What is media literacy?

Media literacy is the ability to access, evaluate and use information, it allows us access, critically evaluate and create or manipulate media.[1] it is closely related to your daily communication. With a new communication mechanism, social media has an impact on the information dissemination pattern and has an increasing effect on real society. Dual to the characteristic of social media, it put forward new requirements for the media literacy of the public, media industry and government agencies and officials.

 

Why is it important?

Social media progress with technologies, today is the 21st century, no matter where we go or what we do, we can’t run away from social media. I haven’t made a real phone call for a long time, social media could help us to gain a large amount of useful and un-useful information. It becomes extremely important for us to distinguish what is right and wrong. Rumours can be separated very fast, it’s our duty to keep a positive communication environment. People should not believe what they think is right, they have the right to know the truth and distinguish what is misleading.

 

From the interview with Smith Julie, she remainders me that most of the media only show what you want to see, they actually didn’t tell the truth to the public. The cause of this phenomenon is us, the audiences. Our self-esteem causes us to only care about the truth that is good for us. We choose to protect ourselves when cruel truth comes, everyone has his own comfort zone. however, in order to achieve varied views but factual consensus in our PLN. We must step out of the comfort zone, facing those truths that may hurt your feeling, then provide rational analysis and logical comments.