EGSC Commercials Discussion

During this discussion you will watch two very different commercials. This week it is important to read chapter 2 and chapter 4. Don’t watch them like a normal audience, but break down every element such as text, color, messages, why should the audience believe this product is better, who is the audience, hidden messages, does the audience really need this product, etc. Think beyond these examples. I know you are new to the idea of media literacy, but this is good practice for the assignments. The chapters this week and the video examples will help you understand the idea of media literacy better. Research is always an important part of media literacy. Looking up information about the company and product is important as well.

Commercial 1

Commercial 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=175GAmhgzSk

Introduction to Media Literacy
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Introduction to Media Literacy
Fourth Edition
W. James Potter
University of California, Santa Barbara
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Detailed Table of Contents
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Detailed Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Chapter 1 • Why Increase Media Literacy?
Our Message-Saturated Culture
Growth Is Accelerating
High Degree of Exposure
Coping
Automatic Routines
Advantages and Disadvantages
Programming Automatic Routines
Increasing Media Literacy
Media Exposure Habits
Product Buying Habits
Applying Media Literacy 1.1—How Much Time Do You Spend
With Media?
What Are Your Needs?
Applying Media Literacy 1.2—What Are Your Product Buying
Habits?
Key Ideas
Further Reading
Keeping Up to Date
Chapter 2 • How to Think About Media Literacy
Taking Out the Trash: Clearing Away Faulty Beliefs About Media
Literacy
Media Are Harmful
Media Literacy Will Destroy My Fun With the Media
Media Literacy Requires the Memorization of a Great Many Facts
Media Literacy Is a Special Skill
Media Literacy Requires Too Much Effort
Increasing Media Literacy
The Definition
The Big Three
Applying Media Literacy 2.1—Assessing Your Knowledge
Structures
Key Ideas
Further Reading
Chapter 3 • Mass Media Industries: Historical Perspective
Pre-Mass Media
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Development of Mass Media
Innovation Stage
Penetration Stage
Peak Stage
Decline Stage
Adaptation Stage
Current Picture
Life Cycle Pattern
Indicators of Peak
Convergence
Profile of Mass Media Workforce
Increasing Media Literacy
Applying Media Literacy 3.1—Thinking About Convergence in the
Mass Media Industries
Key Ideas
Further Reading
Keeping Up to Date
Chapter 4 • Mass Media Industries: The Economic Game
The Media Game
Applying Media Literacy 4.1—Estimating How Much Money You
Spend on the Media
The Players
The Goal
Advertising Is the Engine
Media Industries’ Strategies
Maximizing Profits
Constructing Audiences
Reducing Risk
Increasing Media Literacy
Key Ideas
Further Reading
Keeping Up to Date
Chapter 5 • Mass Media Audience: Industry Perspective
Identifying Opportunities
Geographic Segmentation
Demographic Segmentation
Psychographic Segmentation
Attracting Audiences
Appeal to Existing Needs and Interests
Cross-Media and Cross-Vehicle Promotion
Conditioning Audiences
Increasing Media Literacy
Applying Media Literacy 5.1—What Audience Segments Are You
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In?
Key Ideas
Further Reading
Chapter 6 • Mass Media Audience: Individual Perspective
Exposure Is Not the Same as Attention
Exposure
Attention
Exposure States
Decisions During Exposures
Filtering Decisions
Meaning Matching Decisions
Meaning Construction Decisions
Increasing Media Literacy
Natural Abilities
Applying Media Literacy 6.1—Personalized Search Results
Key Ideas
Further Reading
Chapter 7 • Mass Media Content
Message Formulas and Genres
Most General Formula: Next-Step Reality
Audience’s Perspective
Programmers’ Perspective
Narratives
Informing
Persuading
Entertaining
Applying Media Literacy 7.1—Analyzing Narratives
Electronic Games
Designing Electronic Games
Experience of Playing Electronic Games
Applying Media Literacy 7.2—Analyzing Electronic Games
Interactive Message Platforms
Social Contact
Sharing
Increasing Media Literacy
Mass Media Message Formulas
Applying Media Literacy 7.3—Analyzing Interactive Message
Platforms
Your Skills
Stronger Knowledge Structures About the Real World
Greater Awareness of Your Needs
Electronic Games and Interactive Message Platforms
Key Ideas
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Further Reading
Keeping Up to Date
Chapter 8 • Mass Media Effects
Media Effects Are Constantly Occurring
Four Dimensions of Media Effects
Timing of Effects
Type of Effects
Valence of Effects
Intentionality of Effects
Factors Influencing Media Effects
Increasing Media Literacy
Applying Media Literacy 8.1—Thinking About Media Effects
Applying Media Literacy 8.2—Recognizing Immediate Effects
Applying Media Literacy 8.3—Recognizing Long-Term Effects
Applying Media Literacy 8.4—What Have You Internalized From
the Media Culture?
Key Ideas
Further Reading
Keeping Up to Date
Chapter 9 • Springboard
Twelve Guidelines
1. Strengthen Your Personal Locus
2. Focus on Personal Usefulness as a Goal
3. Develop an Accurate Awareness of Your Exposure
4. Acquire a Broad Base of Useful Knowledge
5. Think About the Reality–Fantasy Continuum
Applying Media Literacy 9.1—Testing Awareness of Your
Knowledge Structures
6. Examine Your Mental Codes
7. Examine Your Opinions
8. Change Behaviors
9. Make Cross-Channel Comparisons
10. Become More Skilled at Designing Messages
11. Do Not Take Privacy for Granted
12. Take Personal Responsibility
Examples of Levels of Literacy
Reality Series on TV
Facebook Page
Key Ideas
Further Reading
Keeping Up to Date
Introduction to Appendices: Analyzing Media Literacy Issues
Appendix A. Analyzing Media Issues: Are Professional Athletes Paid
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Too Much?
Increase in Pay
Pay Now Too High
Non-Sustainability
Ruining the Games
Players
Owners
Fans
Conclusions
Further Reading
Keeping Up to Date
Applying Media Literacy A.1—Analyzing Criticism of Sports
Appendix B. Analyzing Media Issues: Is Media Company Ownership Too
Concentrated?
Consolidation of Ownership
Concentration of Power
Value of Localism
Value of Efficiency
Reduction of Competition
Limitations on Access
Ownership Access
Voice Access
Change in Content
Enriches Few People
Conclusions
Further Reading
Keeping Up to Date
Applying Media Literacy B.1—Analyzing Criticism of Media
Ownership
Appendix C. Analyzing Media Issues: Is News Objective?
Analyzing the Idea of Objectivity
News Is a Construction
Analyzing the Idea of Quality in News
Avoiding Fabrication
Avoiding Bias
Using the Best Sources
Avoiding Imbalance
Complete Story
Providing Full Context
Considering Standards for News
Journalist Standards
Audience Standards
Conclusions
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Further Reading
Keeping Up to Date
Applying Media Literacy C.1—Analyzing Criticisms of News
Appendix D. Analyzing Media Issues: Is There Too Much Violence in the
Media?
High Amount of Violence in the Media
The Public’s Narrow Conception of Violence
Filtering Out and Harm
Some People Are More Vulnerable Than Others
Vulnerable Groups
Third-Person Effect
We Are All Vulnerable
Reducing the Amount of Violence
Conclusions
Further Reading
Applying Media Literacy D.1—Analyzing Criticism of Media
Violence
Test Your Knowledge Answers
Glossary
References
Index
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Preface
The topic of media literacy is huge. If you do a Google search for “media literacy”
you will get over 16 million hits for websites. If you were to spend one minute
looking at each of these websites for 24 hours a day with no breaks, it would take
you more than 30 years to get to all of them. Clearly, there is too much for anyone to
read and absorb. This situation is likely to leave you asking: What is the core
essence of media literacy?
I asked myself this question about 25 years ago when I was designing my mass
media courses and wanted to take a media literacy approach rather than a
traditional academic approach of simply presenting a long list of facts. The mass
media were a different phenomenon than other college subjects such as a foreign
language, a historical period, or a type of math. The mass media are so integrated
into everyone’s everyday life that we all take them for granted. Also, the media
were so current and changing that it was hard to pin teach some facts that were
going to last for a long time. Thus I needed a different approach to teaching such a
dynamic everyday phenomenon. Because the mass media were so much a part of
everyone’s lives, I needed to present the information in a practical way rather in an
academic theory-based way. I needed to find a way to show students that there was
a lot they were taking for granted so I needed to sensitize them to many things that
were happening every day in their lives. This led to me asking questions such as:
What do students need to know about how the mass media are affecting them? What
do they need to know about the content? What do they need to know about the media
industries? Finding information to answer these questions was not difficult, because
even then there was so much published about the mass media. The challenge lay in
making decisions about what was most important. So I took a couple years getting
my notes ready to teach these courses. I eventually refashioned my notes into a book
which was published in 1994. After the seventh edition came out in the winter of
2013, my editor suggested that I also write a more introductory version, and so I
began working on this book—An Introduction to Media Literacy.
What distinguishes this book from Media Literacy, is that it is much shorter (by
about half) and more practical in its approach, that is, it presents less information
about the media industries, their content, their audiences and their effects. Instead
the focus is much more on the essential facts that students need to know then
translating those ideas into exercises that students can use to develop their
understanding of media literacy.
