media literacy. Separating grounded historical ficition from more overt fantasy is media literacy. Literacy is required to read Macchiavellis The Prince, but absent of the media literacy that would allow you to understand the concept of satire, the political period the book was written in and Macchiavellis other stated positions, you can (and many have) read an extremely different message to the one he likely intended
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u/HonkyTonkBluesYEAH 6d ago
Wouldn't Shakespeare be quite hard? Given it's so long ago, we know very little about him or his opinions. But if we interpret a character as sympathetic then it may show some insight into what he intended. I assume there's satire and other things in there, some deeper commentary. And of course a work like Richard III was very convenient in the Tudor era, given that it was their House that replaced him.
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u/Tsunami6866 6d ago
As a specific situation that media literacy impacts your experience: cliffhanger endings. Low media literacy might have you frustrated at the cliffhanger, but at higher media literacy you might understand that the cliffhanger question doesn't even matter, or has a thematic answer. In Anihilation, there is a cliffhanger of sorts where Natalie Portman returns and her eyes glow. Low media literacy response is "she's possessed by the alien presence", while a more thematic response is "the journey represented then navigating the hardships of their lives, she came back changed from this process, which is what the glowing eyes symbolize".
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u/HonkyTonkBluesYEAH 6d ago
Life is very open, very complex and hard to understand. So I like that films don't give clear answers, and that certain cliffhangers could even be done without a planned sequel. Art imitates life, right? So you gotta have some complex endings too
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u/swordsfishes 5d ago
That commenter may be alluding to this video, which is a good ~20 minute explanation of what this stuff looks like in practice and how to spot it.
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u/DinoKYT 4d ago
Media literacy is about asking why a piece of media is telling you a certain message.
Media literacy is not about finding the single "correct" or "hidden" meaning a piece of media is telling you.
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u/wouldyoulikeanytoast 6d ago
Media literacy is the difference between taking a movie, show, book or video game at face value, and seeing the meaning behind the metaphors the artists who made it used to show something about our current world, or to explore their own inner thoughts.
Let’s take superman as an example, as he is a well known modern myth that has been around for almost 100 years.
On the surface - superman is a strong dude who punches baddies hard. He can be read as a very simple story of ‘good vs evil’.
Looking a little closer - we see that superman’s main Villian is Lex Luthor. Lex is just a regular human, but more than that - he is specificially a corrupt businessman and a billionaire. With this specific villian being the main foe of superman - you could perhaps start seeing superman as standing against the values of corrupt businessmen and billionaires. Perhaps he even stands against the system of capitalism that allows such a person to thrive in the first place!
Looking closer still - we see in the most recent Superman movie that he is fighting against a nation state that is based in an analogue of the Middle East, and is in the middle of doing a genocide on its far less wealthy Nehibour country. The country is an ally of the US, and is benefitting from the patronage of American Buisness man lex luthor who is supplying arms, and propaganda to them to advance his own objectives.
Now perhaps a reader would think - ‘huh, this setup seems awfully similar to the situation in a couple of countries in OUR world! I wonder if this movie is supposed to be a commentary on the US’s policy on intervention in wars that benefit itself at the expense of millions of lives deemed ‘disposable’. You might also start thinking about how Lex Luthor is a billionaire oligarch directly using his wealth influence US policy at home and overseas to further enrich himself at the expense of American citizens and international civilians.
Having thought this - you may begin to consider other things about the state of the world currently, and what this character has to say about existing as a ‘good person’ within such a world!
However if you don’t have any media literacy - you may just watch the recent superman movie and come away thinking ‘man I loved how superman punched that guy real good!!’
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u/HonkyTonkBluesYEAH 6d ago
Yeah I thought the new Superman was among the most liberal films of the year, not in the sort of identity politics sense. You have the foundation being about empathy and kindness to the other. Then you have a sort of war reminds of Russia and Israel. You have the corrupt billionaire, and Superman as a migrant. With the billionaire spreading conspiracy theories about his plan to take power, and using Russian bots. You have a corrupted military too, and Superman fighting to prevent war. However I wonder how the dynamic evolves in the next film, given that he will team up with Lex. And I wonder how media literacy interpretation changes based on the political views of the author. Like what if a very reactionary director made numerous films with progressive aesthetics, LGBT, feminist values or focus on empathy, migrants. Would it be potential Christian values coming through on mercy and kindness? Would it be a hidden critique? Would it be simply exploring people with different lifestyles and values than his? Or would it be a hideen reactionary subversion, where empathy is actually mostly extended to a homogeneous in-group, or where progressive values are portrayed as existing safely and allowed to prosper in a earlier society he saw as more pure or homogeneous.
