Reading Response: Literacy in Multimedia America

While reading this, I tended to agree with almost everything that the author had to say. The classroom practices of inquiry and teaching the students how to look for information to answer the questions that they've raised; the safe classroom environment that students can learn to listen to others and express their own voices and reflect on their own experiences, is something that I have been passionate about if I get into a classroom. I think that in today's classroom it is so pressured for the 'perfect' student and that they should all be 'book-smart' and that gets in the way of being 'worldly-smart' . . . which I believe is more important. By being media literate, it will take us farther in life because it is something that we can use on a daily basis because we are bombarded with so much media and by being literate in what they are trying to say/do, it has the "potential to change the way we think, feel, and react to the world around us" (pg 87).

All Media Messages Are Constructions
I agree with that wholeheartedly. Things are so tweaked before any of the public actually get to see them, that we don't know if what we're looking at is reality or some constructed reality that those producing the show/news want us to see. "Depiction does not embody truth"( pg 91) is the whole premise of what media is today. We all interpret things differently depending on our social status and what our past experiences have been, so we need to teach students what to look for and how to interpret what they see intelligently.

Media Messages Are Representations of Social Reality
Social reality, according to the text, "refers to the perceptions about the contemporary world that are shared by individuals–their picture of the world around them" (pg 94). This is not completely accurate and I don't believe that it ever has been. We construct our realities and it is important to let our students know that. The questions posed in the text are really helpful guidelines that I would take into a classroom setting . . . perhaps even have them as something to accompany an assignment.

1. Who is speaking for whom in this text?
2. What sense do these representations make of the world we live in? What are the texts representing to us and how?
3. What are typical representations of groups in society?
4. What does this example represent to me?
5. What does it mean to others?

If the students can learn to look at media and simultaneously ask themselves these questions, perhaps they can better learn to observe the world around them and what forces are in work to sway their perceptions one way or another.

Audiences as Well as Individuals Negotiate Meaning
This is a double edged sword at times. When you are sitting in a classroom and they ask you to state your opinion after many others have already done that, students tend to change their opinion or statements to fit what everyone else has said; or they'll say what it really meant or was saying to them because they had a different experience in the past that has led them to see things a certain way. Each individual will pull something different out of any media. For example, if I hold up a picture of a rose, many people will see just the rose. Perhaps one will see that it is a yellow rose. Maybe something will think back to that yellow rose they saw at a funeral or hanging for a tree. Each will bring something different to that one media.

Practical use of everything media literacy has to offer each and every day with each form of media that is out there will make our students–and us–see the world in a different light. Everyone brings something different to the table and instead of saying "you're right" and "you're wrong" we need to allow our students the freedom and the safety to express what they see and how they are feeling.