When I talk about "media literacy" – or the absence of same – I always run the risk of offending educated people. I never mean to be offensive, but you have to agree that the average, aware, involved, hard-working American with a high school or college education may not take kindly to being called a "media illiterate."
The trouble is, people tend to immediately associate the word "illiterate" with "can't read or write," as opposed to "not schooled in." Being not schooled in is what I mean when I talk about media literacy. It is the same as being not schooled in surgery, or accounting, or engineering, or education. No one would call a university president a "surgical illiterate." Nor would I call him or her a "media illiterate." It's just that he or she has not been schooled in it.
Today, in my classrooms at Grossmont Community College, in a suburb of San Diego, classes in media literacy begin. There will be around 130 students in all, in five classes. Four of the classes teach the basic tools needed to produce media content. Specifically, these students will be learning journalism, but the same tools apply to all the media businesses: books, movies, magazines, newspapers, radio, recording and television.
One of the classes will teach the basic tools needed to consume media content. These consumer tools are almost exactly the same as the tools the producers use. And that is an overlooked, but fundamental requirement in consuming media. In education, we call this consumer course a "survey" course. More than 90 percent of the students in the class will not become media producers; they will become surgeons or accountants or engineers or educators. They take this course, "Mass Media & Society," because a) it is a required course; b) they like mass media; and c) it looks more interesting – and easier – than philosophy.
There are dozens of scholars and academics who have written textbooks about the relationship between society and its mass media, and they are thoroughly instructive. However, they all tend to use social constructs and communication theory to explain the relationship, which is fine, but it misses some important nuts and bolts: the tools used by media producers to develop content, and the tools used by media consumers to interpret that content. And they are basically the same tools.
The awareness of these tools, and the ability to use them, whether to produce media or consume it, is what I call media literacy. But in the present American educational system, these tools are taught to the media producers of the future, but not to the media consumers. U.S. Labor Dept. statistics from 2007 show 1,007,000 Americans working as media producers. They learned the production tools in specific media production classes, at the high school and college/university levels. There are no equivalent classes for media consumers, all 300-plus million of them in America, in the general curriculum. Those 300 million are not schooled in media.
Is that important? Well, it's important enough for practically all institutions of higher learning to require classes like "Mass Media & Society." It's important enough to make "media literacy" a hot topic among secondary school educators and parent associations. It's important to those of us defending the media from extremism. And it is important in uncounted other ways, some of which you can already read about in this Media Literacy series, and some that will appear later.
It has been about seven years, through teaching both media producers and consumers, since I realized that the same tools were used by both sides. Today, another 130 start receiving the information. At this rate, the entire American population could receive the information in another 115,384.6 years. You always have to start somewhere.
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