Why Do We Need Critical Media Literacy?
India has made commendable progress in lowering the number of illiterates but it still contends with 313 million illiterate people 59 percent of whom are women according to the 2018 figure released by Observer Research Foundation.
The nation state has released a new national education policy (NEP2020) affecting 65 percent of its population under the age of 35 and 290 million students (in schools and universities), no issue is arguably more critical for India’s future than education.
In Europe the multimedia and digital media have not displaced mass media, at least not yet. It can be deduced that both the systems of mass communication and the new digital multimedia environment can co-exist within the information society. (Study on the Current Trends and Approaches to Media in Europe, 2010) This media ecology is not too dissimilar in India where despite the above social pervasiveness of digital technology its largest and fastest growing television sector is enigmatic and defiant of the global decline of broadcast television.
The resilience of traditional media (like television, the cinema and the press) against the flourishing of the ‘new media’ such as the internet, mobile telephony, cable and satellite TV has been noted by academic researchers like Kumar who calls for a critical evaluation of the mediasphere at all levels of public education. (Keval J. Kumar. Ud; B.K. Ravi. 2012).Television broadcast media in the country are expected to rise to 66.76 per cent by 2020 with its current number of 780 million viewers likely to exceed the entire population of 745 million of the European continent, according to BARC India, a TV viewership monitoring agency. (Gaurav Laghate, 2017)
CML is a subfield of media theory, which is itself a subset of communication theory. They are related, but they are not the same. It is a broad field that studies how people communicate and how communication shapes society. It includes the Facebook of verbal and nonverbal communication, as well as the ways in which communication is mediated through technology and other channels. It is recognised that CML plays a crucial role in governance, reform agenda and makes recommendations for steps to improve governance through media literacy to assist development practitioners. Highly news literate teenagers, as determined by news media literacy assessment measures, are more internally motivated to consume news, more skeptical, and have better knowledge of current events compared to their less news literate peers. (Adam Maksl et al.,2015)
CML is critical in being able to navigate the complex and ever-evolving media landscape, citizens must acquire the critical abilities and necessary communicative skills to actively and meaningfully participate in the democratic public sphere, where free and equal citizens come together to discuss and debate current affairs.
The imbroglio of conflicting discourses, advice and recommendations concurrent during the peak of Covid-19 pandemic indicates the conflicting advice, news, medical reports and scientific laboratory reports created by professional and individuals deficit of CML. This presents one type of threats while the other relates to our exposure to the pandemic of malicious or misleading content on social media, multi-platform broadcast and broadband channels that have become an integral part of our lives
Critical Media Theory is a branch of communication theory that specifically studies the dynamics, matrix and undercurrents of media production, media representation, content distribution, and audience approach to content reception. Besides examining these it focuses on how media technologies and practices shape the way that people communicate and how they understand the world. [NEXT – Motivators of Critical Media Literacy ]