By Bill Walsh

One of the most stubborn misconceptions that media literacy proponents try to battle is the idea that "media" means "video" and that media literacy is a fancy term for replacing the traditional literacy with some newfangled, high tech, less demanding image-driven consumerism.

Sigh.

Media literacy is an attempt to expand the traditional view of literacy, not to replace it. Reading and writing are important. They are vitally important. People communicate through reading and writing in their everyday lives. The ability to read and write (which is, after all, the oldest definition of literacy) is crucial.

But only about 15% of the average person's time is spent communicating through reading and writing. Our society and our school systems recognized that the traditional view of "literacy" needed to be expanded if people were to survive in the real world. And so decades and decades ago, we started to understand that the ability to speak (coupled with the ability to listen carefully and critically) was important too. Courses in Public Speaking abounded. The traditional view of literacy was expanded. And the first teacher who brought a newspaper into the classroom and taught students about parts of the newspaper, the difference between editorials and news, how to read a stock market page, and what the ads were doing was stretching the definition of literacy, too.

As was the first teacher who had students take a look at - and create - mass media images of posters, billboards and the like in addition to the "traditional" art of painting and carving.

You see, we have been expanding our view of "literacy" for hundreds of years now. This is not a new concept. I recall being required in high school to take art and music and even a computer course or two - all trying to force me to become a more broadly literate person, one who could survive in the 20th century. Today we would call such efforts "cultural literacy," but it was an effort to expand my skills and abilities as well as the definition of literacy.

Media literacy is a fairly new term for an old concept - the idea that we need to be literate in many fields, not just one or two. Yes, new terms for old concepts sometimes seem silly ("Libraries" have become "media centers;" "English Departments" or "Communications Studies Departments"). However distressing the new terms may be, they represent a growth into additional areas of study.

But along with any trend to broaden a concept, we need to deal with those who would rather narrow it - usually restricting it to their individual area of expertise.

I've met television people who think that "media literacy" is just about TV.

The other day I was talking to a computer guy who kept talking about "technology." Technology in the schools and teaching kids all about technology. It became distressingly clear that while his mouth was saying "technology," he really meant "computers," only computers.

Even at the Harvard Institute on Media Education this past year, a very bright and articulate woman argued that people should use newspapers instead of TV.

Double sigh.

Although it would be unfair to call these people narrow-minded, it is accurate to say that their view of what's necessary to make a literate person needs to be broadened.

"Media" is just a term for anything which communicates. "Media literacy" is an attempt to make each of us more comfortable, more critical, and more conversant in various methods of communication. All of them.

Reading, writing, computers, art, music, TV, newspapers, magazines, film, billboards - receiving the messages contained therein and using these media to create and communicate our own messages. All of these are important.

Maybe we should be talking about "media literacies" in the plural instead of in the singular. It's not this or that. It's this and that.

I suppose it is natural for people to think their narrow area is the most important, and that any attempt to broaden important concepts invariably tends to weaken them. It's natural and comfortable to think that.

It's just not true.