Consider for a moment the flood of online content you encounter every day. It is produced not only by official media organizations, but by people like you. As a media producer, you might be working on a blog that you fill with posts on a given topic. Maybe you publish your own videos or post on Instagram to publicize news events or personal causes. Do you comment on blog posts and then tweet their links to them to your friends?

 

As you can see in life these days is an endless cycle of producing and consuming media. Beyond helping you to become a skilled media producer, this text should help you to grow into a literate media consumer. In the role of a twenty-first-century media consumer, you should be able to understand the difference between fact and opinion, truth and fiction. In the twentieth century, when a small handful of newspapers, magazines, television networks, and radio stations dominated the media landscape, separating fact from opinion was a relatively simple matter.

 

Not so these days. How can we think critically about important, life-changing news stories and issues with so much conflicting information at our fingertips? Modern life demands a much higher level of discernment as more people have learned how to manipulate and send messages through digital media. You will need to figure out what to learn, what to ignore, and how to shut out the noise.

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