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I really enjoyed readying Literacy for the 21st Century because I agree with everything the article says. I really believe that you really have to either embrace technology in order to succeed in our modern day society. One of the things that I hadn’t really thought as much about as much as some of the other ideas presented was the role of media literacy in our central democratic process.
In a time when candidates are elected through Web sites and 30 second commercials, and wars are fought in real time on the Internet and TV, a unique role of media literacy is to prepare citizens to engage in and contribute to the public debate.
I think this idea is particularly interesting in light of the 2008 Presidential Election. While candidates have had Web sites and have been featured in commercials for a pretty large amount of time, this election saw an explosion of messages in other online formats, such as social media.
I’m not really into politics but you have to give Obama props for social media use in his campaign as a way to engage others to contribute to democratic debate. Forrester research (that I can’t really cite since I no longer work at the company that paid to have access to it) found that social media users are often early adapters to new ideas or technology, spend more money, have higher affinity for and loyalty to a brand/product/person and are more engaged with them those brands/products/people those who are not social media users.
Obama tapped into this target audience with a cross-platform social media campaign that he used to raise funds, promote his campaign platforms, answer questions, provide information, etc. Not saying that how many fans you have on a Facebook page or how many videos you have on YouTube makes or breaks elections, but Obama has his own channel on YouTube, with 1,847 official Obama-sponsored/approved videos and has 6,403,492 fans on his Facebook page while McCain does not have a YouTube channel and has 544,726 fans on his Facebook page. Debates between voters on both sides developed on Obama’s blog, Facebook page, Twitter, and his other social media sites. Citizens were expressing their ideas and opinions and thinking analytically and creatively about concepts, some of the goals of media literacy.
There is also a ton of content created by everyday people using social media such as YouTube as a forum for debate by either posting speeches, interviews, debates, etc. or even satirizing the candidates using pop-culture heavy hitters such as the Simpsons or Saturday Night Live. While these vidoes might have appeared first on television, their inclusion on a comments-enabled site allows for citizens to participate in a way TV does not allow and illustrate their higher-order critical and creative thinking skills.
