Media Literacies-Rheingold

          Howard Rheingold is a 20/21st-century author who primarily focuses on analyzing the effects of social media consumption in the world. He wrote an article in 2010 entitled Attention, and Other 21st-Century Social Media Literacies in which he discusses the importance of 5 social media literacies: attention, participation, collaboration, network awareness, and critical consumption. Rheingold believes that students need to not only understand technology skills such as how to create a blog, but they need to understand these media literacies in order to effectively engage in learning. Upon discussing each of these literacies, he stresses that attention is the most important even though he further stresses that all of them connect with each other.

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         According to Rheingold, attention is very important since this is essentially the main way individuals learn, interact, and ultimately grow. In the 2010 article mentioned above, Rheingold states "[a]ttention is the fundamental building block for how individuals think, how humans create tools and teach each other to use them, how groups socialize, and how people transform civilizations." (2010, para. 4). Rheingold believes that students need to be aware of their attention and where it goes in order to know when they need to be more focused and when it is acceptable to switch and be attentive to something else.

         I agree that thinking about how we pay attention is important, especially since we're living in a world full of more technology distractions than before, and we need to make sure we're fully focusing on one thing rather than just shallowly taking in bits of information from all over. If we focus on something, we may understand that one thing better than if we looked at that for just a bit instead of getting distracted and looking at other things. For instance, as I am writing this blog post, I am also focusing on the television as well as being distracted by my phone by checking my e-mails and my Facebook account. In addition to all that, I am hungry and thinking about what I am going to make for breakfast. While it's human nature to get distracted, I think media distracts me the most as I am taking in a lot more information than if I were just sitting in my living room without access to those outlets.

        Despite feeling that attention is important, I find critical consumption to also be very important. I agree that students need to take classes regarding the topic of media literacy in order to be critical of the information that is all around them through media. I always stress to my students that they need to be critical of the resources they gather for a research report. They need to recognize credible sources by doing an investigation of the author, or by analyzing various sources to help distinguish between the facts versus the opinions.

          In addition to being critical of sources, students need to be aware that some of the images or information that they read may not be revealing the whole truth, or may be reworded to present the information in a certain way to people. I enjoyed viewing the information presented in the media literacy presentations this week. Some of those images were eye-opening, especially the image of the captured soldier receiving water on one side and having a gun held to his head on the other side. Depending on how the image is cropped can reveal different stories versus seeing the whole picture without crops or edits. I think this is a great example to share to show all people, not just students, that they need to question the information around them without just accepting it or jumping to conclusions.

      Media literacy is a very interesting topic, and I plan on delving more into it in order to be a more attentive and critical consumer of the technology world around me.