Media literacy has become more of a life skill throughout the years, especially with social media becoming a prominent part of our lives. As technology improves and social media becomes more influential, the knowledge of how to handle media becomes more of a necessity. While the media can be very helpful, it’s easy to come across misinformation and fake material that could be dangerous. Along with this, the media has had a massive impact on pop culture.

Manheim Township has been offering a media literacy course for three years. This class is a semester long and is available to all grade levels. Taught by Mr. McCarthy, it examines the influence of social media, news sources, news and advertising and different ways they influence you and how you absorb information. These topics are important to learn because they impact your daily life.

For example, certain advertisements persuade you to buy certain products and to go to certain places. It’s helpful to understand how they are persuading you. This course brings attention to how your use of media impacts your knowledge of current events and influences what you watch. It helps you understand why different people can have such different opinions. Social media, something that most likely affects most of the people who take this course, has many different sides to it due to its ability to spread information quickly across millions of people. It leaves room for misinformation and mistakes to be made about stories, and this class helps understand how to differentiate between real and fake stories.

This class is becoming more relevant as media has become more widespread in society. With this expansion comes dangerous side effects like the ability to see people’s unsupervised or fact-checked opinions on a situation. This can lead to a misinformation spread and leave lasting impacts. Misinformation on social media can even affect election outcomes. An example is the 2016 presidential election, where it was said that undecided voters were likely to vote for Donald Trump, due to false rumors about his opponent Hillary Clinton. Misinformation on social media can also impact people’s health. Especially with the rise in use of TikTok during the COVID-19 pandemic, misinformation about the virus impacted the way people handled it.

Media literacy is not only a class that can help meet your minimum amount of credits, or something to use as a GPA booster, but can teach you things you can use throughout your whole life. It uses real life examples and self reflection to inform you about the importance of having media literacy skills and how media affects you as an individual.