On Dec. 4, 2012, Paul Mihailidis, media literacy expert, spoke to students at the US Forum about living in a hypermedia age. During his talk, he set the current landscape with a few statistics:
- We spend 53+ hours a week with media (Kaiser, 2010)
- Our average attention span in 2012: 8 seconds
- Our average attention span in 2000: 12 seconds
- Average attention span of a goldfish: 9 seconds
Mihailidis defined media literacy as the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate messages in a wide variety of forms. Media literacy empowers individuals to be critical in their media consumption and have a voice what they do. Mihailidis also talked about how individuals have more power than ever to influence the media and have a significant impact on change.