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Media Literacy Part 2: More Than Meets the Eye 369 Views


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Transcript

00:01

We speak student!

00:05

Media Literacy

00:07

More than Meets the Eye

00:09

a la Shmoop

00:12

We're covering More than Meets the Eye.

00:14

Topic is images in mass media.

00:17

And we all know images can be changed a lot.

00:19

Thank you Photoshop and Adobe,

00:21

you can advertise right here.

00:22

So, Deb, talk to us about what kind of images we find in mass media.

00:26

Structure the process for us.

00:29

I mean, images are everywhere in mass media, right?

00:31

Unless we're just reading straight texts,

00:33

like a newspaper article, images are everywhere.

00:35

So we have -- TV and movies are obviously mostly images.

00:39

Even things like a billboard, that's mass media.

00:43

And then of course, magazines and newspapers have images

00:47

in them, not just on the covers,

00:49

but in advertisements.

00:52

And, you know, the advertisements are in print and onscreen.

00:57

So basically, any time you see something that is not a word,

01:01

you're looking at an image in mass media.

01:04

So it's a huge component of mass media.

01:06

They say the camera doesn't lie.

01:09

Is that true?

01:11

How are images constructed?

01:13

So, yeah, there are a bunch of different ways

01:17

to manipulate images.

01:20

[ whoop ]

01:20

[ pop ]

01:21

[ oh yeah! ]

01:22

So let's talk about a few of those different ways.

01:24

One of them is cropping.

01:25

That's a pretty simple one.

01:27

Again, anyone can do this on their computer at home.

01:29

Take a picture, there's two people in it,

01:31

cut one of them out, now there's just one person.

01:33

That's fine for me to do

01:35

if I'm making it my Facebook photo.

01:38

But if there's an image in the news

01:43

and you have... Let's say

01:46

the president of the United States is jovially laughing.

01:50

Little do you know that cut out of that picture

01:53

is some poor suffering child in Africa.

01:56

So that changes the picture, right?

01:58

So cropping is a big one.

02:00

Another one is juxtaposing.

02:04

So same if you put the picture of a really wealthy American

02:09

16-year-old next to a starving 16-year-old

02:14

in another country. Then it's not just like,

02:18

"Oh, hey look! This is a normal 16-year-old girl."

02:20

Instead it's like, "Oh, wow. We're spoiled." or, "We need to help these other people."

02:25

Then there's just manipulating images more generally.

02:28

Things like touching them up,

02:30

making celebrities look better than they actually do.

02:33

These kinds of adjustments that we make to images are actually really --

02:38

We have to be really careful of them,

02:39

especially in things like advertisements, right?

02:42

Where someone might have

02:46

a picture of a celebrity

02:49

drinking a Gatorade or something like that.

02:52

Little do we know, the next thing they did

02:54

was spit it out because they thought it was gross.

02:56

But all we see is the picture.

02:58

So it's just -- You kind of always have to be aware of

03:01

the context of what might be surrounding the image.

03:05

And not just what's taken out or put into the image,

03:09

but how the image itself has been changed.

03:12

It's not just adding and subtracting features;

03:13

it's actually changing what was in the image to begin with.

03:17

[ whoop ]

03:19

What kind of images do we find in mass media?

03:23

They say the camera doesn't lie.

03:26

Is that true? How are images constructed?

03:32

[ oh yeah! ]

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