ABSTRACT
For more than two decades, Jean Kilbourne, Sut Jhally and his Media Education Foundation, and other critics have created training materials to educate people about the ways in which media producers create images, fabricate demand for consumer goods, and distort perceptions of the human body. Yet despite educational initiatives in other parts of the English-speaking world, media literacy efforts in schools have lagged in the United States (Kellner & Share, 2005). These efforts often focus on an inoculation or protectionist approach to the “disease of mainstream media” (VanMeenen, 2009; for example, see Brucks, Armstrong, & Goldberg, 1988). Academic and industry studies about the effectiveness of any style of media literacy for advertising consumption are insufficient and focus only on short-term effects or recall, rather than on actual behaviors or predictive theories (Eagle, 2007). Indeed, few systematic tests of media literacy efforts are attempted, even though at least three scholarly journals—the Journal of Communication in 1998, the American Behavioral Scientist in 2004, and Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism in 2009—have published special issues to encourage new assessment and broader outlooks.
