Media and Information Literacy and the Media Industries: Best practices

• Laura Cervi ^[1]
  1. [1] Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

     Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

     Barcelona, España

     
• Localización: Com formar ciutadans crítics?: Alfabetització informacional i mediàtica / María José Recoder Sellarés (ed. lit.), 2019, ISBN 978-84-120344-3-1, págs. 73-90
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto Completo Libro
• Resumen

  • Every great technological invention induced a change in the communicative paradigm.Nonetheless, few moments of the history of humanity have been so revolutionary, in terms of distribution of the information and the knowledge, as the current period.ICTs have changed the way people live, work and connect with each other and with their environment. This situation embeds a great democratizing potential, together with the emergence of new challenges. Media literacy, intended as the capacity to access, have acritical understanding of, and interact with the media, therefore, becomes an indispensable life skill for the 21st Century. It enables citizens of all ages to take informed decisions, raising their awareness and helping counter the effects of disinformation campaigns andfake news spreading through digital media, empowering them. Thus, Media literacy the key to active citizenship. For this reason, it should not be limited to Governments or public education: on the contrary, it should involve all the stakeholders. Specifically, media industries should be actively implementing media literacy programmes, first because of their crucial informatory social function, and second because traditional media are facing an economic crisis, but mostly a crisis of trust. In order to reconnect with users they must reconstruct their relationship providing spaces for dialogue and interaction. This chapter, after contextualizing the current situation, analyzes four European best practices of media industries’ initiatives in media literacy: two newspaper and two televisions; three of them specifically devoted to young people and one open to the entire citizenship. All these initiatives are focused on the critical understanding and production of information and, besides providing participants with learning resources, share a hand on approach that allows user to actually participate in the news making process.