Critical Thinking and Media Literacy
Everything we see in the media was done for a specific purpose, which can be implicit or explicit; For the first case, it is necessary that we have the ability to "read between the lines" or that we develop media literacy, that is, analyze the tools that were used to transmit the message to later analyze everything as a whole critically.
Taking the above into account, let's fix our sights on what floods a television channel: propaganda, publicity.
The purpose of advertising is to attract the person to buy a product, becoming a loyal customer. How do they attract the person? Well, that's thanks to its appetizing advertisements; For example: to show a rejuvenating facial cream, they use a model of considerable age and with visible wrinkles (as is normal to have at that age), and then -and thanks to technological effects- those marks of time on the face disappear, like if it had never happened. To encourage people to buy slimming girdles, they use young models with a worked body, not diverse and without "imperfections". To sell tourist plans, the most beautiful of that city or place is shown, leaving aside the reality that goes through the place, concentrating on the commercial, on what attracts the human eye.
As these can be found many more examples and the conclusion I will reach, regarding advertising, I think it will always be the same: most of reality is hidden to paint that bit that is left with colors that attract the senses of the reader, of the person. Regarding media literacy, I can conclude that it is vital to have a global vision of what is shown to us and not a vision that tends to individualize and isolate those components of the material that we are capturing.
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