THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE'S DIGITAL MEDIA LITERACY. THE TRAINING OF CRITICAL AWARENESS

The term media literacy refers to the knowledge, skills and competences required in order to use and interpret the media: a form of critical literacy (Buckingham). On the basis of this assumption, research has been initiated: the medium - the social network is the analog and digital message . The socio-educational qualitative survey promoted during academic year 2014/15 – through administration of a questionnaire/interview with open-ended questions in collaboration with the chairs of Education and Technologies of Education, Distance Education and Media Education, and Cognitive Sociology at the Department of Cognitive Sciences, Psychology, Education and Cultural Studies at the University of Messina – aimed at identifying the degree of skill and judgment that media literacy involves in the actors concerned. The qualitative analysis was conducted through the use of Weft QDA open-source software as an instrument for textual data collection from a representative sample of 30 questionnaires submitted to the student population of the courses in question. The textual analysis was carried out using keyword and concept marking according to 4 macro categories (Information - Education - Cultural Industry - Consciousness) and respective subcategories (Media: TV - radio - books/newspapers - films - novels - institutional/generalist websites - online newspapers; Social Networks: YouTube - Google+ - LinkedIn - Facebook - Twitter) with reference to the 11 questions around which the questionnaire used for the survey was structured. Cross-matching and comparison in terms of Code Review (number of documents, passages, characters) made it possible to calculate numerical data. The reading and interpretation of textual and numerical data made it possible to photograph a reality (representative sample) filtered according to the assumption the content of a medium is always another medium (McLuhan). However, the form effect (McLuhan) of a media literacy shows that the social actor (neo-digital immigrant) is not always conscious of the final content: he/she him/herself. In particular and significantly, the Code Review analysis (number of documents) of textual and numerical data highlights the dichotomy in the comparison between the macro categories and their subcategories: Cultural/Media (15) - Consciousness/Media (20) and Cultural Industry/Social Network (22) - Consciousness/Social Network (16) about the rereading and rewriting of media texts.