The deconstruction of the message: first step in the critical reception training

Abstract

Media literacy is an educational necessity due not only to the fact that a high rate of consumption implies a great capacity to influence the population, but also to the fact that media has become the main source of information and knowledge conversion. Many studies on educommunication include the need to train free citizens to participate in the media, but these studies forget that the deconstruction of messages is a prior learning required to produce critical texts. The present study defends the priority training in the critical reception justified, besides the nature of the communicative act, by the results extracted from a questionnaire about the use of the media made to two hundred and thirty-eight university students, which show a greater involvement as receivers than emitters. This survey provides relevant data on the consumption of the different media that allow assessing the weight of each source of information in young people and consider the teaching of a critical reception focused on the analysis of five elements: source, message, channel, code and receivers. Unlike many educommunication studies lost in indisputable generalities, this work advocates semiotic strategies of discursive analysis that question the credibility of communication. Training in the deconstruction of the message is, without a doubt, the first step in educommunication.