MEDIA LITERACY RESEARCH AND AN APPLICATION AT SELCUK UNIVERSITY

Media literacy is defined as gaining the ability of reaching, analyzing, evaluating and transmitting both written unwritten messages, which can be seen in a great variety of formats like tv, video, cinema, advertisements, internet, etc. media literacy contributes the audiences’ conscious to follow the media, allow them to easily express themselves and help them to participate in the social life more actively. it also allows being equipped with the ability to perceive media messages in a more proper way and even produce them. the importance of media literacy comes from its supply of a greater control on the messages sent to target audience. as their conscious on media literacy increase, all the segments of the society, especially the children, may notice the border between the real life and the world built by media and protect themselves from the harmful effects of it while gaining information from them. media literacy courses were added to curricula in the schools in order to form a more conscious audience, who accurately follow media, know their country’s problems, behave sensitive to the environment and capable of understanding media messages properly. the purpose of the media literacy course is to provide the children necessary equipment to understand the structure and the mechanism of media institutions, to evaluate the fictional content consciously, to follow media in a criticizing way, to ask correct questions and to find correct answers. in this study, it is aimed to determine how media literacy is perceived by the students of selcuk university. moreover, besides this general aim, creating awareness to media literacy has been adopted as another purpose.