Original scientific paper
Who Wants to be a Media Literate? Locating Media Research Methods and Applying them to the “Media Literacy” Concept
Zala Volčić
Abstract
The field of media studies deals with issues involving the complex process
of consumption of mass media and its relation to audiences' meaning-making
practices.
One of the enduring concerns in media studies is the ongoing question regarding
the power of mass media, their effects, and their roles as vehicles of
culture. For example, in some media approaches, mass media are analyzed
simply as propaganda machines that have direct media effects. In more sophisticated
versions they are seen as forces that shape public knowledge
through defining what counts as news and framing the stories that are presented,
as well as by providing audiences with specific ways of interpreting the
world. The present paper describes the major methodological approaches that
have shaped the way that media scholars analyze audiences and the role of the
media in their everyday lives.
In the second part, the paper describes the qualitative research project designed
to assess the need for audience studies and media literacy. The study
offers a comparative international view on the need to teach media literacy to
students, and tries to apply one of the described qualitative methods to a particular
case-study. The paper explores the meaning that media literacy has for
the informants, young students. Through detailed in-depth interviews with 12
students from four different countries (United States, Norway, Canada and Japan), an attempt was made to attach a normative definition of “media literacy”
to people’s subjective perceptions of the mass media, whereby I closely
analyze my informants’ “media literacy” discourse.
I argue that there are two dominant interpretative frameworks of the meaning
media literacy, i.e., explicit and implicit, and I suggest that media literacy
was perceived by most of my informants as a positive quality and that participants
would make every attempt to showcase their own degree or explain their
own interpretation of what it means to be “media literate.”
Keywords
media literacy; mass media; role of media; media research
Hrčak ID:
23310
URI
Publication date:
10.12.2003.
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