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Strategies Used by the Media

In our last lesson, we talked about how structural and personal bias affects the information we get from the media, particularly the news media. But the media do more than just bring us news, information and entertainment. They sell us things. In fact, for many media, that's their only purpose. In this lesson, we're going to tell you how they do it. But first we need to give you a little history.

Print Culture/Image Culture

Since the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, human beings have lived in a print culture . Almost all information was communicated via the printed word and, for the most part, only those who could read were able to fully participate in society.

Since photographs came along 150 years ago, our culture has been evolving into an image culture. Print is still important, but it's only one of the ways that information is communicated. Today we live in a world of powerful images, words and sounds -- a media world. There are media everywhere -- print media like books, magazines, comic books, graphic novels and newspapers. All around us are film, radio, television, videos, CD's, video games, popular music, DVD's, photography, advertising and the Internet.

The media don't just influence our culture anymore, they are our culture. So you need to learn as much about them as you can. You need to become media literate.