This book will show you this media literacy perspective and set you on a path to
exercise more power to use the media to achieve your own goals rather than letting
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the media use you to achieve their goals.
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Organization of the Book
This book is composed of 9 chapters and four issues appendices. The 9 chapters
will provide you with the essentials of media literacy that you can use to develop
your own perspective on media literacy, then use that perspective to debate the four
issues presented in the appendices.
In Chapter 1, I show you why developing media literacy is such an important thing
to do. Chapter 2 presents what I call the “media literacy approach.” The next six
chapters provide basic information about the four knowledge facets of media
literacy: Media industries, audiences, content, and effects. Chapter 3 helps you see
the media industries from a historical perspective so that you can appreciate the
challenges they have overcome to arrive at their current status, then Chapter 4
shows you why understanding the economic perspective is so important to media
literacy. Chapter 5 focuses on the audience from the industry’s perspective then
Chapter 6 examines the audience from the individual’s perspective. Chapter 7
analyzes media content and shows that all types of content rest on a foundation of
“one-step remove” reality. Chapter 8 will help you expand your vision about what
constitutes a media effect. Finally, Chapter 9 summarizes the book’s most important
ideas by presenting you with a dozen guidelines that you can use in your everyday
lives to increase your media literacy.
Each of these 9 chapter begins with a highlighting of the key ideas that structure that
chapter. The text in the chapter then explains those ideas in enough detail to prepare
you for the concluding section, which helps you to use the information in the chapter
to think in a more media literate manner. Most chapters present exercises to help
you think more deeply about the perspectives presented in the chapter and to use the
information in your own lives. At the end of each chapter is a list of places you can
go to get more information on the chapter topic and to keep up to date as we move
forward into the future.
I have included four appendices—each focusing on a different media issue. The
encountering of these issues can be incorporated at various places as you proceed
through the chapters or can be saved to the end of the course after you have
transformed the information throughout all 9 chapters into your own knowledge
structure on media literacy. Each appendix begins with a statement about how that
issue represents a debate or a controversy. I then briefly lay out the argument that
people typically use when addressing the issue. Next I present a description of the
situation, which is a set of facts that people typically use as evidence for the
controversy and information they site in support of their position. The heart of each
appendix is the analysis section, where I show you how to dig below the surface of
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the issue layer by layer to reveal its complexity. Because space is limited in each
appendix, I cannot a complete analysis that reveals all the layers and all the
complexity of each issue, but what I do present can be used as a model of how to
proceed when continuing with your own analysis of the issue.
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How to Get the Most Out of This Book
The first challenge we all face when confronting a new body of information is
motivation. We ask ourselves: Why should I expend all the effort to learn this? How
will learning this help me enough to make all that effort worthwhile?
Our initial answers to these questions are likely to make us feel that learning about
media literacy is not worth the effort because we feel that we already know a lot
about the media. We are familiar with a large number of websites, apps, recording
artists, and celebrities. We are already able to access a wide range of entertainment
and information, so why would we need to learn a lot more about the media?
This book will show you the answer to that question. By presenting you with some
key insights about things you don’t know about the mass media, you will be able to
expand your perspective into new areas. Your growing perspective will allow you
to exercise more control over your media exposures so that you can get more value
from those messages.
When you read each of these chapters, be strategic. Begin with the list of Learning
Objectives to alert you to the purposes of the chapter. Also, answer the Test Your
Knowledge questions at the beginning of the chapter; your answers will let you
know where the strengths and weaknesses are in your existing knowledge
structures. Next, use what you have learned from the chapter objectives and your
answers to the knowledge questions to formulate your own list of questions, which
will then be your reading strategy.
Now you are ready to read the chapter actively. By actively, I mean don’t just scan
the words and sentences; instead, keep your list of questions in your mind and focus
on those parts of the chapter that provide answers to your strategic questions. When
you have finished reading the chapter, close the book and see if you can articulate
the key ideas from that chapter. Check your recall by opening the book and looking
at the list of Key Ideas I have provided at the end of that chapter. Can you
remember only a random mass of facts, or can you envision an organized set of
knowledge structured by your questions?
If all of your questions were not answered in the chapter, then continue reading on
the topic beginning with the Further Reading suggestions presented at the end of
most chapters. Also, you might want to update yourself with fresher information so
check out the Keeping Up To Date suggestions. With many aspects of the mass
media, information changes quickly. As I wrote this book, I tried to site the most
current facts possible, but by the time you read the book, some of those facts and
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figures may have gone out of date.
Because media literacy is much more about using information instead of simply
memorizing facts, each chapter offers two features to help you internalize the ideas
in the chapter. The Applying Skills questions give you opportunities to employ each
of the seven media literacy skills by engaging more fully with the ideas in the text.
Also, the Applying Media Literacy feature presents you with extended exercises
that take you step-by-step through a process of using the information from the text in
a way that makes it relevant for your own experiences.
Finally, you will get more out of each chapter if you try to incorporate the
information you are learning into your own experience. Do not get caught in the trap
of thinking that it is sufficient to memorize the facts in each chapter and then stop
thinking about the material. Simply memorizing facts will not help you increase
your media literacy much. Instead, you need to internalize the information by
drawing it into your own experiences. Continually ask yourself, “How does this
new information fit in with what I already know?” “Can I find an example of this in
my own life?” and “How can I apply this when I deal with the media?” The more
you try to apply what you learn in this book, the more you will be internalizing the
information and thus making it more a natural part of the way you think.
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Ancillaries
edge.sagepub.com/potterintro
SAGE edge offers a robust online environment featuring an impressive array of
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20
encourage students to think critically
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To Conclude
This book is an introduction. It is designed to show you the big picture so you can
get started efficiently on increasing your own media literacy. It is important to get
started now. The world is rapidly changing because of newer information
technologies that allow you to create and share you own messages in addition to
accessing all kinds of information on just about any conceivable topic.
I hope you will have fun reading this book. And I hope it will expose you to new
perspectives from which you can perceive much more about the media. If it does,
you will be gaining new insights about your old habits and interpretations. If this
happens, I hope you will share your new insights and “war stories” with me. Much
of this book has been written to reflect some of the problems and insights my
students have had in the media literacy courses I have taught. I have learned much
from them. I’d like to learn even more from you. So let me know what you think and
send me a message at wjpotter@comm.ucsb.edu.
See you on the journey!
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Acknowledgments
Thank you Matt Byrnie for suggesting that I write Introduction to Media Literacy
to serve the needs of a different audience than my Media Literacy book, which is
now going into its eighth edition and has been translated into six languages over the
past two decades. And thank you Matt and Natalie Konopinski, Development
Editor, for steering me through the very challenging task of cutting the size of Media
Literacy in half, while not losing any of the key ideas; for helping me translate
those ideas into more practical expression without disregarding the rigorous base
of research; and for helping me write a book that would appeal to an audience
interested in media literacy but wanting a different approach than I had been
providing up to this point.
I thank the following reviewers for their thoughtful contributions and the
manuscript: Teresa Bergman, University of the Pacific; Michael A. Cavanagh, East
Carolina University; Lori Dann, Eastfield College; Tom Grier, Winona State
University; Rachel Alicia Griffin, Southern Illinois University Carbondale; Rachael
Hanel, Minnesota State University, Mankato; Nina Huntemann, Suffolk University;
Frank Nevius, Western Oregon University; Michael Plugh, Fordham University; Jeff
Shires, Purdue University North Central; Beatriz Wallace, Duke University; Ken
Wolfe, University of Missouri–St. Louis; Catherine Wright, George Mason
University; Jingsi Christina Wu, Hofstra University.
I also thank the many other talented people at SAGE that made this book possible. I
am especially grateful for Matt’s Editorial Assistant Janae Masnovi who did the
photo research; for Gabrielle Piccininni, the e-Learning Editor, who created the
many digital ancillaries that go along with this book; and for Ashlee Blunk,
Marketing Manager. Last but not definitely not least, I thank two people who did the
detailed work that readers often take for granted but who are responsible for the
quality of how the book looks and the words sound—Production Editor Laura
Barrett and Copyeditor Megan Markanich.
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About the Author
W. James Potter,
professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, holds one PhD in
communication studies and another in instructional technology. He has been
teaching media courses for more than two decades at Indiana University;
Florida State University; University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA);
Stanford University; and Western Michigan University. He has served as
editor of the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media and is the author of
well over 100 scholarly articles and over two dozen books, including Media
Literacy (now in its 8th edition), Media Effects, The 11 Myths of Media
Violence, Becoming a Strategic Thinker: Developing Skills for Success, On
Media Violence, Theory of Media Literacy: A Cognitive Approach, and How
to Publish Your Communication Research (with Alison Alexander).
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1 Why Increase Media Literacy?
Media literacy strengthens your ability to exercise control over the vast array of
messages you encounter through daily media exposure.
©iStockphoto.com/scanrail
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Test Your Knowledge: True or False
Before reading this chapter, think about which of the following statements you believe to be true and
which you believe to be false.
1. There is now so much information in our culture that people are cutting back on their time
with the media.
2. We should avoid media as much as possible in order to protect ourselves from its harmful
effects.
