Media Literacy is the ability for individuals to develop while using social media, including how to differentiate fake news, understanding various information, and generating appropriate opinions. Center for Media Literacy (2012) states that this ability teaches people to access, analyze, evaluate and create messages on the different social media. It helps people to express their own feelings and satisfy self-inquiry. Students must develop media literacy skills because it is critical during the learning process; students should distinguish social cliché, jokes, coverage, etc. As students, in terms of media literacy skills, they should first analyze media from understanding why they spread this message and what it aims for and interpreting messages from different perspectives; secondly, they need to create media products from understanding and using media functions to convey thoughts and ideas.

Media provides more than thousands of information daily, and people should realize that some news is only created because of business value, and these are nutrients which satisfy people’s demands. “News is not an objective reflection of reality”. When people realize this concept, they will have the sense of distinguishing true and false messages; thus, developing personal understanding of the media and also pay attention in producing messages. Developing media literacy skill is a cognitive process, as people may be familiar with the policy or rule through discovering online resources and messages; people can access information more effectively because they have the ability to analyze and exclude fake messages.

Speaking about why people hold factual consensus and varied views on some opinions, I would say it relates to the type of information. For example, when people encounter problems such as whether PLN works for university learning, some may hold opposite opinions. However, when discussing whether we need policy to regulate online discussion, most people would agree. Especially in PLN, it is meaningful when people discuss in various opinions as this is the way of learning, learning from different people in different fields, age, and social experience. Therefore, during using the media, we should learn media literacy to help us distinguish bad “news”.

Reference

Trilling, B., & Fadel, C. (2012). Digital Literacy Skills. In 21st century skills: Learning for life in our times. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.