Truth

What is Real?

What is propaganda? What is fake? What is real? What is a lie? What is the truth? Can you really rely on media to give you the answer?

What makes you twitch, what gets you mad, what makes you ask the burning questions? Is it the news, that Coca Cola advertisement, that man holding up the sign “Honk if you love Jesus”? This world is full of fake news, but how do you separate the real from the fictitious? Fact is fact, a lie is a lie, when it comes to propaganda they are one in the same.

When someone produces a media based message, and sends it out to the world, withholding specific details and information, it is a strategy. It is something that these people do, not naming any names…politicians *cough, and they do it so that we are basically hypnotized to believe that all the facts are included. Our minds are trained to believe that if the information has become a symbol to the public, it must be fact. The hardest thing to grasp about corporately funded news is that they imply to trick us. They set out to find new words and terms that sly away from fact and bring us to the only other alternative, belief.

How do you know what I’m saying is true? You don’t. But you better believe it.

Example:

THE STORY:

An email circular claimed that President Bush had the lowest IQ in presidential history, so the typing fingers of every journalist not currently employed by Fox began twitching with anticipation.The story claimed the Lovenstein Institute of Scranton conducted a four-month study of President Bush's IQ levels and concluded he ranked at a solid 91 due to his lack of grasp over the English language, limited use of vocabulary and lack of scholarly achievements, unless you count being able to say the alphabet backwards after doing five straight keg stands.

The Truth:

Proving that The Guardian newspaper and Doonesbury cartoonist, Gary Trudeau treat email forwards with the same level of skepticism as your mom, both picked up the story and ran with it. Had they bothered to check the source of the email, they would have traced it back to the reputable news source LinkyDink.com, and the original press release, which claimed that Dr. Lovenstein "lives in a mobile home in Scranton, Pennsylvania running an Internet business called College Degrees for Sale.”

Works Cited

"7 Clearly Fake News Stories That Fooled The Mainstream Media | Cracked.com." Cracked.com ? America's Only Humor & Video Site Since 1958. Web. 07 Oct. 2009. .

Media Literacy

Literally Literacy

The dictionary’s definition of the concept of media literacy is as follows: “Media literacy is the process of accessing, analyzing, evaluating and creating messages in a wide variety of media modes, genres and forms.”

That is correct for the most part, but it is so much more than that. To expand on the idea of media literacy is to dive into the media world itself, because how we interpret the media can literally change how it is written. For example if a billboard has millions of people reaching for the phone to contact a company they know their slogan has been a wild success, if little or no feedback derives, they are aware it was a failure. This failure had to do with the media literacy put out by the media itself. Media literacy is the ability to analyze and interpret the meanings of the media world around us, and each one of us has media literacy in our minds, but we all do it differently. In the book “Understanding Comics, the invisible man” by Scott McCloud, he explains to us the meaning of closure. Closure is how we see certain parts of everything around us. In media literacy the human race will see what it wants to see, for example if someone has always hated Rogers the phone company, anytime they see an advertisement they will immediately make their decision due to prior experience. This is another form of closure; we react and put together pieces to come up with our literal idea of the concept.

The literacy of media in my opinion is literally our closure on the media.

Have I really answered the question what is media literacy? Well, what does it mean to you?

Works Cited

Mccloud, Scott. Understanding Comics The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Paperbacks, 1994. Print.

Tallim, Jane. "What is Media Literacy?" Media Awareness Network | Réseau éducation médias. Web. 07 Oct. 2009. .

Defining

Mass Medium

The term mass media can mean so many things to a human being. Truly understanding it’s definition does not mean you understand its effects or what it does to society at large. We coexist together unaware that perhaps its not the mass of the media, perhaps it’s the medium. How we receive our information can come in so many forms; the television, radio, blogs etc. but how we receive it can take on another form; hearing, seeing and so on, and the term mass media means to me that there is a large source of information being delivered to me every hour of everyday.

We are all apart of a medium, we all deliver information and we all pass it on oblivious that we are making an impact. If you watch a television commercial and then brag to your friend about the latest styles at Hollister, you yourself have become a factor of mass media. The way you see the world differs from how the media sees you, it targets you and tries to engage you in its content. Whether or not the media is ready, you’re coming for it.

Works Cited

John, Berger. Ways of Seeing Based on the BBC Television Series. New York: Penguin (Non-Classics), 1990. Print.