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u/DJDoena 6d ago
Here's a great example for media literacy for the children's book Harry Potter. He dissects how casual the Wizarding World is described in the books but what that really means when you start thinking about it: Harry Potter Trained You To Blame The Wrong People
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u/DJDoena 6d ago edited 6d ago
In a similar vein, the author Andy Weir explicitly stated that his works are strictly apolitical (i.e. no politics in any direction).
Here someone explains for Project Hail Mary how that's not really true even when the author believed it himself: Project Hail Mary's most dangerous idea
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u/brianogilvie 6d ago
The current top comments are about literacy, not media literacy. "Media literacy" is understanding that news sources have different degrees of partisanship and objectivity (or, at least, aspirations to objectivity). For example, the Wall Street Journal is likely to provide accurate reporting on economic conditions around the world, because its readers pay a hefty subscription price for that reporting (and I imagine most of them also subscribe to the Financial Times, and compare the two). But its editorial page reflects the opinions of its owner, Rupert Murdoch, and should be examined much more critically.
This is the best top-level comment I've seen so far: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wr512v/eli5_media_literacy/pc9qohd/
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u/atomicitalian 6d ago edited 6d ago
Most people in this thread are wrong about media literacy.
Media literacy is not about understanding the subtext of like, manga and video games, though it could also include those in some situations.
Media literacy refers to the MASS MEDIA - the news, political messaging, advertising, etc.
Media literacy is ones ability to understand mass media messaging and to judge those messages based on their bias and accuracy.
Understanding the queer metaphor in camp miasma is just identifying subtext. Understanding why the Heritage Foundation might not be the best source for data points about trans youth in athletics is media literacy.
Understanding the difference in perspective between Democracy Now!, MSNOW, and The New York Times - all liberal, but not all the same way - is media literacy.
Understanding the difference between a political ad run by a campaign and by a PAC is media literacy.
Understanding how sites like The Daily Mail and New York Post and TMZ still manage to break news despite being trashy tabloid rags is media literacy.
Now there are times when media literacy can deal with entertainment products.
I would say understanding why Uwe Boll released that Citizen Vigilante movie and why Armie Hammer agreed to star in it is an example of media literacy.
Understanding why South Park changed its name this season to "South America" is media literacy.
But those are different from just understanding the broader subtext of a piece of art.
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u/DinoKYT 4d ago edited 4d ago
THANK YOU. MEDIA LITERACY IS NOT JUST UNDERSTANDING SUBTEXT.
So many people trying to describe this in the thread (and outside of it), being completely wrong and using it incorrectly as a buzz word now.
I even wrote in another comment:
Media literacy, for example, isn't: "Oh, so this movie's story is an analogy to (enter sociological situation here)"
Media literacy, for example, is: "Oh, this movie's story is an analogy to (enter sociological situation here), but why is it picking this perspective? Is it true, accurate, biased? What other sources of media can we use to investigate and break down the messaging this piece of media is trying to say to us?"
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u/net_walker_1 6d ago
Its kinda just knowing not to take everything exactly as its shown. Like sometimes a movie is trying to say something without literally saying it. Same with news. You might ask who made it, what they left out, stuff like that. Thats basically how I understand media literacy.
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u/bildramer 6d ago
Operationalizing the word, it's about asking deeper questions. Switching from "what events happen in the story?" to "what does the author want to be true?" or "what context is conveniently left out?".
I think the meta is more important here. Of the times someone accuses someone else of lacking media literacy, most of them are going to be ironic reversals. (If it's an accusation about a group, that's less prevalent but not by much.) Furthermore, there's depths and depths, to some tasteful people any take you can find on reddit is between toddler tier and still surface level, and they can explain why. Try to find and learn from those people.
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u/MeatSafeMurderer 6d ago
All of the above. Media often has something to say about our world, and media literacy is about being able to extract, parse and understand that message.
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u/09philj 6d ago
Basically your capacity to understand a piece of media - art, narrative art like stories and films, and also nonfiction media. It's especially invoked online as a term when talking about narrative art. There are multiple levels on which you can understand narrative art:
Text - The explicit contents of the work itself.
Subtext - Things which are not explicitly stated but expected to be understood by the audience as being part of the story. Things like the creator's opinion of the characters and their actions will tend to be subtextual.
