Sure, you use technology to chat, post photos, watch videos and catch up on what’s going on in the world, every single day.
You can scroll through a newsfeed for hours, and communicate aptly using only gifs or emojis, but how often do you pause to think about media?
At Media What, we think about media a lot. We talk about media all the time. And we’d like you to join our conversation.
Sure, you use technology to chat, post photos, watch videos and catch up on what’s going on in the world, every single day.
You can scroll through a newsfeed for hours, and communicate aptly using only gifs or emojis, but how often do you pause to think about media?
At Media What, we think about media a lot. We talk about media all the time. And we’d like you to join our conversation.
Media What is a non-profit organization made up of a team of educators and researchers experienced in designing learning experiences that encourage critical thinking through media activities.
Our workshops and projects are designed with the understanding that engagement and critique of the media is empowering. We believe that developing media literacy is essential to navigating a world that is rich in information and media messages and this is important for students and teachers.
We are dedicated to supporting youth in developing the knowledge, skills and attitudes that can enable them to be creative in their use of media, while remaining conscious and critical citizens online and offline.
We believe that media literacy can answer some of the greatest societal challenges we are facing today. Media form the invisible thread that runs through news and information, our communication, our creativity. They are the fabric of our personal and collective memory. Media literacy helps us unravel this thread by helping us understand how language, representation and production techniques shape how we view our world.
Our actions are guided by the following three pillars: Memory, Identity and Citizenship.
We tell the stories that we want to remember, and with words, visuals and sounds, we document realities using interviews, archived footage, real people. Within the context of media literacy, the theme of memory is an exploration of narrative storytelling and ways of documenting personal stories. More critically, it is the understanding that all stories offer just a slice of the whole.
We can identify with a lot of different things: our gender, our race, our age group. We can even identify as a member of a fandom or an online community. Within the context of media literacy, the theme of identity explores self-representations, and through unpacking visually constructed identities, we can really reflect about who we really are versus the self we assert, online and offline.
How we think about community and participation has really changed with new digital media. Online, news, entertainment and user content blend together, and this influences how we understand the world and our reality. Within the context of media literacy, the theme of citizenship focuses on understanding privacy and expression online, critically evaluating online information and exploring online personalization and its impact on democratic processes.
