Category Archives: Media Literacy

The Brain of a Media Librarian

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Over the weekend, I was talking with a friend who is also a media librarian. She asked if I was going to watch the Super Bowl, which launched an interesting conversation about how we can’t turn our “media brains” off when watching anything. Watching an event like the Super Bowl raises so many media issues–politics in sports, televised violence, sexism–and that’s just the game. Add in the commercials and the half-time show and the spectacle turns into information overload to someone attuned to analyzing what they are watching.

The answer turned out to be: I watched the second half. Actually turned it on partway through the halftime show, and got to see part of the awful performance by the Black Eyed Peas.

I just want to point out a few things that intrigued me post-spectacle.

Salon posted an interesting article the day after the game, The Super Bowl’s Bloated, Chaotic Spectacle, which analyzed some of the media-related issues which surround the game. The article, to a certain extent, captures the experience of being the kind of attentive viewer that is compelled to analyze something that is seen by most people as “mere entertainment.” Of course, what entertains us say a lot about who we are and shouldn’t be taken lightly.

A couple of commercials that they don’t mention seem worth pointing out. One is this ad from Groupon that exploits the political strife in Tibet. I found it rather surprising that a company would decide to use such a sensitive political issue to try to hawk their goods. I haven’t seen any backlash against this ad, but there has been some against a tweet by Kenneth Cole who tried to capitalize on the recent events in Egypt. Perhaps the latter story created more of a stir because those events have been more in the news recently.

I did not see this other commercial during the game but came across it later via a Grist article. It is a piece of industry sponsored propaganda from Americans Against Food Taxes.

As the author of the Grist piece points out, the most outlandish part of the ad is the claim that we should resist the government trying to control what we eat and drink when the existing subsidies are what make soda so inexpensive to drink in the first place.

Finally, here is an interesting interview with Dave Zirin, author of A People’s History of Sports in the United States and co-author of the documentary Not Just a Game: Power, Politics & American Sports, who provides some insight into the role of politics in sports.

Not Just a Game | Media Education Foundation : taken from – http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=151
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

Transliteracy and Media Literacy

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I’ve recently become fascinated by the surge of interest in the concept of Transliteracy.  One of the things I find fascinating is that, for a new term, it’s not really all that new. In a way, it’s just a fancy new term for media literacy with a few different twists. The Center for Media Literacy defines media literacy as:

a 21st century approach to education. It provides a framework to access, analyze, evaluate and create messages in a variety of forms — from print to video to the Internet. Media literacy builds an understanding of the role of media in society as well as essential skills of inquiry and self-expression necessary for citizens of a democracy.

Similarly, the National Association for Media Literacy Education states:

Media literacy– the ability to ACCESS, ANALYZE, EVALUATE, and COMMUNICATE information in a variety of forms-is interdisciplinary by nature. Media literacy represents a necessary, inevitable, and realistic response to the complex, ever-changing electronic environment and communication cornucopia that surround us.

Although media literacy began as a reaction to the perceived negative influence of Mass Media during the middle of the 20th century, it has evolved to include and analysis and understanding of a variety of emerging media. In this way, media literacy is not much different than transliteracy, which The International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) defines as:

an umbrella term encompassing different literacies and multiple communication channels that require active participation with and across a range of platforms, and embracing both linear and non-linear messages.

Despite the fact that print is a communication medium, media literacy tends to focus on non-print or non-text print materials. Transliteracy attempts to be broader. IFLA, in its report “Transliteracy: take a walk on a wild side,” quotes Sue Thomas, who defines transliteracy as “what it means to be literate in the 21st Century,” that is, having a “unifying perspective” on the ability to “read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks.”

In this respect, media literacy can be considered a sub-topic of transliteracy. Regardless of how one chooses to use the terminology, the emerging field of transliteracy is building on the foundation set forth by media literacy.

Having a long-standing interest in media literacy in my work as a media librarian, the recent wave of interest in transliteracy fascinates me, and I hope to investigate and write more about it, especially as to how it relates to libraries.