3. Automatic routines have far more disadvantages than advantages.
4. The best way to become more media literate is to stop encountering the media unconsciously
and to instead consciously process each message.
Answers can be found on page 247.
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Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, you will be able to do the following:
1. Identify how our culture is saturated with a constant flow of information from the media.
2. Recognize how you have been navigating through tshis flood of information unconsciously with
automatic routines that determine what gets filtered into your attention.
3. Describe the ways in which our mental programming is influenced by parents, institutions, everyday
experience, and the mass media.
4. Analyze your own media exposure and product buying habits.
5. Develop a well-informed skepticism about how the media have been shaping your automatic
routines to achieve their goals, often at the expense of you achieving your own personal goals.
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Our Message-Saturated Culture
Our culture is saturated with a flood of information. Most of this information is
delivered by media messages that aggressively compete for our attention.
Hollywood releases more than 700 hours of feature films each year, which adds to
its base of more than 100,000 hours of films they have already released in previous
years. Commercial TV stations generate about 48 million hours of video messages
every year worldwide, and radio stations send out 65.5 million hours of original
programming each year. In addition, users of a video platform such as YouTube
upload more than 100 hours of new video every minute of every day (YouTube,
2014). We now have more than 140 million book titles in existence, and another
1,500 new book titles are published throughout the world each day. Then there is
the World Wide Web—or Internet—which is so huge that no one knows how big it
really is. Google started indexing web pages about a decade ago and has now
cataloged more than 13.4 billion pages (de Kunder, 2013), which is a truly large
number. However, Google has barely scratched the surface of the web, because
these 13.4 billion pages have been estimated to be only 1% of all webpages
(Sponder, 2012).
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Growth Is Accelerating
Not only are we already saturated with media messages but the rate of production
of media messages is growing at an accelerating pace. More information has been
generated in the last two years than the sum total of all information throughout all
recorded history up until two years ago (Silver, 2012). And the rate continues to
accelerate!
Google Glass projects information directly into the wearer’s view with its Internetconnected glasses.
©iStockphoto.com/Wavebreak
Why is so much information being produced? One reason is that there are now more
people producing information and sharing it than ever before. Half of all the
scientists who have ever lived are alive today and producing information. Also, the
number of people in this country who identify themselves as musicians has more
than doubled in the past four decades, the number of artists have tripled, and the
number of authors has increased fivefold (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2013).
Another reason is that the technology now exists to provide easy-to-use platforms
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to create and share messages. For example, until recently if you wanted to produce
a recording of a song and share it with a large audience, you had to hire musicians
and rent a recording studio. Next, you had to make copies of the song (usually a
vinyl disc, cassette, or CD) and then go around to record stores to persuade those
managers to stock your album. Then you had to persuade program managers at radio
stations to play your song so audiences would hear it and want to buy it. Now all
you need is a computer with some easy-to-use software (like GarageBand) to
produce a recording of your song with high production values; then you upload it to
one of many music-sharing platforms. You can also be a videographer, a journalist,
a fiction writer, a photographer, or even a video game designer as a hobby and
make your messages easily available to millions of people, just like professional
artists. Or you could generate and share smaller scale messages such as e-mails and
tweets. There are now 2 billion Internet users worldwide, and they send and
receive 300 billion e-mail messages each day; Twitter has 500 million tweets per
day; and Facebook reports that 100 million photos are uploaded each and every day
(Pingdom, 2014).
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High Degree of Exposure
Over the last three decades, every new survey of media use has shown that people
on average have been increasing their exposure time every year. In your lifetime,
much of the increase in media exposure has been from video games and computer
usage, which was typically engaged at the same time as other media use, especially
listening to music or watching TV (Roberts & Foehr, 2008). Now the fastest
growing area of media exposure is with social media, which is increasing at a rate
of 37% a year on computers and 63% a year on mobile devices (Nielsenwire,
2012). It is clear that the media are an extremely important part of our everyday
lives.
Social media is the fastest growth area for media exposure, and users consume
most of it on mobile devices.
©iStockphoto.com/Csondy
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Coping
How do we try to keep up with all this information? One way to cope is to
multitask. A recent study of media use found that the average young person (8 to 18)
was exposed to about 8 hours of media messages but accomplished this exposure in
less than 6 hours per day, which indicates a considerable amount of multitasking
(Roberts & Foehr, 2008). With multitasking, a person can listen to recorded music,
text friends, and watch video on a pop-up window all at the same time and thus
experience 3 hours of media exposure for each hour of clock time.
Multitasking, however, is not a good enough strategy for helping us keep up with the
flood of information. Remember the figure of 13.4 billion webpages that Google
has indexed thus far? If you wanted to check out all these pages and you started
reading one every minute of every hour of every day with no breaks, it would take
you more than 25 centuries to get through all those pages! Even if you multitasked
by viewing five Internet pages simultaneously, it would still take you five centuries
to read them all. And that is just Internet pages. While multitasking helps increase
our exposure, it is not a good enough strategy to help us get out ahead of the
information glut.
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Automatic Routines
The powerful tool that the human mind uses to navigate through all this chaos is the
automatic routine, which is a sequence of behaviors that we learn from experience
then apply again and again with little effort. Once you have learned a sequence—
such as tying your shoes, brushing your teeth, driving to school, or playing a song
on the guitar—you can perform that task over and over again with very little effort
compared to the effort it took you to learn it in the first place. Think of the process
of learning to do something as the recording of instructions in our minds, much like
how computer programmers write lines of code that tell the computer what to do.
Once that code is written, it can later be loaded into our minds and run
automatically to guide us through that task with very little conscious thought or
effort.
We have developed automatic routines to help us filter out almost all mass media
messages and filter in only a tiny fraction of those messages. Thus, we encounter
almost all media messages in a state of automaticity—that is, we put our minds on
“automatic pilot” where our minds automatically filter out almost all message
options. I realize that this might sound strange, but think about it. We cannot
possibly consider every possible message and consciously decide whether to pay
attention to it or not. There are too many messages to consider. So our minds have
developed automatic routines that guide this filtering process very quickly and
efficiently so we don’t have to spend much, if any, mental effort.
33
Search engines help users sift through billions of webpages for information but may
still leave an overwhelming number of options that create a feeling of “information
overload.”
©iStockphoto.com/Yongyuan Dai
To illustrate this automatic processing, consider what you do when you go to the
supermarket to buy food. Let’s say you walk into the store with a list of 12 items
you need to buy, and 15 minutes later you walk out of the store with your 12 items.
In this scenario, how many decisions have you made? The temptation is to say 12
decisions, because you needed to have made a decision to buy each of your 12
items. But what about all the items you decided not to buy? The average
supermarket today has about 40,000 items on its shelves. So you actually made
40,000 decisions in the relatively short time you were in the supermarket—12
decisions to buy a product and 39,988 decisions not to buy a product. How did you
34
accomplish such an involved task in such a short period of time? You relied on
automatic routines that reside in your unconscious mind and reveal themselves to
you as your buying habits.
Our culture is a grand supermarket of media messages. Those messages are
everywhere whether we realize it or not, except that there are far more messages in
our culture than there are products in any supermarket. In our everyday lives—such
as when we enter a supermarket—we load an automatic program into our mind that
tells it what to look for and ignore the rest. Automatic processing guides most—but
certainly not all—of our media exposures. With automatic processing, we
encounter a great many media messages without paying much attention to them; thus,
we have the feeling that we are filtering them out because we are not paying
conscious attention to them. Every once in a while something in a message or in our
environment triggers our awareness of a particular message and we pay attention to
it, but most messages get filtered out unconsciously.
35
Advantages and Disadvantages
While there are major advantages to automatic processing, there are also some
serious disadvantages. To illustrate these advantages and disadvantages of our
automatic processing, think of how you use Internet search engines (like Google,
Bing, Yahoo, Ask). Search engines are great tools to help us sort through all the
information available on the Internet and alert us to particular sites that will
provide the most useful information for our needs. By typing in a few key words,
we can direct the search engine to navigate through the huge mass of information to
find just the bits we want. For example, if you Google information overload, you
will get 7.3 million results in.07 seconds. While this Google search is helpful in
going from 13.4 billion indexed pages down to 7.3 million pages—a filtering out of
99.95% of all webpages considered—it still leaves us with 7.3 million choices
about which sites to access. But Google doesn’t stop at this point; it continues
filtering by ranking those 7.3 million pages and displaying only the top choices on
the first screen of results it presents to you. How does it do this enormous amount
of filtering? It uses its special algorithm that factors in three things in its rankings:
popularity of sites as determined by how many visits a site gets from other people,
suitability of the site for you as estimated by your history of searching an Internet
usage (data gathered by Google), and payments from sites who want to buy a higher
ranking. This algorithm makes for a wonderfully efficient search experience—going
from 7.3 million relevant sites down to the “top 20.” But does the algorithm deliver
to you the sites with the most credible information? No, because the filtering
algorithm is dominated by a concern over popularity, rather than other criteria such
as credibility, most insightful information, or most current information. To
understand the value of the algorithm, we must understand how well the criteria
used by the algorithm matches our own criteria for the value of the search to us.
36
37
How is shopping in a supermarket similar to consuming media content?
