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Adaptive Behaviour
Availability of information resource
A media literate person should be able to know where to access, analyse and produce information for special outcomes (Aufderheide, 1992). Elements that the person needs are as follow:
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Characteristics of news reports
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Format of news text
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Interpretation of text
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Journalistic practices
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Message presentation
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Nature of news
In addition, a media literate person should know that news media only provides news-related materials but not the others.
Background & character of users
Media literate people should possess various media literacy skills such as reading, thinking and enquiry skills which help them explore in certain domains and have the ability to understand and categorize appropriate information. Besides, they should have high adaptability and adapt to change easily, especially the world nowadays. Therefore, a literate person should be willing to learn new things. In the case of news media, for example, the general public should know how to use online resources to seek for news.
For commercial sector, they may adapt to make use of news media to increase their benefit e.g. increase profit from advertisement, provide information in marketing research and make decisions on financial prediction, etc. For industrial sector, they may adapt to focus on how to edit, publish and cooperate with news media company. For academic sector, they may adapt to focus on how news can support their proposed theories. For the general public, they may adapt to recognize the events happen in news.
Social, political, economic, legal regulatory systems
A media literate person should adapt to the society by following certain rules. For example, the business sector should make good use of resources under the right and legal rules. Editors should not use exaggerating and illegal methods to report news and mislead the readers or audience. Academic researchers should follow the rules of copyright ordinance to quote and copy the news. The general public should critically judge the credibility of new reports.
Information literacy is closely related to adaptive behavior, because a literate person would change his/ her information searching behavior (i.e. adaptive behavior) according to the situations he/she comes across. Meanwhile, based on the previous information use (i.e. experience in searching), that person would adjust his/ her adaptive behavior for next information seeking.