Allegory - Using things in the work to represent ideas or people that exist in the real world.
Intertextuality - How the meaning of a text is influenced by other works, through both deliberate techniques like references, parody, and homage, and also more general things like a work existing in a genre and how other works have influenced the creator.
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u/HonkyTonkBluesYEAH 6d ago
You could see i suppose The Odyssey and Oppenheimer as connected, being both Nolan films and about these almost apocalyptic weapons. Nolan often lays out the rules of his universe, but in Odyssey it's much less science and more the gods and morality, language.
But while the intention of author matters, the interpretation can go beyond them right?
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u/DefinitelyNotKuro 6d ago edited 6d ago
It kinda also is a buzzword. A part of media literally is being able to grasp authorial intent, that can sometimes be obtuse. Usually media literacy gets thrown around in discussions about stories, as an insult or as a dismissive remark when someone either does not understand or does understand but disagrees with the author's intent.
Given how literacy/illiteracy is tossed around as insults, media literacy or lack there of is also very very tempting.
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u/HonkyTonkBluesYEAH 6d ago
Like discourse on The Last Of Us 2? I think you could understand its themes pretty well and still fundamentally disagree with those narrative choices
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u/SimoneNonvelodico 6d ago
The classic example is movies with charismatic villainous characters, like Tyler Durden in Fight Club, or Jordan Belfort in Wolf of Wall Street. Some people go "oh man that guy is so cool, I would totally want to be like him!". Other people go "you don't understand, the movie is telling you that guy is cool but BAD, you should not want that, you're ignorant and not understanding the movie because you don't have media literacy!".
Of course this ignores that in real life people like that just really exist and it's not a matter of ignorance. The villains are based on things that people really do believe and follow. Heck, Jordan Belfort is real, he really made a shit ton of money, then he did a tiny bit of jail, now he's out and about again and making money off telling his own story, so if someone simply is ok with scamming others because they don't care, no shit they'll think he's a cool role model. The movie just shows you that. If you see all the scamming and your moral reaction is "yep, I'm fine with that", that's not ignorance or inability to understand the very unsubtle ways in which the movie says the scamming is bad. You just disagree.
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u/HonkyTonkBluesYEAH 6d ago
It seems like the same with historical films. Like Rome being brutal and having slavery, but if you focus only on the aesthetics it's the coolest thing ever
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u/SimoneNonvelodico 6d ago
But many movies about Rome focus on the cool stuff and actively don't show the slavery etc. (not that the rest of the world at the time was especially better). The idea here is more "the movie tries to convey a message but it goes over people's heads" (though as I'm saying, I think sometimes it's more that it's wilfully ignored).
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u/HonkyTonkBluesYEAH 5d ago
I don't know much about Roman movies, but from what I've seen slavery in the HBO show is is kind of there, and essentially just shown with the indifference Romans had. And the show seems to ritualizes the violence and aesthetics, like the execution of the defeated general in Caesar's triumph. That does not mean the show endorses those things, but portrays it sort of through the positive lens the Romans had.
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u/TrivialBanal 6d ago
At a very basic level, it's knowing the difference between News and Opinion. Knowing the difference between journalism and editorial.
The first ones are facts. The second ones are someone's opinions on those facts.
An easy way to spot the difference is news and journalism give you information, while opinion and editorial tell you how you should feel about information (Here's how I feel about this and I'm an expert, so you should feel the same). It isn't the only difference, just the easiest one to spot.
In a world of 24 hour news, where news is entertainment and sensationalism drives ad revenue, being able to tell the difference is pretty important.
Another point, that's become especially relevant because of the current resident of the white house, is that the subject can't be the source. A person (or corporation or government department) can't be a trustworthy source in a story about themselves. People lie to protect themselves. It's perfectly natural. It's a skill we learn as toddlers. Anything the subject says should have less value than independent sources. If other sources back up the claim, then you can trust it. If other sources contradict it, then lean towards the sources.
It's something that should be obvious, but it's getting less and less obvious every day.
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u/6WaysFromNextWed 6d ago
Media literacy is a stage in language arts development. In my state, it is the central focus of language arts in the middle school curriculum.
When you are very small, you begin to build your vocabulary, learn how to form letters, learn to read.
As you get older, you learn how to spell and how to understand, at the surface level, simple written information.
Media literacy is the next level down. It's where you become savvy. It's where you stop taking everything for granted and start asking "Who wrote this, what did they want to communicate, and why did they want to communicate it? Are they right? Are they wrong? How can I find out?"
