Media Analysis: Seven Skills of Media Literacy and Children as a Special Audience
Seven Skills of Media Literacy
Read Chapter 2 carefully on the seven skills of media literacy and apply as many of them as you can them to this clip of President Obama's appearance on the Tonight show with Jimmy Fallon.
Seven Skills Prompts:
Analysis - break down a message into meaningful elementsWhat are the meaningful and significant elements in this skit? Who are the players and what are they performing? How is a tone conveyed?
Grouping - determine which elements are alike in some way; determining how a group of elements is different from other groups of elements. What are some of the consistencies in the skit? What are the variety of jokes / humor / irony?
Evaluation - judge the value of an element; the judgment is made by comparing a message element to some standard. Where would tahis performance fit with others of the same nature? Can you think of one?
Induction - infer a pattern across a small set of elements, then generalizing the pattern to all elements in the set. Once the skit has begun what patterns can you discern? How long into the skit did it take?
Deduction - use general principles to explain particulars.Can you expect all of the political/economic statements to be true? Why or why not?
Synthesis - assemble elements into a new structure. What can you discern from the evidence of a politician appearing on a late night talk show for entertainment?
Abstraction - create a brief, clear, and accurate description capturing the essence of a message in a smaller number of words than the message itself. Summarize this session fully but briefly based on the above insights. Include any elements such as context, genre, satire, irony, history, etc.
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Applied Theory: Children as a Special Audience
Read Chapter 5 carefully and using the prompts below state and support your position.
Should media (entertainment programming & advertising) be restricted on behalf of children? Is this censorship? Considering the developmental stages discussed in the reading, do ads push ethical boundaries in targeting children? Explain and defend your answer in essay form - not a response to each of the questions. Consider the appeals in the compilation below used by educators to teach kids media literacy skills.