“Media literacy is not just important, it’s absolutely critical. It’s going to make the difference between whether kids are a tool of the mass media or whether the mass media is a tool for kids to use.”

— Linda Ellerbee, journalist

“No matter what the source, information is only powerful if students know what to do with it. As students are inundated with media messages, the challenge is not to amass more information, but to access, organize, and evaluate useful information from a variety of print and electronic sources.”

— Kathleen Turner, author

“There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power.”

— Matt Taibbi, author and journalist

“Just as we would not traditionally assume that someone is literate if they can read but not write, we should not assume that someone possesses media literacy if they can consume but not express themselves.”

— Henry Jenkins, author

Berners-Lee is credited with inventing the World Wide Web. The British computer engineer created the first web browser and set up the world’s first website in 1991. He also devised Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a widely used computer programming language.

Zuckerberg is the co-creator and chief executive officer of Facebook, a powerful social networking site with global reach. Since its creation in 2004, Facebook has grown into a multibillion dollar company with more than 1 billion users.

Wojcicki is one of the country’s most powerful technology executives. She was one of Google’s first employees and advocated successfully for Google to buy YouTube, a video-sharing website, in 2006. Today, Wojcicki runs YouTube as its chief executive officer.

As co-founder of Apple Computer, Inc., Jobs helped develop and popularize user-friendly personal computers in the 1970s. He went on to transform the way people access and listen to music by helping develop the iPod. Later, he influenced the way people use cell phones with the introduction of the iPhone.