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The role of visual perception in media literacy is paramount in understanding the shift from a linear perceptual process (literacy) to a holistic perceptual process (visuality) by which almost all information is now transmitted through the visualforms of mass media: television, film, and the Internet. The media-literate individual must be educated in the processes of visual perception and how the media use the visual channels to transmit, and often distort, information. The media-literate person understands the meaning of the primary axiom of visual communication-The more we know the more we see-as well as the next most important axiom: What is not seen is as important as what is seen.
Keywords: literacy; media literacy; visuality; visual literacy; intertextuality
But at some point in the second half of the twentieth century-for perhaps the first time in human history-it began to seem as if images would gain the upper hand over words.
-Stephens (1998, p. 5)
In the most generic sense, media literacy can be defined as the understanding we have about the ways in which media affect our selves, our society, and our culture.
In a more problematic sense, we are confronted by the paradox of the term media literacy. One of the most dominant elements of media, particularly the visual mass media, is that our perception of them is a holistic experience, drawing on right-brain processing to encapsulate images in a spontaneous instant of closure. On the other hand, the most dominant element of traditional literacy is that it is linear, drawing on our left-brain ability to construct meaning through language in a sequential process, creating words from letters and sentences from words. The very process of media literacy suggests a need to integrate these two disparate elements into one process that incorporates all of our perceptual abilities.
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE VISUAL IMAGE
In human history, the visual image has never been more dominant than it is now. I will illustrate this point with a recent and dreadful example. On September 11, 2001, we were ushered into a world of terrible visual immediacy. For days after this tragedy, we were exposed, over and over again, to televised images of the planes crashing into the towers, the towers burning, and then the towers collapsing. I was...