EDUCOMUNICAÇÃO

Sobre a importância de educar para os media

Renée Hobbes, uma das maiores especialistas de Educação para os Media nos Estados Unidos da América e fundadora da Alliance for a Media Literate America, deu recentemente uma entrevista sobre a sua ligação e a sua perspectiva sobre a importância desta componente educativa, cuja leitura se recomenda. Eis uma das perguntas que lhe é colocada e a respectiva resposta:

Why do you feel it's important to stress Media Literacy in today's society?

RH: Students are swimming in a media sea and technology is more a part of their cultural experience, so media literacy is important because the texts that students consume, and interpret, and read are film texts, and audio-visual texts, and media texts, and technology texts. Another reason that media literacy is important is because more and more information comes to us from so many different sources, that the gate-keeping function has long since disappeared. As we receive all different kinds of messages, people really need a set of critical thinking skills to make sense of it all. We are all suffering from 'Information Overload'. Media Literacy helps sort out the wide range of messages we get in our culture, and finally, the concept that is becoming really important to me, now that I am really beginning to understand, is that media literacy is really just an extended conceptualization of literacy. Literacy is a very powerful function for people. It enables us to be truly human: to share and express meanings using a wide range of tools and technologies. Really, to be literate in an age of multi-media messages, one has to be able to read the language and images of media in addition to the printed word.

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