Media Literacy and the Emerging Citizen

Book excerpt: Media Literacy and the Emerging Citizen is about enhancing engagement in a digital media culture and the models that educators, parents and policy makers can utilize to place media-savvy youth into positions of purpose, responsibility and power. Two specific challenges are at the core of this book's argument that media literacy is the path toward more active and robust civic engagement in the 21st century: How can media literacy enable core competencies for value-driven, diverse and robust digital media use? How can media literacy enable a more civic-minded participatory culture? These challenges are great, but they need to be examined in their entirety if media literacy is to begin to address the opportunities they present for democracy, participation and discourse in a digital media age. By presenting information that places media literacy at the center of what it means to be an engaged citizen, educators and policy makers will understand why media literacy must be integrated into formal and informal education systems before it's too late