© Jupiterimages/Creatas/Thinkstock
We cannot avoid using automatic routines; they are essential to our mental wellbeing. However, it is possible to rely too much on these automatic routines. When
this occurs, we get into a rut of paying attention only to the same kinds of messages
over and over. This limits our range of experience. When we rely too much on
automatic routines for filtering, we are in danger of narrowing down our world
rather than growing and expanding our experiences. To illustrate this, let’s return to
the previously given supermarket example. Let’s say you are very health conscious.
Had you been less concerned with efficiency when you went into the supermarket,
you would have considered a wider range of products and read their labels for
ingredients. Not all low-fat products have the same fat content; not all products
with vitamins added have the same vitamins or the same proportions. Or perhaps
you are very price conscious. Had you been less concerned with efficiency, you
would have considered a wider variety of competing products and looked more
carefully at the unit pricing, so you could get more value for your money. When we
are too concerned with efficiency, we lose opportunities to expand our experience
and to put ourselves in a position to make better decisions that can make us
healthier, wealthier, and happier.
38
Programming Automatic Routines
Because these automatic routines are learned, they are guided by a sequence of
memories. Think of these sequences of memories like mental programs that are
continually running in the back of your mind—that is, your subconscious. These
mental programs are like computer programs. Your computer relies on many
programs to do all sorts of things automatically so that you do not have to program
it from scratch every day. Likewise, your human mind relies on many mental
programs to guide you through all kinds of routines each day—thus, freeing you up
to think about other things.
This brings us to an important question: Who has been programming your mental
programs? The answer lies in the complex process of socialization—that is, as we
go through our everyday lives, we are continually influenced by all sorts of
authorities (such as parents, teachers, religious leaders, political leaders, etc.) who
tell us what to think about all sorts of things. One of those authorities is the mass
media with their flow of messages that constantly tell us how to think about what it
means to be well known, successful, happy, witty, attractive, and many other things.
Through the way they present news, they tell us what is important and what is not.
Through the way they tell entertainment stories, they show us how to behave in all
kinds of situations. Through the way they present messages from advertisers, they
shape our perception of what our personal problems are and how we can buy
products to solve those problems quickly. Thus, the media are constantly tinkering
with our mental programs to get us to think and behave in ways that serve their
goals. Because the programs that use their codes run automatically in our
subconscious minds, we are typically unaware of their subtle influence on us.
Unless we periodically analyze this programming, we cannot know the extent to
which the media have programmed us. When we find that particular media
messages have programmed us into a habit that satisfies their needs while
exploiting us, then we need to reprogram that code so that it helps us rather than
harms us.
39
Increasing Media Literacy
The purpose of this book is to help you increase your level of media literacy. In
order to do this, I need to present you with information on many different topics.
But information alone will not make you more media literate. You need to use the
information, so each chapter has this section—Increasing Media Literacy—where I
will present you with some guidelines to help you use the information from that
chapter. Each chapter also presents some Applying Media Literacy exercises to
help you practice using the information and generate new insights. The more you
think about the things you do in these exercises, the more aware you will become of
how the mass media operate and how they are influencing you subtly in your
everyday lives. That increasing understanding is an essential first step toward your
using the media better to achieve your own goals and to reduce the potential for
media influence to program you into unhappiness.
The more you are aware of how the mass media operate and how they affect you,
the more you gain control over those effects and the more you will separate
yourself from typical media users who have allowed the mass media to program the
way they think and behave. Let’s get started on this task of increasing your
awareness by examining two habits you likely take for granted: media exposure
habits and product buying habits.
40
Media Exposure Habits
The media have programmed our media exposure habits by presenting all kinds of
messages on every conceivable topic. They continually try to attract us to those
messages they think we will find most interesting then do everything they can to
encourage us to keep coming back to those messages for habitual exposures over
and over.
What media exposure habits do you have? To begin this analysis, estimate how
many hours you typically spend with the media each week. Don’t worry about being
super-accurate at this point; just make a wild guess. Then work through Applying
Media Literacy 1.1.
41
Product Buying Habits
Many people criticize the media—especially their advertising messages—for
making us buy things we don’t need. While this criticism sounds accurate on the
surface, it is faulty. The media do not force us to spend our money on things we
don’t need; instead, the media alter our beliefs about what we need. They move us
beyond thinking of needs as things we absolutely must have to survive and lead us
to believe that we have all kinds of other needs that are just as important. For
example, they make us believe that we have many types of social needs—that is,
we must look, act, and smell a certain way or other people will not like us. They
make us believe that we need to achieve certain kinds of lifestyles in order to be
successful, attractive, or happy. Once they have convinced us of the importance of
these needs, we go shopping to buy those advertised products that will help us
satisfy that increasing list of personal needs. Advertisers have programmed many of
us into a shopping habit. People in America go to shopping centers about once a
week—more often than they go to houses of worship—and Americans now have
more shopping centers than high schools. A decade ago, 93% of teenage girls
surveyed said that shopping was their favorite activity (Schwartz, 2004), and that
figure has not changed. Advertising works by programming our automatic routines
so that we shop even when it would be in our best interest to do other things.
Let’s analyze your product buying habits by looking at what kinds of products you
have been buying. Applying Media Literacy 1.2 begins with an analysis of your
food buying habits. At the most basic level, all you need to consume each day is
some bread and tap water in order to survive. However, few of us think only in
terms of survival when it comes to food. We also need variety. We need to
experience different tastes and textures of food. We have psychological needs for
food—that is, we eat some foods to excite us when we are bored and other types of
foods to comfort us when we are sad. However, there are times when the media
convince us we have a need but this lasts only long enough for us to buy a product.
But then when we get the product home, we realize that we don’t really have a need
for it, and it just sits there unused. Are there any foods in your kitchen that have sat
there for a week or two without you eating them? If so, think about why you had a
need to buy those foods then why that need evaporated and you were stuck with the
product.
As for grooming, we could get by with one bar of soap and a toothbrush. Or could
we? How many different kinds of needs do you have for grooming products? Is this
more or less than your friends? Have you been convinced by ads to buy certain
grooming products but then never use them?
42
As for clothing, we could function with the clothes we are wearing and one spare
outfit. But I am guessing that you have more than two outfits of clothing. Why?
Group them according to your needs—that is, which are your social clothes, your
business clothes, your exercise clothes, and so on? Which set of clothes contains
the greatest number of outfits? Why? Do you have clothes in your closet that you
rarely wear—or never wear? Why did you buy them? Work through Applying
Media Literacy 1.2.
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Applying Media Literacy 1.1
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How Much Time Do You Spend With Media?
This exercise asks you to try to be as accurate as possible in recording the number of hours you
spend with each kind of medium each week. Write your number of hours and minutes next to each
medium in the following list. Think about an average week. Remember that you can be doing more
than one of these at the same time.
_______ Reading magazines
_______ Reading newspapers
_______ Reading textbooks and other materials for classes
_______ Reading for pleasure
_______ Listening to the radio (in your car, portable players, at home, etc.)
_______ Listening to recorded music (non-radio, MP3 player, stereo system at home, etc.)
_______ Watching films at theaters
_______ Watching TV (messages of all kinds on your TV at home)
_______ Watching videos (on your computer, smartphone, and other screens)
_______ Working on a computer (word processing, doing research, etc.)
_______ Communicating on a computer (e-mailing, texting, social networking, etc.)
_______ Playing on a computer (games, visiting websites for entertainment, etc.)
_______ TOTAL (sum of all the figures down the column)
Now that you have completed this inventory, compare your inventory total to the wild guess you
made before starting this exercise.
* Are those two numbers the same?
* If they are not the same, which is larger?
* Does this surprise you? Why?
Next, look for differences in the amount of time you spend with different kinds of media in your
inventory.
* Do you have a zero on some lines?
If so, why have you been avoiding those media?
Have you had bad experiences with those media in the past?
* Which lines have the largest numbers?
Why do you spend so much time with those media?
Is it purely a habit, or are you continually generating wonderful experiences with those
media?
Now ask yourself THE BIG QUESTION: Am I spending my time most with those media that are
delivering the information and entertainment that would most strongly satisfy my own natural needs?
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What Are Your Needs?
Now that you have undertaken an analysis of your media habits and your product
buying habits, you are ready to analyze your personal needs. Take out a sheet of
paper, and write down your needs. This may be difficult if you have not thought
much about this before, but let’s get started. Begin by simply listing all your needs
as they pop into your head. At this point, simply brainstorm and list everything you
can. You may want to carry this list around for a few days so you can add to it as
other needs occur to you.
Next, organize your list into categories. Group all like needs together. For example,
you might have several social needs (e.g., make more friends, become more
popular), health needs (lose weight, exercise more, etc.), career needs, family
needs, school needs, and so forth.
After you have your categories, rank order your groups. Which set of needs is most
important to you? What set is second and so on?
The bottom line to all this analysis is to compare your needs to all the products you
own and see how well there is a fit. Have you been spending the largest portion of
your money on satisfying your most important needs? How about your time—that is,
have you been devoting most of your time to satisfying your most important needs?
How well have the products you purchased and use the most been satisfying your
needs?
