Media Literacy Pitfall?

       In our class discussions about media literacy we have come to conclusions that learning media literacy for anyone at any stage of their life would be worth while. Pinkleton's The Role of Media Literacy in Shaping Adolescents' Understanding of and Responses to Sexual Portrayals in Mass Media supports this idea in that their study showed participants who had media literacy training better understood  media influences regarding  decision making about sex. They were also more likely to indicate that sexual depictions in the media are inaccurate and glamorized. They also were better equipped to resist peer pressure. All of these things inform our understanding of media literacy as a completely positive program.
        However, a study done by Kristen Harrison (who happens to be my instructor for COMM 482) shows something interesting and its implications dispute the effectiveness of media literacy. Her study deals with adolescents and body consciousness. The study shows that telling adolescents that the idealized imagery they are looking at has been retouched actually makes their body satisfaction worse. So, in their case, they expected that making children wiser to the game that media was playing in terms of retouching images would make children better media consumers and be better off for it. However, their increased media savvy made them even more self conscious than before.
          The implications of this study challenge our belief that media literacy is always beneficial. Though the study focuses on body image and media, I think it would be interesting to translate the themes of the study into a more sexual-focused media study. It also raises the interesting idea of questioning whether or not it is a good thing to make people wise to the game that media plays. The idea that people are better off remaining ignorant to deceptive media practices is an idea not often thrown around in an academic setting, but is nonetheless very interesting. This is a link to the Harrison study: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15213269.2013.770354

Sources: 

 Pinkleton, B. E., Austin, E. W., Chen, Y. C. Y., & Cohen, M. (2012). The role of media literacy in shaping adolescents' understanding of and responses to sexual portrayals in mass media. Journal of health communication, 17(4), 460-476.


    Harrison, K., & Hefner, V. (2014). Virtually perfect: Image retouching and adolescent body image. Media Psychology, 17(2), 134-153.