Our society has become characterized by aggressive media. Information is constantly at our fingertips – whether it be through the books, newspapers, and magazines we read, the television we watch, the radio stations to which we listen, or the computers that connect us to the world in a matter of seconds. We can try to limit our media exposure, but it is impossible to avoid all media messages. As a result, we psychologically protect ourselves by automatically processing the media to which we are exposed. Theory of Media Literacy: A Cognitive Approach comprehensively explains how we absorb the flood of information in our media-saturated society and examines how we often construct faulty meanings from those messages. In this book, author W. James Potter enlightens readers on the tasks of information processing. By building on a foundation of principles about how humans think, Theory of Media Literacy examines decisions about filtering messages, standard schema to match meaning, and higher level skills to construct meaning. A central theme of Potter′s theory is the locus that governs the degree to which a person is media literate. The locus is enriched by developing skills as well as good knowledge structures on five topics: media effects, media content, media industries, real world parameters, and the self. Key Features Presents the first social scientific theory of the process of media literacy Explores a broad range of literature on media literacy written during the past two decades Focuses on how the human mind works, especially in this mass media-saturated society Theory of Media Literacy is an essential resource to a wide audience within the media discipline. The book provides empirical researchers with direction to test the theory and extend our understanding of how the media affect individuals and society. Practitioners will find it helpful in developing strategies to achieve goals and, at the same time, avoid high risks of negative effects. In addition, new scholars will find it to be an excellent introduction to various media literacy research.

Leading authority on media literacy education shows secondary teachers how to incorporate media literacy into the curriculum, teach 21st-century skills, and select meaningful texts.

What does it mean to be media literate in today's world? How are we transformed by the many media infrastructures around us? We are immersed in a world mediated by information and communication technologies (ICTs). From hardware like smartphones, smartwatches, and home assistants to software like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, our lives have become a complex, interconnected network of relations. Scholarship on media literacy has tended to focus on developing the skills to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media messages without considering or weighing the impact of the technol.

This updated Second Edition of Media Literacy introduces the fascinating world that operates behind visible media messages. This accessible edition includes updated figures and information about computers and the Internet. Media Literacy helps the reader to establish knowledge structures from which they can consciously filter out negative media effects, while acknowledging the positive instructional and entertainment value of media. The author provides the details necessary to facilitate media literacy, rather than merely surveying why it is needed; integrates theory with practice; includes exercises to help readers improve media literacy; emphasizes examples and exercises that support the key ideas of any media studies; and invites students to think like a psychologist, an economist, an advertiser, a journalist, a media critic, a producer, and a policy maker.

Completely updated, with current examples and new coverage of digital media, this popular handbook provides a range of qualitative approaches that enable students to effectively decipher information conveyed through the channels of mass communication - photography, film, radio, television, and interactive media. It aim is to help students develop critical thinking skills and strategies with regard to what media to use and how to interpret the information that they receive. The techniques include ideological, autobiographical, nonverbal, and mythic approaches. An Instructor's Manual is available to professors who adopt this new edition.

In Seven Skills of Media Literacy, best-selling author and renowned scholar W. James Potter provides readers with the practical guidance they need to make substantial improvements on seven major skills required to increase their media literacy. For each of these seven skills, Potter provides easy-to-follow algorithms and heuristics that structure the process of using the skill. Chapters also offer many exercises to help readers practice using these algorithms and heuristics while avoiding traps in thinking. The book is organized to guide readers progressively through the sequence of media literacy skills, starting with the most fundamental and building to the more complex skills. This book is a must read for those people serious about becoming more strategic in using the media to satisfy their own needs for information and entertainment and thereby avoid being exploited by media messages.

Provides ideas for teaching media literacy in English classes, showing how to analyze films and television and develop an elective film course.

Gramsci and Media Literacy: Critically Thinking about TV and the Movies offers a series of contemporary media analyses that use Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony to explore how dominant ideologies in media delivery, historical storytelling, and gender in today’s mass media environment become the commonsense viewpoints that maintain power structures in civil society. Through a media literacy approach, case studies of ideological delivery through television and film illustrate why Gramscian media theory serves as a valuable tool for revealing the many ways hegemonic thought operates in the media sphere and in everyday life, and they offer hope for counterhegemonic understandings.

Traditional media literacy models are mostly left-brained, inherited from the legacy of alphabetic literacy, the Gutenberg press revolution, and industrial mass media production. New digital media radically alter the environment: their nonlinear, multisensory, field-like properties are more right-brain oriented. Consequently, rather than focus exclusively on deconstructing the products of design objects (such as an advertisement «text»), digital learning should respond to the design of the system itself, including cultural and cognitive bias. Mediacology proposes a design-for-pattern approach called «media permaculture», which restructures media literacy to be in sync with new media practices connected with sustainability and the perceptual functions of the right brain hemisphere. In the same way that permaculture approaches gardening by establishing the natural parameters of its ecological niche, media permaculture explores the individual's «mediacological niche» in the context of knowledge communities. By applying bioregional thinking to the symbolic order, media permaculture redresses the standard one-size-fits-all literacy model by taking into account diverse cognitive strategies and emerging convergence media practices. Antonio López applies a practical knowledge of alternative media, cross-cultural communication, and ecology to build a meaningful theory of media education.