Think of what you have done so far on this series of Applying Media Literacy
exercises as only a beginning. In the days and weeks to come, think more about your
needs and keep clarifying them. Then, as your needs become clearer and clearer,
keep comparing them to how you are spending your time and money. This
comparison will show you where you are using your resources to satisfy your real,
lasting needs and where you are wasting your resources on things that do not satisfy
you. Then make the adjustments to your habits to bring them more in line with
satisfying your most important needs. When you do this, you are taking more control
over programming your own mental codes.
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Applying Media Literacy 1.2
47
What Are Your Product Buying Habits?
1. First, go through your kitchen cabinets and pantry.
How many prepared foods (in boxes, cans, and bags) do you have compared to natural
foods (milk, fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, etc.)?
What proportion of those products are advertised brands, and what proportion are
unadvertised or generic?
2. Next, check your bathroom.
How many health and beauty aids do you have?
How many of those products are for basic health needs, and how many are image
enhancers?
What proportion of those products are advertised brands, and what proportion are
unadvertised or generic?
3. Now go through your clothes closet.
How many changes of clothes (outfits) do you have?
How many pairs of shoes do you have?
4. Finally, think about how you spend your time.
How much time do you take getting washed, groomed, and dressed each day?
How much time (how many times) do you spend eating and snacking?
What do you do with your leisure time? Are you active in satisfying your needs, or are
you passively sitting in front of the TV or listening to music, where you are being told
by others what your needs should be?
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Key Ideas
We live in an information-saturated culture where new information is being
created at an accelerating rate.
We cannot physically avoid the flood of information from the mass media, so
we have developed automatic routines to filter out almost all of these
messages.
These automatic routines are governed by mental programming that has been
influenced by parents, institutions, and experiences we have in our everyday
lives.
The mass media also influence our mental programming through our constant
exposure to their messages every day throughout our lives.
When our automatic routines truly satisfy our own needs, they are very
valuable because they are so efficient. However, when our automatic routines
instead serve to satisfy the needs of others—such as advertisers and media
programmers—they can make us unhappy and harm us.
When we periodically analyze our automatic routines, we can separate the
mental programming that serves to satisfy our real needs from that which takes
us in directions that can harm us.
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Further Reading
Silver, N. (2012). The signal and the noise: Why so many predictions fail—but
some don’t. New York, NY: Penguin Press. (534 pages with index)
The author documents the dramatic increase in information over the past several
decades and argues that most of this information is noise, which makes it more
difficult—rather than easier—to make good predictions and forecasts.
Wright, A. (2007). Glut: Mastering information through the ages. Washington,
DC: Joseph Henry Press. (252 pages with index)
The author, who characterizes himself as an information architect, takes an
historical approach to showing how humans have evolved in the way they generate,
organize, and use information. He argues that all information systems are either
nondemocratic and topdown (a hierarchy) or peertopeer and open (a network).
Tracing the development of human information, he uses perspectives from
mythology, library science, biology, neurology, and culture. He uses this historical
background to critique the nature of information on the Internet.
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Keeping Up to Date
For some chapters, the material I talk about is very fluid and quickly changes.
Therefore, some of the facts and figures I present may be out of date by the time you
read a particular chapter. To help you keep up to date, I have included some
sources of information that you can check out to get the most recent figures
available.
Infoniac.com (www.infoniac.com/hitech)
This site presents information about the growth of information in the world, and
more generally, it provides information about new developments in technologies.
Pingdom (royal.pingdom.com)
This is a blog written by members of the Pingdom team on a wide variety of topics
concerning the Internet and web tech issues. Pingdom is a company that provides
Internet services to companies around the world.
Statistical Abstract of the United States (www.census.gov/compendia/statab)
The U.S. Department of Commerce releases a new statistical abstract every year.
For updates on this material in this chapter, go to the Information &
Communications section.
WorldWideWebSize.com (www.worldwidewebsize.com)
This site constantly updates the size of the web from how many webpages are
indexed by the major search engines.
Sharpen your skills with SAGE edge at edge.sagepub.com/potterintro
SAGE edge for Students provides a personalized approach to help you accomplish your coursework
goals in an easy-to-use learning environment.
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2 How to Think About Media Literacy
Becoming more media literate enables you to take control over your engagement
with the media in order to achieve your own goals in life.
©iStockphoto.com/PeopleImages
52
Test Your Knowledge: True or False
Before reading this chapter, think about which of the following statements you believe to be true and
which you believe to be false.
1. People often criticize the media for the wrong things.
2. Media literacy is essentially critical thinking.
3. Everyone already has some degree of media literacy.
4. Some people are already so media literate that there is no more room for improvement.
Now read the chapter to see if you are right or if you have some faulty beliefs about media literacy.
Answers can be found on page 247.
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Learning Objectives
After studying this chapter, you will be able to do the following:
1. Analyze faulty ideas about the media and media literacy so that you can avoid falling into the traps
of that faulty thinking.
2. Explain the proactive definition of media literacy.
3. Define the three key components of media literacy.
4. Describe seven skills that can be used as tools for building useful knowledge structures.
5. Assess your own knowledge structures about the mass media.
As you learned in the first chapter, we are constantly flooded with a huge number of
messages from the mass media. We must screen out all but a tiny percentage. To
help us do this screening with the least amount of mental effort, we rely on
automatic routines where our minds efficiently filter out media messages without
thinking about the process until a particular message triggers our attention. This
automatic processing is governed by mental codes that have been influenced by
your history of media exposures. Becoming more media literate enables you to
understand these codes better and to reprogram them so that you can use the media
and their messages much better to achieve your own goals in life.
This chapter will show you what media literacy is. But first, we need to examine
some of the assumptions people make about media literacy so we clear away the
faulty beliefs.
54
Taking Out the Trash: Clearing Away Faulty Beliefs
About Media Literacy
Everyone holds many beliefs about the media. Some of these beliefs are accurate
but many are faulty. The faulty beliefs can get us into trouble, because they trap us
into thinking about the wrong things and they make us think that we are powerless to
change. These traps lead people to talk in circles, and this prevents them from
moving forward to a point where they can use media literacy to improve their own
lives. Let’s examine five of these traps. Once you see what these traps are, you can
avoid being caught in faulty reasoning.
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Media Are Harmful
Perhaps the most prevalent trap is getting caught in the belief that the media are
harmful so that the purpose of media literacy is to get us to avoid all media or at
least help us avoid the risks of harm. The trap lies in believing that the media are
only harmful. Of course there are risks with media exposures, like there are risks
with many things we do in our everyday lives. But there are also many wonderful
benefits that can be acquired through media exposures. Therefore, the purpose in
media literacy is not to help people avoid all media or even any particular kind of
message; instead, the purpose of media literacy is to help people recognize the
difference in messages between potential harm and potential benefits.
This trap is frequently seen when a new medium captures the public’s attention and
critics complain only about the dangers of that new medium and ignore the potential
for positive advantages. For example, the newest media have stimulated criticism
from people like John Sutherland, an English professor at the University College of
London, who argues that Facebook reinforces narcissistic drivel and that texting
has reduced language into a “bleak, bald, sad shorthand” (quoted in Thompson,
2009). He says that today’s technologies of communication that encourage or even
require shorter messages like Twitter have shortened people’s attention spans and
therefore limited their ability to think in longer arcs, which is required for
constructing well reasoned essays.
Fortunately there are sometimes people who take a more optimistic position with
the arrival of each new mass medium and point out its positive effects. For
example, Andrea Lunsford, who is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford
University, is convinced that the newer information technologies have actually
increased literacy. She says, “I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the
likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization.” In addition, she argues
that these new technologies of communication are not killing our ability to write
well but instead pushing it in new directions of being more personal, creative, and
concise. She reached this conclusion after systematically analyzing more than
14,000 student writing samples over a 5-year period. She explains that young
people today are much more adept at understanding the needs of their audiences and
writing messages especially crafted to appeal to them. For today’s youth, writing is
about discovering themselves, organizing their thoughts concisely, managing
impressions, and persuading their readers.
Media literacy is not just about fearing the media and worrying about protecting
one’s self and others from their potentially negative effects. Media literacy is also
about developing an appreciation for the many positive things the media offer us
56
and developing our abilities to take advantage of those positive things. Thus, we
need to develop a balanced perspective on the media and their influence. Media
literacy is also about adapting to our changing world rather than ignoring those
changes or denying that those changes are happening.
Media literacy increases a person’s ability to access a wide variety of messages,
no matter what technology is used to transmit them.
© Sven Hagolani/Corbis
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Media Literacy Will Destroy My Fun With the Media
Another trap in thinking about media literacy is that it requires a lot of dry analysis
and that this will destroy a person’s experience of fun with the media. People who
fall into this trap use the analogy of analyzing a joke by arguing that when we
analyze why a joke is funny, we lose the humor. Or when we overanalyze what our
favorite characters do in movies, we reduce our liking of those characters. With
these people, analysis is regarded as an acid that eats away at their fun, so they try
to avoid analysis.
This is a trap because media literacy is not about dissolving messages with
academic discourse; instead, it focuses on digging below the surface to see more
things in the message. This can more often lead to greater appreciation of the
messages rather than less fun.
