icd.2013.group.2: Media empowerment

Media Literacy are a series of competences that allow people to analyze the messages that inform, entertain and sell to us every day, in a large variety of media modes, genres and forms.

Media Education is the process of teaching and learning about media, animates people to ask about what they are watching, hearing and reading, to develop a critical thinking.

While I was studying and researching about Media awareness and Media literacy for our first test, I came through some web pages created to teach about these topics. Reading those pages I realize that mass media information has become an issue or a “problem”, Because of the excess of time people and specially kids spend in front of a tv, the internet, video games, etc.. In fact, surveys shows that children now spend more time watching television than they do in school, or in anything else.
That’s why a large number of non -profit web sites about media Education had arisen in some countries like Canada, USA, and organization as the European Union, UNESCO, etc..
They understand that “today’s kids are facing more complex challenges than ever. With high levels of incarceration, poverty, drug addiction and general anxiety, many of today’s youth find themselves faced with the incredibly difficult task of raising themselves”. And that is why they want to harden the concept of Media Education. They have created these non-profit organizations that provides the tools to be an active and informed digital citizen.
Media are powerful forces in the lives of children and youth, with positive and negative influences on their social, emotional, intellectual, and physical wellbeing. That is why the best response to media is education.
This organizations with the help of the police department, pediatric organizations, schools, parent organizations and libraries - which include classroom lesson plans, with work sheets, backgrounders, tip sheets and essays, and multimedia games and quizzes- are trying to give the ability to access, analyze and evaluate images, sounds and texts, and to filter the volume of information that kids receive every day.
Media Education aims to foster not simply critical intelligence, but critical autonomy. This way, people are not going to believe everything they are told. First they are going to deduce where this information it is from? Who are the one who made it? what is going on? What is really going on? All this translates into the empowerment of the individuals.