Nicole Dahmen
Seth Lewis
The mass media are one of the most powerful institutions in our society. While there are laws and codes of ethics that dictate how the media must and should act, those codes are not always followed or enforced. As such, we must all learn to become critical and savvy media consumers. News, entertainment media, advertising, public relations, TV, video games, magazines, social media, and other media all have a strong influence on how we see the world, an influence that often begins in infancy. To be engaged and critical media consumers, we all need to develop skills and habits of media literacy. These skills include being able to access media on a basic level, to analyze it in a critical way based on certain key concepts, to evaluate it based on that analysis and, finally, to produce media oneself. This process of learning media literacy skills is media education.