INTRODUCTION TO MEDIA EDUCATION: BUILDING PARTICIPATIVE CITIZENSHIP IN THE INFORMATION SOCIETY

We are living in the so-called information society. As Castells claims, in this new paradigm, the generation, the processing and the broadcast of information become the main sources of productivity and power. That is, the channels of communication proliferate, technology provides innovations everyday and the time dedicated to consumption of media grows to a giddy rhythm; which increases their power, with the enlargement of screens that invade the spaces of our society and of our everyday life.

The increase of information is not translated into a better understanding of the world. In fact, like many authors emphasize, the world has become illegible. There is an excess of information and immediacy and it is necessary to learn to manage this saturation of information to be able to recover a space of autonomy and of critical thinking. What is important is not to acquire information, but to integrate the information into knowledge, the knowledge into consciousness and the consciousness into culture. For those reasons, a review of the educational curriculum is essential in order to include a course on Media Training as a means to contribute to an autonomous and critical citizenship.

Education should teach to read the world, should help to form people’s critical thinking in questioning their habits and comfortable lives. Furthermore, in the society of the 21st century, this has to be done by promoting a Media Training in both formal and informal education systems. This proposal aims at emphasising the need to introduce the perspective of Media Education, the goal is to promote an active and critical citizenship through the denaturalization of the media and a new form of literacy that would take new languages into account. We aim to teach how to select, to evaluate and to contextualize the messages and to use the media critically, both in the production and in the reception.