Information Overload

What is Media Literacy?

 

Changes in technology are embedded in society, and we are living in an increasingly virtual world. Media literacy is becoming progressively crucial to being an informed and productive member of society.

 

Media literacy has many definitions, but here I assign it a simple yet invaluable one: the ability to understand, interact with and comprehend the information we see in our every day lives.

 

Professors, researchers, businesses and media outlets are all invested in a media literate society. This digital age, though, has brought with it monumental new players in the information game: social media.

 

Media constructs our culture. It shapes our thoughts, attitudes, perceptions and ideas about the world around us. There is a lot going on in the virtual world; some of it we can see, and some of it we can not see (advertisers with persuasive language, media outlets with agendas, “language of persuasion”, “texts” and “subtexts”…). Participation is a crucial dimension to information and media literacy, and social media is a monumental avenue for participation.

 

When we engage in activity on the Internet, we are part of a network or community, even if we don’t know it. Our results are based on what others “near” our own network have searched for or clicked on, as well as a mass series of algorithms and connections. Therefore, these centralized platforms play an important role in the shaping of our world.

 

What are the roles of platforms like Facebook, Twitter and other information-community networks in media literacy? When Facebook changes your newsfeed, it makes these decisions based on multiple levels of communities (your personal tastes and history, those of your friends, business and advertisement interests, and quite probably many other reasons we do not know about). Furthermore, we are surrounded by a community sharing hundreds of different perspectives, “facts”, and speculations of events.

 

Understanding our virtual environment is a crucial step in ensuring a media literate society.

 

If we can better understand the sociological implications and inner-workings of online communities, we can develop techniques to communicate more effectively, and furthermore devise more effective ways to teach and foster media literacy.