A Semester in COM416
Throughout this semester, I have had the opportunity to learn about “media literacy”, something that had not been discussed and contextualized to myself anytime before. Beyond that, we learned about propaganda, throughout history, in advertising, education, entertainment, basically used in all fabrics of our lives. It was an all encompassing course for someone who deeply enjoys history, culture, politics, and entertainment and seeks to expand their knowledge and learning about different opportunities in the field of media and media literacy. When thinking of propaganda before, it was limited immediately to ideas of Nazis, but now it has expanded and contextualized propaganda through education, entertainment, conspiracy theories, and elections, and helped me to understand how necessary it is to inform and teach media literacy.
We find ourselves in a world that in obsessed with producing content, stories, even scandal that we are completely flooded with information before we have time to process. The ability to reflect on media before instantly drawing emotional feelings allows you to create thoughtful, inspired, and choices that match not just you but the world around you. Having a complete and better understanding of not just how things influence you, but how susceptible you are, or where they might pop up in your day to day lives, avoid an ignorance that centers the world on you, and distorts your views. This course has allowed me to look at history and not just say it repeats itself, but show how culture and individuals have agency in this repetition. I have mentioned it in class discussions, but through this course, and life events from the last 3–4 years, it is not so hard to see how someone like Hitler was able to rise to power and completely distort the people to believe the same as the Nazi party, but the key to avoiding it again? They told us in the module on Nazi Propaganda, Media Literacy. This essay is a journey through this course, ending on the important and a reflection for the necessity for media literacy to be educated to everyone and how beneficial it could be for the world, and ourselves.
