This is Part 4 of a series on Disinformation and Misinformation. If you missed them, make sure to check out Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. And if you’ve found this series compelling, consider becoming a paid subscriber so that I can continue to write this newsletter.
When you’ve written a book about the horrifying things that young people can do to each other on social media, people tend to ask you for solutions. And sure, I have a few stock answers, some of which I’ve explored in this newsletter. I’ve interviewed social media and parenting coach Devorah Heitner, talked with administrators about what schools can do when kids hurt each other with technology, got some sage advice from clinical psychologist Riana Anderson about how Black teens can navigate the Internet’s ambient anti-Blackness, and shared some of the legal allegations about Big Tech’s role in perpetuating those harms. But when people ask me for solutions, I tend to fall back on a single phrase: media literacy. “Media literacy should be taught from kindergarten on,” I often say. But what exactly is media literacy? And, more importantly, how do you teach it?
A few basics, before I get into that thorny second question.
What Is Media Literacy?
Big picture, media literacy includes both basic digital skills (how to search, post, edit, etc.) and evaluative skills of the sort I’ve been discussing over the past several weeks — how to know whether something is reliable, how to tell when you’re being manipulated, how to sort fact from fiction.
I’ve defined a few of the important subcategories below, with the help of the organization Media Literacy Now:
Information Literacy which “enables individuals to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information”
News Literacy which is “the ability to determine the credibility of news and other information and to recognize the standards of fact-based journalism”
Digital Wellness which “addresses the physical and emotional health impacts of media use”
Digital Citizenship which “teaches you how to use social media without behaving like a complete asshole.” (Okay, that definition is mine.)
All of these things are important, but for now I’m going to focus on the first two: the ability to assess whether information is reliable, verifiable, unbiased, and true.
Training The Brain
The unhappy truth is that true media literacy can’t be taught in one six-week unit or even in a single school year. These are skills that have to be taught as part of every subject, at every level. Disinformation and Misinformation don’t stand still; they’re like the shape-shifting T1000 robot in Terminator 2, constantly adapting themselves to the latest technology. We may still be catching up to the ways that social media warps our understanding of the world, but AI is already rewriting the script.
Media literacy is thus not a set of practices as much as it is a way of thinking and evaluating. It requires accepting the inherent subjectivity and selectivity of any narrative while also maintaining allegiance to the existence of objective truth and verifiable fact. And frankly, this isn’t just a way of thinking about media. It’s a way of interacting with the world and it belongs in every classroom.
For example, part of understanding History is understanding both how historians verify and analyze events from the past using primary source materials, and also how false narratives—like the myth of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy or that salacious story about Catherine the Great and her horse—take hold.
Part of understanding Science is understanding how scientists test hypotheses, build on the work of others, and refine their understanding in the light of new evidence, and also how a biased understanding of how the world works can cause researchers to ask the wrong questions or ignore important evidence, as in the myth of sperm competing to fertilize eggs.
Part of understanding math is understanding how statistical models are used in the real world both to explain and to mislead.1
Media literacy, in other words, is a process of teaching your brain how to think critically about the information that comes your way, while simultaneously building an understanding of how to verify the information you’ve received and where to look for information that is more likely to be accurate. It’s basically a kind of media mindfulness, a habit of deep-breathing through alluring stories and titillating factoids long enough to investigate their veracity. In my ideal world, students would learn to apply those skills not just to the news they see on social media but also to the rumors circulating through every middle and high school and the conflicts between them and their friends and families.
Where It Can Go Wrong
But, like any other subject, media literacy can be taught poorly, and when it is, it can backfire. In 2007, the Center for Media Literacy listed five core media literacy concepts:
All media messages are ‘constructed.’
Media messages are constructed using a creative language with its own rules.
Different people experience the same media message differently.
Media have embedded values and points of view.
Most media messages are organized to gain profit and/or power.
