Media Literacy and Critical Thinking - Definition

Imagen por Geralt, tomada de Pixabay

 Media Literacy is an analysis used to decipher implicit intentions or arguments behind media texts to question these. All media present a message in a text. In the context of media analysis, a text is not only as something that is written. A text is anything that communicates a message. Some examples of non-conventional texts are: commercials, webpages, songs, billboards, advertisements, or even illustrations. With critical thinking we can analyse messages to which we are exposed in the media. Thus we can understand implicit, hidden or subliminal messages

It's all about taking a second look to discover, for example, a deeper message in a song. Or decipher strategies in an advertisement to sell a product.

Media literacy is important because it helps you avoiding being manipulated by these strategies.

Media texts have a target audience, which is closely related to the text purpose (entertaining, informing, persuading, making momney, explaining, arguing). Target audience is characterized in term of age, sex, education, economic and social status, ocupation, lifestyle, values, beliefs, tastes, etc. A succesful media text is shaped by these characteristics.