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Media Literacy Requires the Memorization of a Great
Many Facts
It is a trap to think that media literacy focuses on the acquisition of a large number
of facts. This is faulty for several reasons. One faulty reason is that media literacy
is more focused on knowledge than on facts. Facts by themselves are not
knowledge any more than a pile of lumber is a house. Knowledge requires structure
to provide context and thereby exhibit meaning. Facts are ephemeral, while
knowledge is enduring. Facts go out of date quickly. If your education is simply
about the acquisition of a large number of facts, then your education will lose value
each year as more and more facts go out of date. But if your education has shown
you how to transform facts into knowledge, then you have a structure of meaning
that increases in value each year. A characteristic of higher media literacy is the
ability to transform information into knowledge structures and the willingness to
exercise that ability.
Another reason that this belief is faulty is because media literacy requires more
than knowledge; it requires the strengthening of a person’s skills and the person’s
personal locus. This is because knowledge cannot be memorized; instead, it has to
be constructed by you. And the construction process relies on tools (which are your
skills) and a plan (which is your personal locus).
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Media Literacy Is a Special Skill
People often talk about media literacy as if it is “critical thinking.” This term has
little usefulness in defining media literacy because it has so many different
meanings. Some people think critical thinking is simply being critical of the media,
while other people have many different meanings (see Box 2.1). While each of
these definitional elements has value to increase understanding of media literacy,
when we load them all onto one term it gets confusing.
In a larger sense, it is a trap to think that media literacy is any one particular kind of
skill; instead, benefits come from the use of a cluster of skills. Furthermore, the
skills that are the most useful to media literacy are skills that we already have to
various degrees and already use every day.
These are the skills of analysis, evaluation, grouping, induction, deduction,
synthesis, and abstraction (see Figure 2.1). We all have some ability with each of
these skills, so the media literacy challenge is not to acquire these skills; rather,
our challenge is to get better at using each of these skills as we encounter media
messages.
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Media Literacy Requires Too Much Effort
A fifth trap in thinking about media literacy is to believe that it requires too much
effort because there is so much involved in becoming media literate. This is a trap
if you think that media literacy is a category, rather than a continuum. It is faulty to
think that you have to do 1,000 difficult things in order to enter the category of
media literacy.
Media literacy is not a category—like a box—where either you are in the category
or you are not. For example, either you are a high school graduate or you are not;
either you have a driver’s license or you do not. Instead, media literacy is best
regarded as a continuum—like a thermometer—where there are degrees. We all
occupy some position on the media literacy continuum. There is no point below
which we could say that someone has no literacy, and there is no point at the high
end of the continuum where we can say that someone is fully literate; there is
always room for improvement.
There is always opportunity to improve. Many of these opportunities require very
little effort. When you understand the media literacy perspective (to be explained in
the next section), you will begin to see all sorts of opportunities to improve your
level of media literacy in your everyday lives.
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Box 2.1: CRITICAL THINKING
There are many different meanings for critical thinking:
* Criticizing the media and not accepting many of their practices
* Becoming more open-minded
* Analyzing media messages in more depth to appreciate the craft of production
* Thinking more broadly about the media and their effects on society
* Elevating one’s quality of experience with the media
* Becoming more aware of the economic and political impact of the media
* Regarding the media in a more cultural context
* Becoming more skeptical of the media and their influence on individuals
* Developing a more refined aesthetic sense of quality in media messages
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* Being more active in processing media messages rather than taking things for granted
63
Increasing Media Literacy
Now that you have seen the traps in thinking about media literacy and how to avoid
them, it’s time to focus on what media literacy is. In this section, I present you with
the core set of ideas that includes a definition and its three key components.
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The Definition
Media literacy is a set of perspectives that we actively use to expose ourselves to
the mass media to interpret the meaning of the messages we encounter. We build our
perspectives from knowledge structures. To build our knowledge structures, we
need tools, raw material, and willingness. The tools are our skills. The raw
material is information from the media and from the real world. The willingness
comes from our personal locus.
What is a perspective? I’ll illustrate this with an analogy. Let’s say you wanted to
learn about the earth. You could build a 100-foot-tall tower, climb up to the top,
and use that as your perspective to study the earth. That would give you a good
perspective that would not be blocked by trees so that you could see for perhaps
several miles in any direction. If your tower were in a forest, you would conclude
that the earth is covered with trees. But if your tower were in a suburban
neighborhood, you would conclude that the earth is covered with houses, roads, and
shopping centers. If your tower were inside the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New
Orleans, you would conclude something quite different. Each of these perspectives
would give you a very different idea about the earth. We could get into all kinds of
arguments about which perspective delivers the most accurate or best set of ideas
about the earth, but such arguments are rather useless. None of these perspectives is
better than any other. The key to understanding the earth is to build lots of these
towers so you have many different perspectives to enlarge your understanding about
what the earth is. And not all of these towers need to be 100 feet tall. Some should
be very short so that you can better see what is happening between the blades of
grass in a lawn. And others should be hundreds of miles away from the surface so
that you can tell that the earth is a sphere and that there are large weather
formations constantly churning around the globe. The more perspectives you have
from which to experience the media, the more you will be able to see and
appreciate in the media, their messages, and their effects on you.
Figure 2.1 The Three Components of Media Literacy
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The Big Three
The three key components of media literacy are personal locus, knowledge
structures, and skills. These three are necessary to build your wider set of
perspectives on the media. Your personal locus provides mental energy and
direction. Your knowledge structures are the organizations of what you have
learned. Your skills are the tools.
Personal Locus
Your personal locus is composed of goals and drives. The goals shape the
information processing tasks by determining what gets filtered in and what gets
ignored. The more you are aware of your goals, the more you can direct the process
of information seeking. And the stronger your drives for information are, the more
effort you will expend to attain your goals. However, when your locus is weak (i.e.,
you are not aware of particular goals and your drive energy is low), you will
default to media control where you allow the media to exercise a high degree of
control over exposures and information processing.
The more you know about your personal locus and the more you make conscious
decisions to shape it, the more you can control the process of media influence on
you. The more you engage your locus, the more you will be increasing your media
literacy.
Knowledge Structures
Knowledge structures are sets of organized information in your memory.
Knowledge structures do not occur spontaneously; they must be constructed with
care and precision. They are not just a pile of facts; they are constructed by
carefully crafting pieces of information into an overall design. The structure helps
us see patterns. We use these patterns as maps to tell us where to get more
information and also where to go to retrieve information that we have previously
built into our knowledge structures.
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Exercising media literacy transforms the many discrete pieces of information you
encounter through messages into an organized knowledge structure.
©iStockphoto.com/erikrei
Information is the essential ingredient in knowledge structures. But not all
information is equally useful to building a knowledge structure. Some information
is rather superficial. If all a person has is the recognition of surface information
such as lyrics to TV show theme songs, names of characters and actors, settings for
shows, and the like, he or she is operating at a low level of media literacy, because
this type of information addresses only the question of what. The more useful
information comes in the form of the answers to the questions of how and why. But
remember that you first need to know something about the what before you can
delve deeper into the questions of how and why.
With media literacy, we need strong knowledge structures in five areas: media
industries, media audiences, media content, media effects, and the real world. With
good knowledge in these five areas, you will be able to make better decisions
about seeking out information, working with that information, and constructing
meaning from it that will be more useful in serving your own goals.
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In this book, I will help you get started on the first four of these knowledge
structures. These four are focused on a different major facet of the media:
industries, audiences, content, and effects. The fifth knowledge structure—the real
world—is just as important. However, in order to build your knowledge structures
about the real world, you need to seek out your own direct experiences rather than
rely on what the media tell you. For example, the best way to learn about political
campaigns is not to read about them in books or websites or to watch news reports.
The best way to learn about political campaigns is to run for office yourself. When
you run for a major office—or even when you help someone else run—you acquire
a wealth of real-world information that will help you make good assessments about
the credibility of media messages about political campaigning. Likewise, people
who have played sports will be able to appreciate the athletic accomplishments
they see on TV to a greater depth than those who have not physically tested
themselves with those challenges. People who have had a wide range of
relationships and family experiences will have a higher degree of understanding
and more in-depth emotional reactions to those portrayals in the media.
Knowledge structures provide the context we use when trying to make sense of
each new media message. The more knowledge structures we have, the more
confident we can be in making sense of a wide range of messages. For example,
you may have a very large, well-developed knowledge structure about a particular
TV series. You may know the names of all the characters in that TV show. You may
know everything that has happened to those characters in all the episodes. You may
even know the names and histories of the actors who play the characters. If you
have all of this information well organized so that you can recall any of it at a
moment’s notice, you have a well-developed knowledge structure about that TV
series. Are you media literate? Within the small corner of the media world where
that one TV show resides, you are. But if this were the only knowledge structure
you had developed, you would have little understanding of the content produced by
the other media. You would have difficulty understanding trends about who owns
and controls the media, about how the media have developed over time, about why
certain kinds of content are never seen while other types are continually repeated,
and about what effects that content may be having on you. With many highly
developed knowledge structures, you could understand the entire span of media
issues and therefore be able to “see the big picture” about why the media are the
way they are.
Let’s see how well developed your knowledge structures are about the mass media
(see Applying Media Literacy 2.1). If you are not able to answer many of these
questions, don’t worry too much about it. Most people struggle with these
questions. However, this struggle should be taken as an indicator that your
knowledge structures could be a lot better when it comes to the mass media. The
following six chapters will help you acquire a great deal of the information you
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need to make these knowledge structures a lot stronger.