This approach may have worked fine when “media” meant television, movies, or magazines, and advertisements were easily distinguished from news and entertainment. But today, these distinctions no longer exist. An advertisement for a suitcase might be easily recognizable as such, but it might also might be your favorite content creator talking about how she packed her suitcase for a recent trip. Perhaps she was paid to mention that brand of suitcase. Perhaps she was hoping that a mention would earn her free stuff from the suitcase company in the future. Maybe she’s genuinely enthusiastic about that particular suitcase and simply want to share her packing expertise with no ulterior motive. Or, that suitcase endorsement may be an AI version of that creator that was generated without her consent. There are meaningful differences between each of these scenarios and very little way to distinguish between them. But telling a teenager, “She’s just in it for the money” when they have been following a creator for years and feel a personal connection with her is likely to backfire.
Likewise, the origins—and agendas—of many things that call themselves “news” are no longer clear, as both social media sites and news aggregators repackage stories in ways that may divest them of their original meanings, substituting new angles, narratives, or even facts. When the New York Times ran a story about the Internet coming to remote tribal village in the Amazon a couple weeks ago, it ended up going viral with a new headline that was in no way reflective of the original story or the reality in the village, with dispiriting impacts for the members of that tribe.
Yet if you tried to fact-check it by clicking on the link, it would take you back to the New York Times story, which was in fact legit, despite being misrepresented by the headlines and the aggregators.
The reality is that we all need to be extremely skeptical of almost everything we see, hear, or read. At the same time, cultivating that skepticism without turning it into cynicism is a delicate dance. Every aspect of media literacy has to rest on the foundation that there is, in fact, a truth to be found, even if the interpretation of that truth might vary.
As this very good discussion of some of the pitfalls of media literacy instruction points out, young people are already prone to black-and-white thinking, and need help traversing the space between total credulity and total cynicism, particularly when they see the online world as “theirs,” and tend to see adult criticism of it as criticism of them, their tastes, their interests, their references, and their happy places.
If we urge students to question everything without teaching them how to answer these questions, the results can be what Mike Caulfield, author of Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers, describes as trust compression: rather than applying skepticism to distinguish between sources that are more or less trustworthy, or to recognize the ways in which different sources are biased, students may conclude that no sources are trustworthy and that all are equally – and fatally – biased. Critical thinking theorists describe this view as multiplist, where knowledge is seen “as inherently subjective and uncertain.” Multiplists “see no use for critical thinking, because they do not believe that humans have the capacity to ever know the world in any ‘correct’ sense” – or, as Caulfield puts it, “everyone’s got an agenda, nobody knows everything, and there’s not 100% agreement on anything anyway.” The difference between skepticism and cynicism, in other words, is that skepticism is asking questions to determine the value of something, while cynicism is denying that anything has value.
At the other extreme, a takedown of all media as “organized to gain profit and/or power” can make young people conclude that adults are taking the online world too seriously when really, it’s not that deep.
[I]t’s important to teach students from early on that critiquing a part of something doesn’t mean you don’t like it, nor does critiquing a work mean that you are criticizing anyone who likes it. . . To respect the aesthetic and emotional values of media – and therefore avoid resistance from our students – we need to teach and model critical distance, respect for others’ tastes, and open-mindedness, and help students understand that a work may be positive in some aspects but problematic in others.
The piece has a list of important media literacy Don’ts, which I urge you to check out. But all of that is, to me, an argument for teaching media literacy — otherwise known as critical thinking—in as many ways as you can. One bad math teacher won’t necessarily keep you from learning—or loving—math, because you’re going to have another chance next year. The same should be true of learning how to navigate our media-saturated world. If everyone teaches a little bit of media literacy, maybe our kids will be better at this than we are. Which is all we can really hope for.
With a sigh,
Dashka
I will never stop beating this horse. Statistics is a more important subject than calculus. Fight me.
Another terrific post (even if you do use the Oxford comma). I'm in awe of the analysis and thorough research you apply to your work, and appreciate your selection of critical topics that most need attention, particularly the pandemic of misinformation and disinformation.
Hello! Thank you for this post! Some people think I should be an AI specialist when I say I’m our school district’s “media literacy facilitator.” The job description includes a made up set of tasks that help students stay safer online than they would if they didn’t have me.
“How do you know?” Citing evidence from texts, looking at multiple perspectives, knowing where and how to research, etc. I cover all of this, and you’re right! It’s NOT separate skills from other school subjects.
I really do wish that adults (in general) could learn more so that we can have more intelligent citizens everywhere, not just a few school classrooms.
Have a great weekend!
Jennifer (ReadingTeacherWrites)