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“Media literacy,” as Dave Yanofsky, the executive director of Just
Think!, puts it, “is the ability ...to understand, analyze, and deconstruct
media images. Its aim is to make [kids] literate about the way
media works, the way it’s constructed, the way it’s delivered, and the
way people access it.”
This may seem like an odd way to think about “literacy.” For most
people, literacy is about reading and writing. Faulkner and Hemingway
and noticing split infinitives are the things that “literate” people know
about.
Maybe. But in a world where children see on average 390 hours of
television commercials per year, or between 20,000 and 45,000 commercials
generally, 10 it is increasingly important to understand the
“grammar” of media. For just as there is a grammar for the written
word, so, too, is there one for media. And just as kids learn how to write
by writing lots of terrible prose, kids learn how to write media by constructing
lots of (at least at first) terrible media.
A growing field of academics and activists sees this form of literacy
as crucial to the next generation of culture. For though anyone who has
written understands how difficult writing is—how difficult it is to sequence
the story, to keep a reader’s attention, to craft language to be
understandable—few of us have any real sense of how difficult media
is. Or more fundamentally, few of us have a sense of how media works,
how it holds an audience or leads it through a story, how it triggers
emotion or builds suspense.
It took filmmaking a generation before it could do these things well.
But even then, the knowledge was in the filming, not in writing about
the film. The skill came from experiencing the making of a film, not
from reading a book about it. One learns to write by writing and then
reflecting upon what one has written. One learns to write with images
by making them and then reflecting upon what one has created.
This grammar has changed as media has changed. When it was just
film, as Elizabeth Daley, executive director of the University of Southern
California’s Annenberg Center for Communication and dean of the
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