I came across a great list of core concepts in media literacy education, put together by the Center for Media Literacy. They are:

1. All media messages are ‘constructed.’

2. Media messages are constructed using a creative language with its own rules.

3. Different people experience the same media message differently.

4. Media have embedded values and points of view.

5. Most media messages are constructed to gain profit and/or power.

It strikes me that media literacy, at it’s core, is essentially a gnostic pursuit. The idea being that you ought to try to pursue a deeper level of knowledge, and that the way you do that is through a process of inquiry. Attached to each one of those core concepts described above is a question students can ask which will help them uncover layers of information encoded in media.

1. Who created this message?

2. What creative techniques are used to attract my attention?

3. How might different people understand this message differently from me?

4. What lifestyles, values and points of view are represented in, or omitted from, this message?

5. Why is this message being sent?

Compare the approach outlined here to Elaine Pagel’s description of what separates a gnostic from an orthodox Christian:

The gnostics understand Christ’s message not as offering a set of answers, but as encouragement to engage in a process of searching: “seek and inquire about the ways you should go, since there is nothing else as good as this.”

… But non-gnostic Christians “do not seek” … Those who merely believe the preaching they hear, without asking questions and who accept the worship set before them, not only remain ignorant of themselves, but “if they find someone else who asks about his salvation,” they act immediately to censor and silence him. (p. 112)

It’s almost as though media literacy is the gnostic path through the religion of modern media.

I’m curious as to why I’ve never seen anyone talk about “religious literacy” in the way media literacy is described in the core concepts listed at the top of this post. I’ve seen people talk about religious literacy only in relation to followers of a certain faith being familiar with the symbols and doctrines of their faith. But I’ve never seen anybody (besides me, of course) make the obvious leap of explicitly adapting such a system as described above. If you just substituted the word “media” with “religion,” I feel like you’d have a very useful analytic tool. Check it out:

1. All religious messages are ‘constructed.’

2. Religious messages are constructed using a creative language with its own rules.

3. Different people experience the same religious message differently.

4. Religions have embedded values and points of view.

5. Most religious messages are constructed to gain profit and/or power.

It seems like a great match, really. And it’s strange to me that religions aren’t usually explored from this type of perspective. It seems like the idea of media literacy is an outgrowth of the development of semiotics and cultural theory, especially in the 60’s and 70’s. It’s sort of a filtered down, concentrated primer to that type of thinking. A lot of those theories are extremely applicable to religions as well though, since they are sign-systems which communicate social meaning, yadda yadda yadda. The thing I’m really interested in though is not so much the theory, but the idea of applying questions, and having that be the almost gnostic vehicle towards understanding.