From the World of High School to the World of Messages: Why We Need Media Literacy

Media literacy is becoming increasingly more important in the lives of teenagers and high schoolers. However, according to medialiteracy.com, as it becomes increasingly more important, America still lags behind other industrialized countries like England, Australia, and Canada in educating teenagers about media literacy. American schools should follow in the steps of these other countries and help its teenagers become media literate because, as mentioned previously, media literacy is a skill that is increasing in importance.

One of the reasons this skill is so important to teenagers is because teenagers face more media messages than ever before. Numerous studies abound, which try to find out how much media people experience. One such study, called Generation M, looked at media use of American kids from ages 8-18. They averaged the media use and found that kids spend nearly 6 1/2 hours per day using media. The study then determined that because kids used some media simultaneously, the kids were exposed to 8 1/2 hours of media messages per day. This obviously means that children's lives involve a saturation of media messages.

Due to the increase in media saturation in teenagers' lives, media messages now have significant influence on teenagers. Media literacy is a necessary skill for these kids because they need to know how to analyze the messages they see. If teenagers are not media literate then like the text book Media Literacy states, "They will have a false sense that they know what is going on in the world simply because they are exposed to so much information." Without media literacy, not only will teenagers have a false sense of what they know, they will be uncritical consumers and could be vulnerable to misleading messages.

Teaching media literacy skills to teenagers is also desirable because this is a perfect age to do so. At this age, kids are experiencing more messages and more messages that are complex. At this age, kids will be able to comprehend the information necessary to become media literate and will be old enough to use it in their daily lives. It is also important to teach it at this time in their lives because not every student will go to college. Some type of media literacy skills need to be taught by the time kids are in high school so kids will be prepared to enter a media centered world as a worker.

Media literacy essentially focuses on developing critical thinking skills. Perhaps if someone uses this term instead of media literacy, then one will understand how important this is to teenagers', specifically high schoolers', education. After all, critical thinking skills are something that teachers try to instill in students in a variety of subjects, especially in English classes. When teachers assign classic books to students, many times the teachers' goal is that students will critically analyze what the writer is trying to say in his or her work. Likewise, since media literacy focuses around critical thinking skills, then perhaps teachers should help students analyze media messages as critically as a traditional English assignment. If teachers and high schools can teach their students to think critcally about the media then they will truly be doing their jobs of preparing high schoolers for life outside of high school; a life that is full of messages.