“Literacy is one of the greatest gift a person could recieve.”
-Jen Selinsky
Being literate is one of the fundamentals of life. If you are a literate individual, you have the ability to read, write, understand and detect if the pieces of information that you’ve heard or seen are fake or real. But not only being literate is the key to understand what the message you have just received, specifically through using media. There is one literacy that focused merely on media which is the Media and Information Literacy (MIL). This is the ability that you should have to add in your stock of knowledge. But before that, let’s just explain what is Media and Information Literacy.
Most people thinks that MIL is just about how we can use social media appropriately but no, this is a broad topic that we should learn but in this blog, we will focus on the introduction of what is Media and Information Literacy.
Media and Information Literacy is defined as a “combination of knowledge, attitudes, skills, and practices required to access, analyse, evaluate, use, produce, and communicate information and knowledge in creative, legal and ethical ways that respect human rights” (Moscow Declaration on Media and Information Literacy, 2012).
Media and Information Literacy teaches you to use information and media content in an ethical, efficient and effective manner. It answers your questions about how this media should be used. Is this information reliable or not? Do the messages that you have received was interpreted correctly? Media information Literacy will cure your ignorance in the things that you don’t understand in the media society.
Why is it important? It is important because, without Media and Information Literacy, people using media specifically social media will become nescient because they don’t know how to use that media properly especially in spreading the news that is not real which is called “Fake News”.
Not only fake news will be rampant but also those nonsense posts of some individual who makes their social media as diaries and shares videos and images that should be private. Without Media and Information Literacy, users will never know what is appropriate in the means of using social media or other types of media.
In conclusion, there are many types of literacy and one of them is the Media and Information Literacy. MIL helps us to correct the stupid things that we have done before by using media, especially social media. People these days are more engaged in social media not just like before so literacy in using media and accessing information should be disseminated to media users. Media literacy also lets us understand and access the information that we have gathered using media.
The key to a correct usage of media is the ability to know, understand, and access or critical thinking, in short,
Media and Information Literacy.
GIF links :
- https://giphy.com/explore/reading
- https://gifs.alphacoders.com/by_sub_category/241779
- https://www.pintower.com/media/801288958680217609
- https://www.independent.ie/world-news/and-finally/7-reasons-why-fake-news-goes-viral-according-to-experts-36283450.html
- https://digitalmarketingphilippines.com/fake-news-and-misinformation-why-it-matters-to-digital-marketers/
- https://www.codingdojo.com/blog/tech-literacy-empowerment-in-the-workplace
- https://omdsaid.com/in-scope-r-u-paying-attn-multi-screening-self-esteem-and-the-effects-on-advertising/
Maria 