KADUNA STATE UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

DEPARTMENT OF MASS COMMUNICATION
SCHOOL OF POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL

MSC MASS COMMUNICATION

COURSE CODE: MCM 804

COURSE TITLE:
COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA STUDIES

MEDIA STUDIES,MEDIA LITERACY AND MEDIA EDUCATION

BY

Georgina Y Bonat
KASU/MSCMCM/MCM/19/0017

COURSE LECTURER:
DR. BINTA KASIM MOHAMMED

APRIL, 2020
 INTRODUCTION

The media represents a crucial part of everyday communication and it has

become an imperative of time and lifestyle, for which educational systems are

preparing students for. The role of media in education is of great importance

because with ageing the possibility of using everyday media grows, which

enables the development of media literacy and effect of media culture.

Media literacy, education and studies represents an educational process which

tends to enable members of the community to creatively and critically study (on

the level of production, distribution and monitoring) with usage of technological

and traditional media of development and liberation of an individual and the

socierty, for democratization of communication (Zgrabljić Rotar, 2005).

The Ancient Greeks believed it was vital for a democratic society and

government to have literate and educated citizens. According to the

empowerment approach, it is equally important in the digital information age to

be media literate – to be able to understand, evaluate, and use digital,

multimedia information. As McLuhan noted, the new media are new languages

and one must be fluent in those languages to be considered media literate.

MEDIA LITERACY

It refers to accessing, understanding, interpreting, analyzing and self-creating

media content disseminated via mass communication channels. Media literacy

is defined by the Trent Think Tank on Media Literacy as ‘the ability to decode,

analyse, evaluate, and produce communication in a variety of forms. Media

literacy is our awareness regarding our mediated environment or consumption

of mass communication. It is our ability to responsibly comprehend, access, and

use mass communication in our personal and professional lives. Potter states

that we should maintain cognitive, emotional, aesthetic, and moral awareness as

we interact with media. Baran suggests a number of skills we can develop in

order to be media literate.

■has the ability to assess the credibility of information received as well as the

credibility of the information source;

■has the ability to recognize metaphor and uses of symbols in entertainment,

advertising, and political commentary;

■has the ability to discern between appeals to emotion and logic, and recognizes

covert and overt appeals;

Media Messages. Often, media literacy researchers reason that awareness of the

constructed nature of media messages is essential to a valid evaluation of media

content.

Media Audiences. Media literacy programs often feature an awareness of how

audiences interpret media content. Different people can experience the same

media message differently.

Media Effects. Several scholars hold that people should be aware of mass

media’s effects on individuals. For example, Byrne (2009) and Byrne, Linz, and

Potter (2009) both analyze a media literacy intervention on the negative effects

of viewing media violence. These interventions urged children to realize that

there is a difference between violence in the media and violence in the real

world. Also, they emphasized the negative effects of viewing violent material

and focused on ways to avoid these effects and evaluating characters that use

violence.

Media literacy is our awareness regarding our mediated environment or

consumption of mass communication. It is our ability to responsibly

comprehend, access, and use mass communication in our personal and

professional lives. Potter states that we should maintain cognitive, emotional,

aesthetic, and moral awareness as we interact with media. Baran suggests a

number of skills we can develop in order to be media literate.

MEDIA EDUCATION

According to the definition given in the UNESCO documents, Media Education

- deals with all communication media and includes the printed word and

graphics, the sound, the still as well as the moving image, delivered on any kind

of technology; - enables people to gain understanding of the communication

media used in their society and the way they operate and to acquire skills using

these media to communicate with others; - ensures that people learn how to
* analyse, critically reflect upon and create media texts;

* identify the sources of media texts, their political, social, commercial

and/or cultural interests, and their contexts;

* interpret the messages and values offered by the media;

*select appropriate media for communicating their own messages or

stories and for reaching their intended audience;

* gain or demand access to media for both reception and production.

Media education is part of basic entitlement of every citizen, in every

country in the world, to freedom of expression and the right to

information and is instrumental in building and sustaining democracy”

(UNESCO, 1999, p.273-274). In my view, this definition provides a

reasonably complete characterization of the main media educational goals.

There are several directions that can be distinguished within media education:

(a) Media education for future professionals — journalists (the press, radio,

TV, Internet, advertisement), moviemakers, editors, producers, etc.

(b) Media education for pre-service and in-service teachers — in universities

and teacher training colleges, and in media cultural courses within the system of

advanced training.
(c) Media education as a part of general education for secondary and

higher school students; it may be either integrated in the traditional

disciplines or autonomous (i.e. taught as a specialized or optional course)

(d) Media education in educational and cultural centres (community interest

clubs, centres for out-of-school activities and artistic development, etc.)

