Media Literacy – Creative Development of the Skills and Knowledge for the Education in the 21st Century

Media literacy enables primarily children, future citizens for the political choices, to understand political discourse and participation within it. In this way, as mature, media literate, well-informed citizens they will be able to make their own decisions about the democratic electoral process. However, adolescents, young people and adults as well as the oldest citizens often need to be media-literate, especially due to the fact that in the age of new media and new technologies, the knowledge that we possess becomes obsolete very quickly and it is certainly necessary to participate in lifelong learning and within the media literacy of all generations of citizens. Media literacy has dual meaning – as an concept is defined as ability of the approach, analyses, evaluation and transmission of the messages through the media while the essential focus of media literacy is to overmaster with critic and creative skills, knowledge that are of help to connect complex ideas, constantly questioning manifestations, attempt to recognize answers that will satisfy congenital curiosity of any of us, but also to identify individual, and even wider, social deceits. This paper will also present scientific relationship in regards “critical vs. creative thinking about the media and vice versa” and methodology focused on media education and/or education of the media and how to upgrade digital literacy with media literacy by the author in 2018, based on the model of Venkatesh & Devis, from 2000. Media literate society is healthy society of new technological awareness that will unify understanding of tradition and new technologies, that will, within the interaction, help the society to create newly established relations within education on verifiable facts which are so very much visible in the post-modern society of the 21st century. Media literacy enables nation(s) to recognize hidden agendas within the transmission of information not just within the media, but also within the society as the whole, especially within the education. For the purpose of the life-long learning, regardless if we have media literacy as obligatory module in the primary and/or secondary school of we have it within the general educationally planned process of the society as a grown-ups.