Media literacy is a term that means many different things to different peoplescholars, educators, citizen activists, and the general public. This article reviews the variety of definitions and presents a synthesis of commonalities that most definitions of media literacy share. The review presents an overview of how media literacy has been treated as an issue in curriculum design within the institution of education, and then how it has been treated as an intervention by parents and researchers.A relatively new topic, media literacy is popular not just among media scholars but among the general public of educators, consumer activists, and parents concerned about their children's risk of media exposures. ''Media literacy'' as a keyword in a Google search yields 765,000 hits, and using that same keyword in a narrower search within Google Scholar still yields a substantial literature of more than 18,700 articles. These articles were produced by scholars as well as concerned citizens from almost every part of the world. Almost all of the writing about media literacy was published in the past three decades. With mass media changing in the past two decades with digitization of information and convergence across channels of transmission, more scholars were attracted to this topic.The vast size of this fast growing literature and the wide range of backgrounds and interests of the scholars writing about media literacy make it challenging to review the ideas expressed. This state-of-the-scholarship essay focuses on three general issues: definitions, curricula, and interventions. It is more concerned with raising questions than with arguing fordefinitive answers, and it is more divergent in its attraction to many different sub-topics and approaches than it is convergent toward a single definition or set of best practices.
This is a critical analysis of how cultivation has been conceptualized in theory and research. Cultivation indicators are exatninedfor their meaning in texts, the meaning received by viewers, and the distinction between estimations and bel@s. The mnstruci of television exposure is analyzed in terms of the assumptions of uniform messages and nonselective viewing, as well as the conception of time and dominance. The nature of relationship is illuminated through the assumptions of linearity, asymmetry, control variables, causation, level of generality, mainstreaming, and resonance. Remmmendations are provided to suggest ratisions for conceptualizing the existing theory and extending it. Suggestions for extension include reconceptualizing the effect and the relationship, developing a typology of fleets, mnsidering the context of other simultanwus influences, pmviding analysis over time, and examining the process of influence on individuals and on the messages. ultivation refers to the long-term formation of perceptions and beliefs about the world as a result of exposure to the C media. It was introduced by George Gerbner in 1969 with the publication of "Towards 'Cultural Indicators': The Analysis of Mass Mediated Public Message Systems."In that article, he argued for the importance of moving beyond examining short-term effects of the media to look at how the media exert subtle but cumulative effects over a long period of time. He posited that "changes in the mass production and rapid distribution of messages across previous barriers of time, space, and social grouping bring about systematic variations in public message content whose full significance rests in the cultivation of collective consciousness about elements of existence" (Gerbner, 1969, p. 138). Rather than use the phrase "long term effects," he used "cultivation" because he was interested in the more diffuse W. James Potter is Associate Professor in the
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