Media Literacy for A2-Answers

Introduction
1. Steven Johnson.
2. The difference between just using and making media and being media-literate enough to qualify with an A level in the subject.
3. The relationship between media literacy and more general forms of literacy, and distinguishing between a media-literate student and a member of the public-in other words, the difference it makes doing media studies.
4. A more developed theoretical understanding of how literacy is being ‘reframed’ by digital culture, so that you not only demonstrate-in your production work and theoretical research for Critical Perspectives-your own high levels of media literacy, but also offer an intellectual, academic and informed understanding of media literacy when you are reflecting on your creative outcomes and processes, and when you are answering questions about how the contemporary media and culture are ‘read’ in new ways.
5. That we return again and again to the idea that web 2.0 has made a big difference to how the media are distributed and exchanged.

New Literacies
1. A critical view of the world.
2. A range of ideas and tensions that Freire’s contribution can help us make sense of.
3. The ability to work between and to step outside of each literacy, to understand how it works as well as being able to use it.
4. In recent years, the word ‘literacy’ has been bolted on to virtually every area of human activity, and this is often done without much attention to these more complex aspects, as described by Gee.

Digital Literacy
1. The internet generally, YouTube, social networking sites, on-demand media, video games, virtual worlds and MP3.
2. The new ways in which we communicate and participate now that were not possible before web 2.0.
3. A tool for reducing the ‘digital divide’, and thus as a social justice agenda.
4. What these digital literacies are all about.

Memes and Remix
1. A popular term for describing the rapid uptake and spread of a particular idea presented as a written text, image, language “move” or some other unit of cultural “stuff”
2. Viral marketing.
3. How this seemingly modern form of cultural practice is actually a new product of a much more established communication principle.
4. Sweded videos and fan montages.

Ofcom and Media Literacy
1. The need to educate and develop people so they can access, analyse, evaluate and create media.
2. The responsibility for regulation to us, so we can self-regulate, and taking media studies is seen as one way of doing this.
3. Young people are all ‘digital natives’.
4. ‘Media literacy is just the literacy of our times’.

Media Literacy for A2
1. It might be a good time to think about media studies 2.0.
2. They use web 2.0 platforms to make their own media, share it with the world and thus represent themselves.
3. Some of the ‘metaliteracy’ we explored earlier on in this section.
4. The liberating potential of web 2.0 might be equal not only to the emergence of ‘mass literacy’, but, beyond that, to the introduction of mass public schooling.

Britney 2.0
1. Evaluate the claim made by Alastair Campbell (previously Tony Blair’s press officer and spin doctor) in 2008 that Britney has ceased to be considered human being by the public and is now understood primarily as a news commodity.
2. Debating the extent to which her commodification is amplified and accelerated by the online dispersal of her as a ‘sign’.

Fan Culture
1. Fan interpretations and reimagining’s of media products.
2. Media studies has, until now, been too interested in just the media, especially the notion of the self-contained media text, and insufficiently attentive to people and how they give meaning to culture.
3. To make sense of this changing landscape by creating media, accessing content and information through research, analysing cultural products and evaluating theories.