Our thoughts today center around three ideas, and how they intersect: information literacy, technology, and digital/media.
As noted in a TedEd talk by Damon Brown, in the olden days of news broadcasts (pre-cable, pre-internet, pre-TwitterFaceGram), there were very few places to get your news. As a college student, I had three networks to choose from and I was a loyal viewer of Tom Brokaw.
We counted on the likes of Rather and Brokaw to take care to present the information fairly and completely. Therefore, our information literacy skills might have been a bit undeveloped as what those anchors reported was… just the facts. “As ALA defines it, information literacy is a set of abilities requiring individuals to ‘recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information’” (ALA, 2020). It was not until the explosion of the internet that multiple sources for media appeared. Now instead of three major networks and a static-y public broadcasting channel, we have networks, cable, newspapers, and magazines (dwindling), and social media (exploding).
If you go beyond the sober and
reliable news sources, it is incumbent upon the media consumer to dust off and utilize
those information literacy skills. Though,
now that I think on it: even if you DO feel your sources are staid and trustworthy,
we should all exercise these skills.
Two podcasters, Michael Gungor and Mike McHargue of the
Liturgists podcast, outline a set of steps to help you analyze any news story
and test for “fakery” in the facts.
1.
Is an author listed? A real person, with a name and maybe even
contact information showing?
2.
Where was this published? Do they have an editorial review board,
someone to detect and banish outlandishness?
3.
Have they included a
publication date? No putting out old
news like it just happened to rile up the populace.
4.
Are facts sprinkled throughout
with no attribution? Name your people
and your sources.
5.
Does the article cry out for a
copy editor? Has anyone spell-checked
and looked it over for sloppy sentence structure?
6.
Does this article strive to
piss you off? Or incite fear? No reputable news organization will stoop to
that.
The best part of the podcast, easily, was the song they created to sum up these steps. While it is a fine effort at regular speed, to really make your day, play it at 1.25x speed. Guaranteed to make you smile… not making that up, either!
(rude language warning)
Resources:
Brown, D. (n.d.). How to
choose your news [video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/damon_brown_how_to_choose_your_news?language=en
Gungor,
M. (Executive Producer). (2017, March 7). Fake News & Media Literacy (No. 18) [Audio
podcast episode]. In The Liturgists. https://theliturgists.com/
Information
Literacy. (2020) ALA’s Literacy Clearing House. Retrieved Sept 8, 2020 from https://literacy.ala.org/information-literacy/
The Liturgists. (2017, March 17). The Liturgists j- Fake News [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-PdOubKBDo
Valenza, J. (2016, November 26).
Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a “post-truth”
world. Never Ending Search. http://blogs.slj.com/neverendingsearch/2016/11/26/truth-truthiness-triangulation-and-the-librarian-way-a-news-literacy-toolkit-for-a-post-truth-world/.
Oh, gosh, yes! I wasn't even thinking about the nightly TV news - another great source of information in a bygone era, wasn't it? But now, even TV news is 24-7 with streaming headlines and a ticker at the bottom that make my borderline OCD brain cringe at the disorderliness.
ReplyDeleteI, too, loved the song that Michael Gungor came up with. They need a "rated for elementary and middle school" version!
Anna,
ReplyDeleteI LOVED the song on the podcast. I will try speeding it up later. :)
I think that one of the most important hurdles that information seekers have is quality control. There is so much information available to users, but it is not necessarily quality and there are contradicting data points. It is ESSENTIAL to double check and analyze sources for credibility.
The song made my day!! My initial thought was to use it at school but once they repeated through again I realized. . yeah maybe not! Thanks for pointing out that some news on Twitter or other social media sites can be reputable, the source always matters. In our efforts to detox our information diet, we can sometimes be a little too hard. However, as you say, no matter how literate we are, we must all exercise those critical thinking skills. I felt vindicated when most of the criteria the Liturgists podcast mentioned were all criteria I use and recommend to my friends and even students.
ReplyDeleteIt's refreshing to see another post that doesn't completely discount the use of social media to get news. The feed can be curated - it's up to the individual to choose who to follow and to decide what they're willing to believe. Twitter has made it easier for unrelated tweets to pop up into your field of vision just because of how their algorithms work, which kind of sucks, but verified news accounts are a good place to start.
