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Informationen zum Autor Ben Boyington Klappentext "During the recent presidential election, "media literacy" became a buzzword that signified the threat media manipulation posed to democratic processes. Meanwhile, statistical research has shown that 8 to 18 year-olds pack more than eleven hours with some form of media into each day by "media multitasking." Young people are not only eager and interested to learn about and discuss the realities of media ownership, production, and distribution, they also deserve to understand differential power structures in how media influences our culture. The Media and Me provides readers with the tools and perspectives to be empowered and autonomous media users. The book explores critical inquiry skills to help young people form a multidimensional comprehension of what they read and watch, opportunities to see others like them making change, and insight into their own identity projects. By covering topics like storytelling, building arguments and recognizing fallacies, surveillance and digital gatekeeping, advertising and consumerism, and global social problems through a critical media literacy lens, this book will help students evolve from passive consumers of media to engaged critics and creators"-- Leseprobe Introduction Looking Beneath the Surface We use clocks to know what time it is. Between the invention of hourglasses and digital clocks, there were analog watches—watches with hands and faces—which were the main devices we used to measure time. Along with learning the ABCs and how to ride a bike, you probably learned to tell time using an old-fashioned clock. You might not have thought much about learning to tell time since then. It’s easy to take a skill for granted once you’ve mastered it. It becomes second nature, which is good because that allows you to focus attention on other things. Instead of thinking, “I can tell time!,” you look at a clock and think, “Only fifteen minutes until I am out of this class!” Back then, you had to learn how to interpret the clock’s two “arms”—the little arm that measures hours, the big arm that measures minutes—in relation to the numbers, from one to twelve, on the clock’s circular background. You had to learn, for example, that when the big hand was on the twelve and the little hand was on the three, it was three o’clock. Learning to tell time was all about understanding the relationship between the clock’s hands and numbers. Once you understood that, you knew how to tell time. In your lifetime, you’ve probably seen these types of clockfaces on wall clocks and on wristwatches. You’ve also witnessed how digital technologies have made it easier to tell time. Instead of having to make sense of the hands on the clock, we just read the numbers from digital displays on our smartphones, or on our computers, or in our cars. You may even be able to call on digital assistants such as Alexa or Siri to tell you what time it is. But what if the clock breaks and you want to fix it? Or what if you are just curious to know more about why the clock works the way it does? Then you need to know more than how to tell time; you need to learn how to look beneath the surface of the clock’s face, to observe and understand the mechanisms that drive the motion of the clock’s hands. Telling time is one thing; understanding how the clock works is something else. Wait a minute here, you may be thinking, I thought this was a book about media literacy (whatever that might be…). What’s all this about clocks and learning to tell time? Put another way: What can a clock teach us about media and media literacy? You do not need to understand how a video is produced to enjoy YouTube, or how news is reported to read the New York Times, or how algorithms work in order to post content on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. Each of those activities is sort of like telling time: you can d...
