Traditional Media Skills and Digital Media Skills: Much of a Difference?

Although traditional and digital media skills contain many similarities, digital media literacy increases the differences observed in traditional literacy. On the one hand computers and the Internet make things easier as they enable systematic information retrieval from innumerable sources simultaneously. At the other hand computers and the Internet make information seeking and improving literacy more difficult as they assume a number of new operational and formal skills to start with. Additionally, they require particular information and strategic skills that partly are different from those required for the use of traditional media. All four skills taken together probably make the gap between people with different educational, occupational and age backgrounds bigger in the new than in the traditional media. Very few operational definitions and measurements of traditional media literacy are available. In this paper a general framework has been proposed to define and measure media literacy that can be applied to both traditional and digital media. The similarities of literacies have been emphasized: they all require operational, formal, information and strategic skills. The differences are caused by the characteristics of the medium under consideration and by the social and usage context that inspire special attention to particular skills.