Value of Being Media and Information Literate Individual

By: Shierlynne Besares

   According to Ian Selinsky, “Literacy is one of the greatest gifts a person could receive”. Being literate individual mean able to read and write, has a competency to understand things, and applied everything they learned in their daily lives. While a media and information literate individual are those who has the ability to understand different types of media and can evaluate a certain information and use it effectively. Hence, why does being a media and information literate individual is important?

          Nowadays, there are so many cases of scamming especially in social media like facebook, twitter, instagram and more. Here are some examples of top online scams used by cyber criminals, stated by Cristina Chipunci. First and the most popular scam is the money laundering which starts into an emotional message wherein they will disguise as a government official or a businessman who will ask help in retrieving a large sum money from bank and in return, they promise to give a large sum of money. But that was just a promise. Another one is the romance scams, especially male scammers who will send a romantic message to have the attention of the female victim and then their conversations lead into a romantic one, the scammer will set a place for meeting up the victim and she will be kidnapped and ask money from the family. So, to avoid scamming, we have to be a media and information individual. Because if we are literate one, we could analyze and determine which media is reliable and which information is true of not. Further value of being a media and information literate person is to keep away from being victim and to victim others in form of cyber bullying. And teenagers are mostly involved that lead into suicide. So, in every like, reactions, comments, messages of post we are going to make, we must think over and over and ask ourselves. “Is it okay”, “what if I could hurt his/her feelings?”. Yes, we have to be sensitive when it comes to their feelings and we must comprehend the information so that we know what we are going to do. Remember “be kind to others”, and of course for ourselves, to avoid cyber bullying let’s just ignore malicious messages and block that person.

      Therefore, we as an individual must know our limitations in using social media. Of course, don’t let social media as a reason in harming others life and also yours. And if you think that you are totally a media and information literate individual, share all your knowledge of learning’s through teaching or starting a campaign which many people will be aware in using any form of media and understand the real value of being a literate on.