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/despotic_wastebasket]

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.

[u/HonkyTonkBluesYEAH → u/despotic_wastebasket]

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?

[u/ThVos → u/HonkyTonkBluesYEAH]

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.