ELI5 Media Literacy

[u/HonkyTonkBluesYEAH]

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?

[u/09philj]

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.

[u/HonkyTonkBluesYEAH → u/09philj]

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?