The core concepts section introduces you to some pretty relevant
contextual information. Especially if you're new to the subject, you might
want to check this out before you go rooting around any further.

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GOOD QUESTION. Well, this is k.i.s.s. of the panopticon's first humble attempt at answering it -- to orienting y'all to what cultural theory, visual literacy, and new media are all about. Before we plow on into new media as it stands today, there are a few central ideas that should be introduced and clarified for a kick-off, since they help to put much of the rest of this area into some sort of context. If you understand what I mean by these concepts, much of the rest of this introduction to new media and culture should make more sense.

Before even trying to tackle the questions of visual/new media literacy, the first thing we need to do is to define what new media are, what old media are, and then try to figure out how to incorporate these terms into our framework of understanding. Perhaps, then, we should first look at what media literacy is supposed to be about -- then we can extrapolate to talk about new media literacy. After all, the subjects are kind of related!

New Media means basically just that: new media. The latest form of mass communication developed by society always tends to be given this label. In years past it was radio, television, cable TV, satellite TV, etc. Nowadays it tends to be used primarily to talk about emerging digital/electronic communications forms, particularly the internet and the World Wide Web. That leaves the other media, i.e., old media, as evertything that came before, such as newspapers, film, radio, television, and so on.

That's the easy part, because surprise, surprise, when we come to the subject of media literacy, there's some disagreement out there about what media literacy actually means. Some people think of media literacy purely in terms of a defensive mechanism to help our children navigate their way through the minefield of insidious, pejorative, and God-knows-what-else kinds of advertising that they're hit with every time they turn on the TV. Give our kids the tools to understand how the media are trying to manipulate them, and they will be able to fend off the commercial propaganda, so the thinking goes. Others, meanwhile, see media literacy in more positive terms, as a tool that allows us to be informed, critical consumers of the media -- in much the same way as teachers of English Literature think that that field of study enables us to become better readers.

Still others focus on the visual literacy component of media literacy as the most important part. This semiotics-based approach looks on media as a language, with its own visual syntax and grammar, which needs to be learned in order to be understood -- again, a bit like English Lit.

Still, most analysts and academics agree that most conceptualizations of media literacy share the following essential elements:

• Mass media are constructed entities that also help to construct reality (more on this later).
• Most media (at least in the good ol' USA and, increasingly, in the rest of the world) have strong commercial drives and are commercially oriented.
• Media also have very strong political and ideological implications (whether we realize it or not). The commercializing drive alluded to above is just one important aspect of this.
• Each of the media has its own unique aesthetic, and each medium's content is closely related to its form. That's just a fancy way of saying that newspapers present information in a very different way from television, and because of that they also present the world in a very different way. Marshall McLuhan was thinking of something like this when he came out with his famous maxim, "the medium is the message".

These are all valid ways of thinking about media literacy. But in a nutshell, we need to remember that media literacy is -- or should be -- all about helping each and every one of us how to figure out what the hell is going on in the Wide World of Media that surrounds us and envelopes us. Anything that can help us do that can also help us get along in the world a whole lot better -- or at least enable us to keep our eyes open! And what's true of the older media applies equally to the new media. If we're going to be swamped by the Internet and the Web, we need to know what's going on, why we're all spending so much time on the Web, what it's doing to us, and whether we're controlling it or it's controlling us! That would be nice to know.

Now we're ready to begin.

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Last Updated: mar 3 2001