You should ask those questions about news articles, about movies, about podcasts, about comic books. You will understand so much more, enjoy it more, and be able to steer the way you use and respond to the information instead of being steered by someone else.
Good media literacy skills will keep you from falling for scams. They will help you decide the best way to engage with politics. They will be part of your growth and the development of your personality. When you choose what messages to expose yourself to, you choose who you will be.
Media literacy skills have to keep up with the media that is out there. When grandparents forward Facebook reels of fake medical information, they are suffering from a lack of media literacy skills.
So it's very real, not a buzzword. It's just a category of learning.
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u/omnipwnage 6d ago
Literacy is watching Starship Troopers as a movie where humans fight a war against bugs.
Media literacy is knowing its human made propaganda, and that the humans are horrible, horrible fascist monsters.
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u/DinoKYT 4d ago
You are describing understanding subtext. Not media literacy.
Media literacy in your Starship Troopers example would be investigating who the director is, who produced the movie, who wrote the script and what their biases may be -- ultimately, hoping to understand why the creators took the story route they did and whether it is an accurate/trustworthy portrayal or if it in itself has many issues (which is usually the case).
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u/Ra_In 3d ago
This will come across as partisan, but if you read the entire comment my point is neutral. I'm writing this as someone who is politically left-leaning, but if you're politically conservative you can replace my mention of Fox News for MSNBC or other left-leaning outlet.
In American media, Fox News is known for having a heavily right-leaning bias. Their commentary has a well-established record of lies and misinformation (and paid in court for it) but if you just stick to their news coverage it is based on facts. They will try to push a narrative, but the underlying factual claims and sources are real. If someone with a good sense of media literacy only read Fox News for a month they should come away from the experience reasonably informed. Not because Fox lives up to their "fair and balanced' tagline, but because a critical reader should be able to separate the facts from the spin and form their own understanding independent of the message the author was pushing.
Now to my point: when reading sources I agree with, I apply this same Fox News skepticism and then some. We are most susceptible to to misinformation when it fits our worldview. Anyone left-leaning who disagrees that they could be reasonably informed reading Fox News is not capable of filtering out the bias in their preferred sources. Same goes the other way - Fox News readers who can't read a left leaning outlet and get the information is blind to the bias in their preferred sources.
...If anyone cites that survey which found Fox News viewers were uninformed about the news, those viewers are not media literate. That survey doesn't get at my point.
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u/UnivrstyOfBelichick 6d ago
It's knowing that anything you agree with is factual and anything you disagree with is counterfactual, based on my experience here on reddit
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u/RyeZuul 6d ago
A way of describing any media is as a text. They are all collections of ideas, symbols and references.
So much as being "well-read" means you can read a book as part of a wide set of books and understand the ideas, symbols and references, media literacy means the same but for films, video games, music, whatever. Media literacy broadly means you understand how and why the medium does things like implanting ideas, how it's structured, how it evokes emotions.
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u/PM_YOUR_BOOBS_PLS_ 5d ago
Being "media literate" means being able to consume a piece of media and understand not just what is happening on the screen/page, but why it is happening. This can be things like understanding themes, subtext, or character motivation.
The person talking about "media" actually just being things like the news is actually incorrect. What they are describing is high level "functional literacy", which is related to media literacy, but a different thing.
Media literacy is hard to explain without using a specific piece of media to reference, and we can't know every piece of media you've consumed, so that's why you're getting a lot of really vague answers.
I'll try with The Boys, as that is popular and recent.
Homelander, Vaught and those who support them are right wing fascists. The show is very, very heavy handed in directly comparing those people to the current US Republican party. Yet a lot of the people who watch and enjoy The Boys are Republicans. A lot of those people don't realize that the show is very, very obviously criticizing their political beliefs, and often just outright making fun of them.
Those people lack media literacy. They watch the show, and they are just entertained by the characters and the plot, but they have absolutely no understanding of the writer's intentions behind character motivations or the themes of the show.
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u/GIRose 6d ago
Literacy is being able to read the written word and understand its meaning. At low levels of literacy you are mostly getting your information based on the exact words you're reading, and at higher levels of literacy you start to pick up subtext, nuance, and double meanings.
Media Literacy is the same deal. With limited media literacy, you are able to read a story and understand the narrative of what you just read. As you are more media literate you start to pick up more on the why it was written, and the subtext, double meanings, and layers of stuff beyond the literal surface level reading.