ReplyDeleteI talked about this on another post, but the checkmarks aren't always indicators that an account is reliable. They're meant to indicate that the person or entity is representing itself and isn't a "fake" account meant to mislead or impersonate. It's a good start, but isn't a guarantee of fact or a sign that this person won't push hateful opinions (J.K. Rowling, for example). Here's an article that mentions how this can cause problems: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/04/twitter-verified-accounts-misinformation/
I remember Cronkite, Brokaw, and Rather on the nightly news. We did not have a lot to read in my house, so the news media was the source of information for knowing what is going on in the whole wide world, unknowingly there was bias. My grandparents did not discredit the news media. Television brought media into our home because only short years before, media was through radio broadcasts. I remember my grandmother stayed up to watch the 11:00 PM news every night.
ReplyDeleteI was never on social media, so finding out that news sources use those platforms to reach the masses is quite interesting. That might not be a bad thing, but some social media readers believe everything they see. I have see a few posts from Facebook. It looks like people are trying to get their five minutes of fame. For example, someone shared how to get rid of the Coronavirus with a home remedy that included onions, lemons, and something else (I can't remember) that you bring to a boil. His recommendation is to inhale the vapors and it will wipe away the virus. Really? The person who showed me the post actually believed it.
Information is so important for understaning, but when you have a lack of credible information, understanding goes lacking. Those steps from the podcast are spot on. When I heard the steps, I was agreeing, yes we need that, and yes, we need that. Those steps will begin to train the minds of our young learners to fact check every time they are presented with information.
Anna, you make a great point that news found on social media can indeed be reliable, as reputable news outlets now use social media posts as a way to reach their users. I went back and read the article that Valenza cites and the authors did not take into account the source of the news stories, other than that they were accessed through social media sites. It would be interesting to know what percentage of news that is seen or read through social media is from a reliable source. The study also didn't take into account whether the readers of these stories considered the source reliability - people don't necessarily believe everything they read. The study did however note that the half of the respondents who get news from social media also got news from national and local TV news shows. That tells me that many of these people are treating what they learn from social media sites with a skeptical eye.
ReplyDeleteCheryl--I agree that placing information on social media is not the problem. I think it is great to put things on social media because of the traffic. We want people to have information, but the correct information. I just believe that we must train ourselves more and more and begin to give young learners hands-on approaches to determine what is real and what is fake. I think as we engage more in the practices, we will be more comfortable when we access information. From what you stated, I would agree that people who are on social media are probably watching the local and national news. However, we all interpret things differently and as I have learned in this course module (even though I already knew) that news outlets are biased. The social media goers might be picking up on the news feeds that the media outlets they are viewing and also emphasizing on them on social media. It does not take news long to travel. In reponse to the study you mentioned, I am happy to know that people are critical with the information they read. As we continue on our journey, we can continue to add to this group.
ReplyDeleteYou suggest in your blog post that some generations' information literacy skills might be "underdeveloped" as a result of having limited sources to choose from in obtaining information like the news, and, well. Let me reassure you that it's not just those generations who relied on the Big Three broadcast networks who are lacking some critical information literacy skills.
ReplyDeleteI am a digital native. I'm probably from one of the first groups of youngsters to earn that prestigious title. I played educational games on computers at school starting in kindergarten. I signed up for my first email account in 4th grade--on a school computer, with friends, sans parental permission or teacher awareness (yeahhhh). As one of the first generations of digital natives, with this excess of information available at our fingertips at the push of a button--we had no idea what we were doing. Many of us still don't have much of an idea of how to be good digital citizens, many of us still don't have many critical digital information literacy skills (looking at the Facebook profiles of some of the other members of my high school graduating class can confirm that). We just never learned--in large part, because we didn't know what we needed to learn. The technology, the abundance of available information was new, and I think many teachers didn't know how to teach digital media and information literacy because no one knew what needed to be taught, or how to teach it. It was a time of learning for all of us, and there are some things we just didn't know that we needed to know.
But I think we're getting to the point where we are learning these things--educators and students alike. I know I still have quite a bit to learn, more investigation I need to do, personally, of the sources I'm getting my information from, as well an acknowledgement of my personal biases that lead me to sources that confirm what I want to hear. I think that we all still have a lot to learn about how to consume digital media responsibly. But we are learning! We're learning to use guidelines like those outlined on the Liturgists' podcast, and through our learning, we're able to teach these skills better than ever, in hopes that the students we reach will be even more aware of the pitfalls of information literacy.
Awesome post!
Tiffany Alley