Miriam: Tell me why is media literacy important?
 
Matt:

Well I mean, off of your previous question, the idea of youth and whatnot. Umm I think it's important and I always used to say this - is that youth um. Okay media literacy is important for young people because they're exposed to and I want to say TV mostly, because I think that's mostly what they're watching. I tend to think of music videos as a good example because music videos are really unruly about what get's...I mean it's an issue because, for example Much Music and MTV their target audience are 14-year-olds. And I think beyond 14-years-olds as a general population, 14-year-old girls are the target audience, and this is kinda disturbing because if you look at what is in the videos and MTV is largely based, is like, it's a lot fiction and sort of reality, like The Hills and whatnot. I mean if you watch these as an adult some of this stuff is really I mean not questionable, but I mean really racy.

Like I mean, there's a lot images of like drug use, sex... And like, I'm not saying that all these things should be just like, hidden but these kids who are watching this don't have the sort of tools to be able to analyze what they're watching because they don't know who it's made, they don't understand all that stuff. So what media literacy ends up doing is shows them how to make a film but in turn gives them the tools to be able to break down what they're watching on TV - whether they know it or not and that's the big thing is that sometimes they'll watch TV and they've done the course and they're kinda like, They weren't you know, so into the theory but somewhere in the back of their head they're analyzing what they're watching and they're breaking it down scene by scene being like: "Oh I know how they shot that, Oh I know how this is made".

So they know it's not, they can't just take it at face value; they know that all this money goes into it and all this production value. So they can be more critical about what they're watching. So that's my reason why I think media literacy is so important for kids.  

Miriam: And where did that reason come from?
 
Matt:

I think it's because I worked at Freeze Frame, which is the media literacy program in Winnipeg - and then I worked at Musiqueplus (laughs) right back to back. So the learning I took from Freeze Frame and the course work I was doing at Concordia, and then worked at Musiqueplus and was like, just frightened by the fact that I was working for this organization making content for 14-year-olds, and just seeing all the sort of work going in to making sure these kids were watching it, making sure that their ad revenue is up.

And it was kinda frightening. I mean frightening to myself, not because I was like oh my god this is an evil industry that must be taken down, frightening in the sort of way, that it was just one more exposure for me to know how much work goes into manipulating images, and making sure kids watch the stuff and then stay tuned for the commercials and buying Oreos, and whatever else they put on their ...(laughs) Fudgeos - Was that clear?