Making Sense of Media Literacy

Both disciplines of education and Information Science would be enhanced through Media Literacy. As Informational and Media technologies mushroom with hastening pace, they could be harnessed to further critical foundations of literacy in Schools and the Library as technologies and literacy both presuppose culture and politics.
McLuhan's argues the centrality of electronic technologies in modern societies having profound social and psychological changes operationally and practically. He likens the complex intertwining of electronic technology and human mediation to a biological system in which the media become an extension of man. Such development is a force which leads to massive differentiation, specialisation and alienation in the Weberian sense and equally powerfully on the evolution of societies unparalleled in history hitherto mechanised by simple mass processes.
The pervasive extent of technologies leads to a complex phenomenon, a 'media event', involving most human activities, leisure, educational or personal mediated through electronically based technologies and Medium.
In my opinion a basis for Media Literacy would be a critical and normative affirmation of the spectrum and diversity of communication which electronic technologies enable. A critical and functional relationship needs to be drawn between societies, individuals and their interaction with technologies as they are governed by complex social, economic, political, capitalist infrastructures and consider their effective literacy merit. Underlying the informational technologal superstructure lays the infrastructure which enables the production of the media messages.
The central question for media literacy is normative, how could media messages be accessed, evaluated, analysed and eventually produced through the Library and School institutions. It bears incidentally upon the learner's education to master these complexities and produce them withn their own cultural, societal and personal literary tradition within a critical pedagogical framework. This idea presupposes understanding technologies and development of educational pedagogy through Freirian perspectives.
As a new field, Media Literacy is replete with diverse educational philosophies and goals centrally bound by common educational interest, critical outlook and production of media (Hobbs). Its scope is based on constructivist foundation; awareness of socio-economic, political, historical and aesthetic context; the science of hermeneutics; a linguistic framework which reflects the diverise langauge forms, genres and symbolic systems of communication; and prompts the comprehension of social reality.
Hobbs enumerates its tenets within a Freirian critical framework whose key issues are deliberated in Media Literacy. These principles provide a critical foundation for the inquiry based field of Media Literacy. It engages with the racial, gender or class disparities; civic consciousness, commodification of culture and personal growth.It underlines the phenomenological mode of human experience as fundamental and employing its education tools through creativity, empowerment, collaboration and ethics. It provides validity to popular culture and its texts, whose ideology could be deconstructed.
Central to it all is the autonomous learner and her subjectivity and consciousness. It aims to unravel critically the aesthetics, ideology and political presuppositions underlying literacy.
It assumes the shortfalls of formal school, its conservative nature and instrumentalist approach which could be overcome by Media Literacy pedagogy.
However it is confronted by issues of financial support from Media Institutions. In all a 21st Century educational framework judiciously combines criticism, literacy and the media.