Media Literacy

Media literacy is the concept that in a technologically advanced society, one must understand many types of media in addition to the written word. In order to interact with technologically advanced worlds, one must first understand the conventions of the mediums used. Literacy, in this context, denotes the ability to understand and participate in the use of new media. When watching a movie, because we have been exposed to the conventions of editing from a very young age, our brain is able to comprehend the flow of time and images in a cut. In this way a person must understand ertain conventions of a medium in order to create new content, take old content and re-use it and to engage in the content. Henry Jenkins argues that being literate in new media landscapes encourages skills such as play, performance, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, and negotiation.