What is media literacy?
Before we provide an answer to this question, it is useful to try to define the two constitutive notions of this term,
that is media and literacy.
And let us start with the question: what is literacy?
That seems easy enough, literacy is the ability to read and write.
Fairly recently, say, few decades ago, this definition would be quite addequate.
If you knew how to read and write, you would be considered literate.
However, looking back in the past, we can say that literacy was not a universal phenomenon,
but rather a rare thing that belonged only to privileged few.
Take a look, for example, at this sculpture,
it is an ancient Egyptian sculpture of a scribe.
Literacy at the time was a rare skill belonging only to a small group of people surrounding the pharaoh himself.
It was so rare that apparently people believed that a person is deserving to be immortalized in the form of a sculpture
simply because of his ability to read and write.
If you look for a definition of literacy in a dictionary, you will find basically two definitions.
The narrow one, let us call it like that, defines literacy as the ability to read and write.
The wider one, let's call it like that, is that literacy is a possession of knowledge
that relates to a specified or particular subject.
This would effectively means that perhaps, nowdays, it's not simply enough to know how to read and write
in order to be considered literate,
or perhaps that a person needs to have certain knowledge required to function in a world in which he or she lives.
And let me illustrate this point with two funny clips from a comedy called "The Gods Must Be Crazy".
In the first clip, we see a group of Bushmen from the Kalahari desert in Africa, who can "read" animal trails.
In the second clip, we see one Bushman meets a lawyer from New York who had a crash and ended up in the desert.
Now, who is actually illiterate here?
Since only the lawyer has the ability to read and write, according to our narrow definition it would be a lawyer who is literate.
But, how about the second definition?
Who acctually possesses the knowledge required to survive and function in the desert?
If we define literarcy in this sense, then of course, it is the Bushman,
and in that sense he is actually right; she is illiterate, insofar as she's anable to function in the desert.
In that respect, her knowledge of American legal system can make her a fortune in New York,
but cannot provide any kind of effective survival for her in the desert.
This brings us actually to the core of our problem: what are the skills and knowledge necessary
to survive in today's modern jungle that we live in?
Here actually lies the answer to the question about the importance of media literacy.
In the era of technology, internet and mass media, simple ability to read and write is not enough.
You may very well know these things and still be dysfunctional in today's society.
And that is why a widely used term nowadays is not just literacy, or basic literacy that applies to reading and writing,
but actually functional literacy.
According to many thinkers, to be functionally literate in today's world, you need to know much more than just to write
you need to be able to use the internet, social networks, probably a smartphone nowdays as well.
This effectively means that being functional today means being media literate,
that is, to know how the media function in today's world, being able to access, critically reflect on, and produce media messages.