Has media literacy been dying? - by Tomás

Has media literacy been dying?

By Tomás Felipe Azi.

Have you ever felt like you haven't been able to know if a news article is fake news or not, what a movies message was about, if you say yes to any of these, you might be a victim of lack of media literacy:

Media Literacy boils down to one simple concept which is vague enough to include all types of mediums (Cinema, Animation, News, etc). It is the concept of being able to analyze a medium with a critical eye, so as an example: Analyzing a movies message and seeing if a news article is true or not.

The concept of media literacy summarized.

In recent years, media literacy has been getting worse with the surge of short form content, which makes it easier to spread misinformation about current trending topics such as: 

• The ongoing wars with countries or conflicts going inside of other countries (Ukraine and Russia, Palestine and Israel, Afghanistan, etc)
• Debates within how to try and make the world a better place (Political figures, Current laws, Economics, etc)
• Dramas online that start because of accusations (Twitter, Tiktok, Youtube, etc)

 Book reading has also gone on a downhill for quite a bit, even with outside factors its still noticeable that people have gone out to read less and browse on the internet more, statistics below show the current number of books read per year (For the statistic of people browsing online, you figure it out because I'm too lazy to try and make another statistic.)

Note: India reads the most books but the books they read by year isn't specified.

So after clearly noticing this downwards spiral of people believing fake news and not deciding to read literature, what can we do to help? There is quite a few options such as:

• Reading Books and news articles of recent news
• Spending less time online and more time working out your brain
• Developing a critical lens for movies, series, musics, etc.

Another practice that may help with developing your critical self is learning metaphors, as an example, imagine if oranges meant death, if you learned that from one show you can oftenly notice that when a characters eats oranges, the next scene is them dead, that is developing your knowledge on metaphors.

Overall, it can take a long time to recover your critical self, but with enough effort and less TV, you may be able to fully enjoy literature again.