Skills
To construct our knowledge structures, we need to use skills. What skills are most
important to media literacy? Many people answer this question with this fuzzy
phrase: critical thinking. This term is very popular within writings about media
literacy but it creates a problem because everyone seems to have a different
definition for what this is (see Box 2.1). While each of these definitional elements
is important and useful, putting them all together into one term creates a lot of
confusion. You can avoid this problem of fuzzy thinking by focusing on seven
specific skills that can be used as the essential tools for building useful knowledge
structures. These are the skills of analysis, evaluation, grouping, induction,
deduction, synthesis, and abstracting. We use these tools to mine through the large
piles of facts so that we can uncover the particular facts we need and brush away
the rest. Once we have selected the facts we need, we shape those facts into sets of
information and carefully fit those pieces of information into their proper places in
a knowledge structure.
Analysis is the breaking down of a message into meaningful elements. As we
encounter media messages, we can simply accept these messages on the surface or
we can dig deeper into the message itself by breaking them down into their
components and examining the composition of the elements that make up the
message. For example, with a news story, we can accept what a journalist tells us
or we can analyze the story for completeness—that is, we can break the story down
into its who, what, when, where, why, and how to determine if the story is complete
or not.
Evaluation is making a judgment about the value of an element. This judgment is
made by comparing a message element to some standard. When we encounter
opinions expressed by experts in media messages, we could simply memorize those
opinions and make them our own. Or we could take the information elements in the
message and compare them to our standards. If those elements meet or exceed our
standards, we conclude that the message—and the opinion expressed there—is
good, but if the elements fall short of our standard, then we judge the message to be
unacceptable.
There is a lot of evidence that people simply accept the opinions they hear in media
messages without making their own evaluations. One example of this is the now
widespread opinion that in the United States the educational system is not very
good, and a big reason for this is that children now spend too much time with the
media—especially TV. To illustrate, the National Center for Education Statistics
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(NCES) is an agency of the U.S. federal government that uses standardized testing
to assess the level of learning of America’s youth in reading, science, and
mathematics each year and then compares their levels of learning with youth in 65
other countries. The 2012 Student Assessment report says that adolescents in the
United States are ranked 24th in reading, 28th in science, and 36th in mathematics
(National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2012). Critiques of the U.S.
educational system use information like this to argue that adolescents spend too
much time with the media, and this makes their minds lazy, reduces their creativity,
and turns them into lethargic entertainment junkies. If this happens, children will not
value achievement and will not do well in school.
This belief is faulty because it blames the media, not the child or the parent, for
poor academic performance. It also focuses only on the negative effect and gives
the media no credit for potentially positive effects. However, when we look
carefully at the research evidence, we can see that the typically reported finding is
wrong and that when we look even more carefully, there are several effects
happening simultaneously. For example, the typically reported finding is that TV
viewing is negatively related to academic achievement. And there is a fair amount
of research that reports this conclusion. What makes this faulty is that this
relationship is explained better by something else—IQ. School achievement is
overwhelmingly related to IQ. Also, children with lower IQs watch more TV. So it
is IQ that accounts for lower achievement and higher TV viewing. Research
analyses that take a child’s IQ into account find that there is no overall negative
relationship; instead, there is a much more interesting pattern (see Potter, 1987a).
The negative relationship does not show up until the child’s viewing has passed the
threshold of 30 hours per week. Beyond that 30-hour point, the more TV children
watch, the lower their academic achievement, and that effect gets stronger with the
more hours they watch beyond that threshold. This means that academic
achievement goes down only after TV viewing starts to cut into study time and
sleep. But there is no negative effect for less than 30 hours of viewing per week. In
fact, at the lowest levels of TV viewing, there is actually a positive effect—that is,
a child who watches none or only a few hours a week is likely to do less well
academically than a child who watches a moderate amount (around 12 to 15 hours
per week). Thus, the pattern is as follows: Children who are deprived of the source
of information that TV provides do less well in school than children who watch a
moderate amount of TV; however, when a child gets to the point where the amount
of TV viewing cuts into needed study time, academic performance goes down. TV
—as well as the Internet and all other forms of the media—have potentially
positive as well as negative effects. TV exposure can displace constructive
behaviors such as studying, but TV can expand our experience, teach us valuable
social lessons, and stimulate our imaginations. Preventing children from watching
TV can prevent a potentially negative effect, but it also prevents positive effects as
well.
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Evaluation is an essential media literacy skill. Weigh the evidence against popular
opinions on a possible link between children’s media consumption and their
academic performance.
©iStockphoto.com/aphrodite74
©iStockphoto.com/joebelanger
When we pose the question, “What effect does viewing TV have on a child’s
academic performance?” we could give the simple, popular answer: There is a
negative effect. But now you can see that this answer is too simple—it is
simpleminded. It is also misleading because it reinforces the limited belief that
media effects are negative and polarized and that the media are to blame.
The reason faulty beliefs are such a dangerous trap is because they are selfreinforcing. By this, I mean that as people are continually exposed to faulty
information, they feel even more secure that their faulty beliefs are accurate. They
feel less and less motivated to challenge them. When someone points out that the
information on which their beliefs are based is faulty, they do not accept this
criticism because they are so sure that they are correct. Thus, over time, they are
not only less likely to examine their beliefs but also less tolerant of the possibility
that beliefs other than their own are correct.
Grouping is the skill we use to put elements into categories. It essentially requires
us to compare and contrast across elements to determine how the elements are
different (contrasting) so that we can create the groups. Then we need to determine
how the elements are the same (comparing) so that we can put similar elements
together into the same group.
The key to using the grouping skill well is constructing one or more classification
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rules, which tell us which characteristics to look for in the elements when doing the
comparing and contrasting. For example, if we want to group content on TV, one
classification rule might be the intention of the programmer, so we look for
characteristics in TV messages to tell us whether the programmer’s intention was to
entertain us, to inform us, or to persuade us.
The media tell us what classification rules are, so if we accept their classification
rules, we will end up with the groups they want us to use. But if we make the effort
to determine which classification rules are the best ways for us to organize our
perceptions of the world, we will end up with groupings that have more meaning
and more value for us.
Induction is inferring a pattern across a small number of elements and then
generalizing the pattern to all elements in the larger set. When we examine the
result of public opinion polls, we can see that many people are using elements in
media stories to infer patterns about real life, and this creates faulty beliefs about
real life. For example, when people are asked about health care in this country,
90% of adults say that the health care system is in crisis; this is what many news
stories and pundits tell the public. But when people are asked about their own
health care, almost 90% feel that their health care is of good quality. About 63% of
people think other people’s doctors are too interested in making money, but only
20% think their own doctor is too interested in making money. People are using
elements they have learned in media messages to dominate their perception of a
pattern in real life. They accept a faulty belief because they do not take their own
real life experience into account when inferring a pattern—that is, they do not use
induction well, instead preferring to use elements from mass media stories and not
the elements from their own lives when inferring a pattern.
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Faulty reasoning can lead to false beliefs. For example, many people think that
violent crime is more prevalent than crime rates indicate, following exposure to
frequent media reports of sensationalized crimes.
©iStockphoto.com/belterz
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This faulty use of induction also shows up in other beliefs. For example, public
opinion polls about crime for years have shown that typically only about one
person in six thinks crime is a big problem in their own community, whereas five
out of six say that crime is a big problem in society (Whitman & Loftus, 1996).
People think this way because most do not experience crime in their own lives and
therefore do not think it is a big problem where they live. However, they are
convinced that it is a big problem in society. Where could the public get such an
idea? From the media’s fixation on deviance in the news. Also the news media
prefer to present sensationalized events rather than typical events. So when a
crime is reported, it is usually a violent crime, following the news ethic of “if it
bleeds, it leads.” Watching evening newscasts with their highlighting of crime and
violence leads us to infer that there must be a high rate of crime and that most of it
is violent assaults. But in reality, less than 20% of all crime is violent. More than
80% of all crime is property crime, with the victim not even present (U.S. Bureau
of the Census, 2013). Furthermore, the rate for violent crime has been declining in
this country since the mid-1980s, yet very few people are aware of this decline.
Instead, most people believe that violent crime is increasing because they
continually see crime stories and gory images in the media. They have fashioned
their opinions on sensationalized events, and this type of information provides no
useful basis to infer an accurate picture about crime. As for education, 64% give
the nation’s schools a grade of C or D, but at the same time, 66% give their public
school a grade of A or B. As for religion, 65% say that religion is losing its
influence on U.S. life, whereas 62% said religion is becoming a stronger influence
in own their lives. As for responsibility, almost 90% believe that a major problem
with society is that people don’t live up to their commitments, but more than 75%
say they meet their commitments to families, kids, and employers. Nearly half of the
population believes it is impossible for most families to achieve the American
Dream, whereas 63% believe they have achieved or are close to the American
Dream. And 40% to 50% think the nation is moving in the wrong direction, but
88% of Americans think their own lives and families are moving in the right
direction (Whitman, 1996).
Deduction is using general principles to explain particulars—typically with the use
of syllogistic reasoning. A well-known syllogism is (1) All men are mortal (general
principle). (2) Socrates is a man (particular observation). (3) Therefore, Socrates
is mortal (conclusion reached through logical reasoning).
