The term literacy has traditionally meant to decode, interpret, and comprehend text. As technologies have evolved, this term needs to be broken down by discipline and continually updated. Visual literacy is the ability to work with visual cues by interpreting, creating, encoding, and decoding: seeing relationships, picturing circumstances, and visualizing solutions. Media literacy is more difficult to define simply because of the broad scope and spectrum for the term media. Media literacy has been defined many ways, but for these purposes will be defined as: one's ability to critically think about how to access, evaluate, & create messages and to participate with these messages in a variety of forms.
The processes of understanding and creating visual literacy are both extremely linear and follow established parameters. Comprehending visual literacy is often shown using Edgar Dale's Cone of Experience to measure the level of concrete or abstract thinking required: the base, or completely concrete, level displays the student doing the action; the middle, or beginning abstraction, level displays the student observing the action; and the top, or most abstract, level displays the student understanding knowledge through visual and verbal symbolisms. In creating media design to show visual literacy the student will follow the design principles based in the creation of visual arts: balance, sequence, emphasis, and unity (which uses the artistic elements of color, shape, line, space, and texture). Visual literacy has its roots in the functions of communication, intending to inform, instruct, persuade, entertain, or enrich. Finally, the student's use of specific colors and color combinations, layout, and design proportion will relay to the consumer an emotional response as well as transmission of the initial message. This response may be noise within the communication process, or bias used to persuade.
While visual literacy is extremely lineal, media literacy is anything but. The main focus of media literacy is to teach students to become critical thinkers and to ask questions, not look for answers in their daily work. Media literacy can either enlighten and democratize or become an unequal elitist force within a society. There are five core concepts of media: that is it constructed by an author, uses creative language containing its own rules, that the point of view different for different people, that they have embedded values, and that messages are sent to gain profit or power. The two parts of media, construction and deconstruction, are BOTH essential to developing a strong media literacy. Based on Thoman & Jolls article "Media Literacy: A National Priority for a Changing World," there are five key questions to apply in both construction and deconstruction of media. These five questions are companions to the five key concepts, and are as follows:
| concept | deconstruction questions | construction questions |
| authorship | Who created this message? | What am I creating? |
| format | What creative techniques are used to attract my attention? | Does the message reflect an understanding in format, creativity & technology? |
| consumers | How might different people view this differently? | Is my message engaging & compelling for my target audience? |
| content | What values, lifestyles & points of view are shown or omitted in this message? | Does content have clearly & consistently framed values & points of view? |
| purpose | Why is this message being sent? | Is the purpose communicated clearly & effectively? |
Both visual literacy and media literacy stress the importance of creation in gaining literacy. Both also stress the development and use of critical thinking skills in the creation and deconstruction processes. Both stress that authorship is not natural and is based in the experience and point of view of the creator. Finally, both forms of literacy show that without a doubt education must go beyond the traditional definition of literacy and begin to instruct students in supplementary forms of literacy that will be essential to their future as active, engaged, and functional citizens of the future.
That being said, media literacy does take some of its cues from visual literacy, but takes the ideas much further. Media does involve text in print, but it carries the concepts of emotional schema and bias through composition much further. Also, media literacy deals with all forms of media, from advertisements, to textbooks, blogs to spam. The vast cornucopia of formats within media make it innately more complex and less likely to lend itself to linear definitions.
** Compiled using WebCT video lectures, lecture notes for CI 501 and the following articles:
"The Changing Nature and Uses of Media Literacy" by Sonia Livingstone published in London, 2003, obtained from the on-line media collection at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Thoman, E & Jolls, T. (2004, September.) "Media Literacy: A National Priority for a Changing World" American Behaviorial Scientist. 48:1. from the Center for Media Literacy website.
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