CONTEXTUAL MEDIA AESTHETICS AS THE BASIS FOR MEDIA LITERACY

The essay is an attempt to build a theoretical base that will help us understand what media literacy is and how it functions. The major argu ment is that contextual media aesthetics is the necessary foundation o f media literacy and that we need to know how the basic aesthetic buil ding blocks are used to create and shape our cognitive and affective m ental maps. The media literacy model proffered here attempts to show t he hierarchical relationship of four levels: (a) the basic aesthetic i mage elements and their aesthetic fields, (b) how they are structured for specific purposes, (c) how we perceive them and how they affect us , and (d) how they fit into the various intellectual and cultural fram eworks for media analysis.