When we have faulty general principles, we will explain particular occurrences in
a faulty manner. One general principle that most people hold to be true is that the
media, especially TV, have a very strong negative effect on other people. They have
an unrealistic opinion that the media cause other people to behave violently. Some
people believe that if you allow PSAs (public service announcements) on TV about
using condoms, children will learn that it is permissible and even a good thing to
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have sex. This is clearly an overestimation. At the same time, people underestimate
the influence the media have on them. When they are asked if they think the media
have any effect on them personally, 88% say no. These people argue that the media
are primarily channels of entertainment and diversion, so they have no negative
effect on them. The people who believe this say that they have watched thousands
of hours of crime shows and have never shot anyone or robbed a bank. Although
this may be true, this argument does not fully support the claim that the media have
no effect on them; this argument is based on the false premise that the media only
trigger high-profile, negative behavioral effects that are easy to recognize. But there
are many more types of effects, such as giving people the false impression that
crime is a more serious problem than it really is or that most crime is violent.
Synthesis is the assembling of elements into a new structure. This is an essential
skill we use when building and updating our knowledge structures. As we take in
new information, it often does not fit into an existing knowledge structure, so we
must adapt that knowledge structure to accommodate the new information. Thus the
process of synthesis is using our new media messages to keep reformulating,
refining, and updating our existing knowledge structures.
Abstracting is creating a brief, clear, and accurate description capturing the essence
of a message in a significantly smaller number of words than the message itself.
Thus, when we are describing a media message to someone else or reviewing the
message in our own minds, we use the skill of abstracting. The key to using this
skill well is to be able to capture the “big picture,” or central idea, of the media
message in as few words as possible.
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Applying Media Literacy 2.1
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Assessing Your Knowledge Structures
Let’s do a quick assessment of your knowledge structures about the mass media. For now, don’t
worry about whether your answers are correct or incorrect; you will find that out as you read
through the book. Instead, think about how many of these 20 questions you feel confident in
answering. Even if you are not able to answer more than a few—or any—of these questions with
confidence, that is okay. For now! You are not expected to have any of this information in your
memory banks.
Mass Media Industries
1. How many mass media are there?
2. Can you list the mass media ordered by how old each is?
3. What is the most dominant mass medium today?
4. What is the most influential force shaping the mass media today?
5. Why is advertising regarded as the engine that powers the mass media industries?
6. How do the mass media businesses maximize their profits?
7. Why is risk so high in the mass media industries?
Mass Media Audiences
8. What is long tail marketing?
9. Why do the mass media businesses no longer seek large, general audiences?
10. What are the major segmentation schemes used by mass media businesses?
11. How is audience exposure different from audience attention?
12. What is the transported exposure state?
13. How do audiences typically make filtering decisions?
14. How is meaning matching different than meaning construction?
Mass Media Content
15. What is the most important content formula used by mass media message
producers?
16. Do you know what a genre is? If so, how many genres of content can you name?
17. What are the three meta-genres of mass media content?
Mass Media Effects
18. Can you tell the difference between process effects and manifested effects?
19. What is the difference between an attitudinal effect and a physiological effect?
20. How many factors of influence that lead to media effects can you name?
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Key Ideas
The five key traps you need to avoid when thinking about media literacy are as
follows:
The media are always harmful.
Increasing my media literacy will destroy my fun with the media.
Increasing my media literacy will require me to memorize a great many
facts.
Media literacy is a special skill.
Increasing my media literacy will require too much effort.
Media literacy is a set of perspectives that we actively use to expose
ourselves to the mass media to interpret the meaning of the messages we
encounter.
The three key components of media literacy are personal locus, knowledge
structures, and skills.
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Further Reading
Adams, D., & Hamm, M. (2001). Literacy in a multimedia age. Norwood, MA:
Christopher-Gordon. (199 pages, including glossary and index)
Coming from an educational technology background, the authors argue that media
literacy needs to include media analysis, multimedia production, collaborative
inquiry, and networking technologies. They present many practical ideas to help
teachers guide their students to learn how to get the most out of messages in all
forms of media.
Potter, W. J. (2013). The skills of media literacy. Las Vegas, NV: Knowledge
Assets, Inc. (224 pages, including references and glossary)
This book presents a detailed description of the seven essential skills of media
literacy along with exercises to help readers develop those skills.
Sharpen your skills with SAGE edge at edge.sagepub.com/potterintro
SAGE edge for Students provides a personalized approach to help you accomplish your coursework
goals in an easy-to-use learning environment.
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3 Mass Media Industries: Historical
Perspective
Video content has adapted from being watched on a traditional TV to being
watched on laptops and other mobile devices through websites such as YouTube,
founded by Chad Hurley and Steven Chen (pictured).
© ZUMA Press, Inc. / Alamy
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Test Your Knowledge: True or False
Before reading this chapter, think about which of the following statements you believe to be true and
which you believe to be false.
1. Although civilization is more than 4,000 years old, the mass media have been around for less
than two centuries.
2. Film is the oldest of all the mass media.
3. The mass media as a whole employ one of the largest workforces in the U.S. economy.
4. There are currently more women than men working in the mass media industries.
Answers can be found on page 247.
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Learning Objectives
After studying this chapter, you will be able to do the following:
1. Apply the life cycle pattern to organize information about the mass media by describing how the
media grow, mature, peak, decline, and adapt.
2. Identify the stage of development for each of the mass media.
3. Identify the factors currently strongest in each mass medium that are responsible for its current
stage of development.
4. Recognize the differences in the sizes of the workforce across the mass media.
5. Apply the information you learn in this chapter toward increasing your own media literacy.
In this chapter, I present you with a map of the most important ideas about the how
the mass media industries have developed over time to arrive at what they are
today. In the first section of this chapter, I show you the key developments that led
to the creation of the mass media. Then we will look at how the mass media
industries have developed over time using a life cycle metaphor. This builds to a
discussion of how the mass media industries look today. The final section helps you
to use these historical patterns to increase your level of media literacy.
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Pre-Mass Media
Humans have always communicated with one another for as long as there have been
humans. Initially this communication was accomplished through speech utterances
and body language; then humans began creating symbols that could be preserved.
The earliest known symbols are in the form of paintings on the walls of caves from
about 30,000 BC. Then humans developed writing systems around 4,000 BC.
Writing remained an individual activity where one person recorded his or her
thoughts on a single surface (e.g., clay, parchment) that preserved those thoughts
and allowed another person to read them at a later time. People who wanted to
make multiple copies of the writing had to create a copy by hand one copy at a
time.
Not until the 15th century was a technology invented that allowed for multiple
copies of a piece of writing to be made relatively quickly when Gutenberg invented
a printing press using movable type. During the next several centuries, the printing
press was improved, but it wasn’t until the middle 19th century when additional
technological inventions greatly expanded human’s ability to communicate. The
invention of the telegraph allowed messages to be sent over long distances very
quickly, and the invention of photography allowed humans to capture, store, and
share images for the first time. Then in the 20th century, the number of
technological innovations greatly expanded human’s capacity for communication
first with the invention of the motion picture, wireless transmission of information
with radio then TV, then the invention of computers and the Internet to give all
humans the ability to interact in large numbers immediately all over the world.
The amount of technological innovation that took place in the 20th century was far
greater than all the technological innovations in human history combined up until
that time. This set off a period of change in human communication that happened so
fast and so recently that we are still trying to make sense of it.
One way that scholars have attempted to make sense of all this change in human
communication was to draw a distinction between interpersonal communication
that has been around for thousands of years with mediated communication where
the new technologies were used to disseminate messages to many people
instantaneously even when they were spread out geographically. Scholars labeled
this mediated form of communication mass communication because messages were
being mass produced much like the way that products were being mass produced in
factories. Scholars further believed that there was a mass audience for the media,
where the term mass did not refer to a large audience as much as it referred to a
certain type of audience, where all people were the same—that is, they had the
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same needs and reacted the same way to media messages. Sociologists in the early
20th century believed that society had become so industrialized with standard jobs,
standard products, and standard lifestyles that society had turned people into parts
of a large public machine and that individuals were becoming both isolated and
alienated from other members of society. They argued that heavily industrialized
countries were not just producing standard products at a high rate for the public but
that they were also shaping the lives of people by turning them into a mass audience
where messages reached everyone quickly and where everyone simply assimilated
the same messages as they were presented. Thus, people were vulnerable to the
power of the mass media.
This initial belief that the mass media were creating a mass audience was gradually
rejected as sociologists began noticing that not all people were reacting to media
messages the same way (Bauer & Bauer, 1960; Cantril, 1947; Friedson, 1953).
However, the term mass communication is still used, but there is no evidence to
support the belief that all people are members of the same mass audience. Instead,
there are many audiences. Today, even the highest rated prime-time TV series does
not attract more than about 3% of the total viewing audience. Even with events such
as the Super Bowl, only about 35% of Americans watch. And more important, the
people who do watch the Super Bowl do not all experience the same thing. Some
viewers are elated as their team is winning, others are depressed as their team is
losing, some are happy that there is a reason to party, and others have no idea
which teams are playing the game. There is little common experience. Also, during
the viewing, people talk to each other and …