What is media literacy?

In lay mans terms, media literacy is the ability to understand the massive flow of technology, media and electronic information today. Its the making sense of the webpage loading in front of you, or the magazine you purchased to peruse while you enjoy your morning Starbucks. Its taking the big, confusing world of technology and being able to organize into the steady stream of information it was intended to be.

When asked to blog about media literacy, I was reminded of a point in my life. My grandma is 82 years old, and this year, she decided it was the right year to learn how to use a computer, email, and the internet. She approached me about halfway through my senior year with the idea, and being the kind hearted family loving grandson I am, well, I obliged. I figured that this would be maybe a short half hour lesson, seeing as I was confident in my ability as a teacher, and heck, how can technology be that hard?

I quickly realized that what I was embarking on with her was like taking her to a different planet. The idea of the internet and email was about as foreign to her as space technology to me. Her media literacy rate would have been zero. For my generation, media literacy is a given. Allof my friends have the ability to be given a piece of technology, and with little effort figure out how to use it in minutes. Take the iphone or itouch for example. The first time you picked it up, how media literate were you? My guess would be that the learning curve was very short. Thats because our media literacy rate is high. We can observe a screen with adds, games, articles and videos, know where to click and what to listen to. We have the ability to put all of the information we are seeing and essentially "sift" it into the different categories of media.

while a large part of media literacy is the ability to interpret what we see, an equally important part is the ability to create. With modern technology one can be media literate enough to create a blog, post a video, or even create music for the world to here. We can not only enter the world of mass media, we can add to it, giving our generations media literacy a purpose.

In fact, media and media literacy has become so important that it literally is a necessity in life now. It is a constant influence that cannot be ignored both in the personal and business world. From facebook to moster.com, media literacy is a must for our generation.