(e) Distance education of young and adult learners through television, radio,

and the Internet; an important part here belongs to media critique, a specific

sphere of journalism engaged in evaluation, analysis, and criticism of the mass

media.

(f) Autonomous continuous media education, which in theory can be life-long.

Therefore, media education in the modern world can be described as the

process of the development of personality with the help of and on the material

of media, aimed at the shaping of culture of interaction with media, the

development of creative, communicative skills, critical thinking, perception,

interpretation, analysis and evaluation of media texts, teaching different

forms of self-expression using media technology.

MEDIA STUDIES

Media studies is a discipline and field of study that deals with the content,

history, and effects of various media; in particular the mass media. The scope of
media studies is broader than that of professional journalism and

communication studies. Journalism is basically focused towards the

production and broadcasting of media contents, whereas communication

studies centres on the study of the various communication techniques and

processes. The thrust of media studies is to study the nature and effects of mass

media upon individuals and society thereby acquiring a distinct status within

humanities and social science. At the same time, it encompasses the more

professional areas like media production, mass communication and

journalism. In this sense, media studies can be taken as a broader umbrella for

journalism and mass communication studies.

Media studies adopts at least two semantic dimensions. The first continues

the traditional notion of critical scholarship focusing on the study of form and

effects of media. This still takes media studies as a component of cultural

studies giving precedence to critical inquiries into the contents. The second

dimension has a wider range of integrations of both theory and practice. Media

studies in this sense is not limited to the study of contents produced elsewhere,

but also sets compulsions to produce and prepare for critical inquiries within the

ssstipulated university space and time.

HISTORY OF MEDIA LITERACY, MEDIA EDUCATION

AND MEDIA STUDIES
The first media studies M.A. Program in the U.S. was introduced by John

Culkin at The New School in 1975. Culkin was responsible for bringing

Marshall McLuhan to ordham in 1968 and subsequently founded the centre or

Understanding Media, which became the New school program. In the U.K it

was developed in the 1960s.

Formally, media studies emerged from sociology and English studies and later

took on vocational media training. But when the television media began

to face unfriendly responses in Europe and America with the rise of soap operas

and horror shows during 1950s and 1960s, and when scholars in educational

psychology warned about TV being a deterrent to child rearing and

family relationships, sociologists began to pay attention to examining the

relationship between media and society. Media began to get more scholarly

attention within textual studies since the 1960s.

Media education in Africa was heavily influenced by the American model.

This was because the Europeans who were the colonial masters had no clear

academic model of journalism education. European colonial powers brought

into Africa the techniques of reaching large numbers of people scattered over

large areas. Printed publications and broadcasting were developed in the West

and imported by Europeans living in Africa (Murphy and Scotton 1987: 15).

Missionaries wanted to use publications to control schools by spreading

religious messages. Government wanted official gazettes, so much a part of

European governmental authorities. They trained Africans as printers and soon

Africans were producing their own publications. West Africans were far ahead,

publishing their own newspapers and pamphlets in the then Gold Coast (Ghana)

and Nigeria by the mid-nineteenth century. Until independence, African

journalists were mostly trained on the job. A few were enrolled in formal

apprenticeship systems such as the one operated by Argus Newspapers in South

Africa and Rhodesia (Murphy and Scotton 1987: 16). These programmes

mainly provided the technical skills needed to operate equipment and to

produce materials that could be formatted into a readable publication. Other

journalists were taken on as assistants by European publications, usually to help

produce materials for African audiences. The need to use the media for

development and political purposes brought about an upsurge in the number of

media institutions and facilities across Africa. Naturally, this also brought about

the need for the training of personnel to man these institutions and facilities .

Arising from this development, by 1972 there were at least 30 training

programmes in journalism and mass communication in Africa, with about two-

thirds of them in sub-Saharan Africa, excluding South Africa (Scotton 1972).

By then, arguments had emerged about what should be the orientation of the

training, and about the lack of African content in the programmes.

Media teachers today use the term ‘media education’, ‘media study’ and

‘media literacy’ almost interchangeably Media education’ as a broad description

of all that takes place in media-oriented classroom. “Media literacy” is the

outcome of work in either media education or media study. The more you learn

about or through the media, the more media literacy you have: media literacy is

the skills of experiencing, interpreting/ analyzing and making media products” .

CONCLUSION

In a global society that gets most of its information through digital networks, it

is incredibly important to know how and by whom media messages are made so

that as consumers we can discern how the mass media are being used to shape

our opinions. We can reply to or comment on messages in the mass media, or

we can demand a seat at the table when messages are being constructed. This is

the nature of participatory media outlined in the previous chapter. Being media

literate gives us the tools to participate well and with purpose

REFERENCES

Baran Stanley.(1994) Introduction to Mass Communication: Media Literacy

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Silverblatt, A. (2007). Genre Studies in Mass Media: A Handbook.

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