Information Literate Individual: Great Mind, Greater Responsibility
The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.” – Rene Descartes. A truth from a prodigious philosopher’s brainchild which metaphorically translates that it is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well. In information literate individual essay this topic is discussed. In this time, our world uses media to send information or in other words technologies are greatly used especially in developing the world and our country. However, this is useless if it is not used appropriately hence, the reason why we have these so-called Media and Information Literacy. In what ways does MIL helps contribute to society?
As a citizen of a modern world, being media and information literate individual is to engage in a digital society where one needs to be able to use, understand, inquire, create, communicate and think critically. It is important to have the capacity to effectively access, organize, evaluate, and create messages in a variety of forms. Furthermore, it enables people to interpret and make informed judgments as users of information and media. On the other hand, being literate in media and information is not memorizing facts or statistics about media but rather to learn, to raise the right questions about what you are watching, reading, or listening to and a person must be able to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information because we, the people, are also a medium of spreading significant information in the community.
As a democratic country, we do have the freedom to express what we want to express and tell what we have in our minds. Nowadays, we do have media as a tool, so that we can express our freedom and they can easily acquire our expression and easily receive feedbacks. Through this we can contribute to our country as our comments and expressions could be a use in improving their work qualities. But, in this situation we must still be careful and assure if our criticisms and comments are suited to the information we had received. To make it sure, we also must assure the information we had received. We also must be careful in the words we are going to use and apply ethical values to maintain our being literate. We can also make use of it to contribute in our community, as we have freedom, we can make suggestions in improving our country. This means creating a creative contribution in ourselves as a person and a professional and in our country as a citizen.
In other words, we must to be aware on what happens in our society and use media and information literacy and make use of it in contributing to our country, a contribution that really change our country into a better one.
