Media and Information Literacy: Strategies to Combat the Decline of Trust, Authority, and Truth
Linda Miles, Miriam Laskin, Catherine Lyons, Jennifer Tang, and Lisa Tappeiner
Technology and the Erosion of Expertise
It seems like a lifetime ago that former Vice President Al Gore championed “the information super highway” back in the 1990s. Since then, many of the promises of the Web have come to pass. It is an affordable and fast route to vast quantities of useful information. People have become their own travel agents, lawyers, real estate agents, and doctors. They now have the power to create their own travel itineraries, draw up templates for legal documents, and, with the help of YouTube, even change the washer on their kitchen faucet. Anyone who can write a tweet or a blog can be a journalist. For better or worse, the Internet has redefined the very notions of expertise and professional competence. As educators of students in their early years of college, one of our roles is to draw students into the academic conversation. Librarians seek to teach students the skills and mindsets needed to discover, integrate, and critique new information and be ready to use the best of it in their professional practice and personal lives. This task has become an increasingly difficult one in an online information environment where the difference between reality and fiction is blurry or indistinguishable. In this discussion, we examine some of the factors that have made the task of educating students to become savvy users of information so difficult in a context of ubiquitous social media, and we propose ways the college community can come together to better educate our students and prepare them to face an uncertain future.
Anti-Intellectualism and Social Media
America has a long history of anti-intellectualism, a distrust of intellectuals and professionals. Anti-intellectualist thought was a driving force behind some of the most troubling chapters of our history, from the anti-communist hearings of the McCarthy era, resistance to civil rights reforms in the South in the 1960s, to the vilification of college students and academics who protested against the Vietnam War (Merritt). In a 2008 article in the Washington Post, Susan Jacoby describes the general shift from print to digital consumption:
The third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know. . . it’s the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism—a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse.
Until recently, intellectuals and professionals—the visible targets of anti- intellectualism—largely controlled the modes of information dissemination— newspapers, television, publishing—and information flowed from “experts” to everyone else. Librarians and others have long sought to democratize access to information and to ensure that a multiplicity of points of view are available to all. The first proposition of the Freedom to Read Statement of the American Library Association, published in 1953, asserts: “It is in the public interest for publishers and librarians to make available the widest diversity of views and expressions, including those that are unorthodox, unpopular, or considered dangerous by the majority.” Throughout its history, broad access has been among the primary hallmarks of our profession.
While librarians continue to be committed to providing access to a diversity of views, today all of us face the daunting challenge of navigating competing interpretations of reality and claims that question historical and scientific facts long held to be true. Social media (including Facebook, Twitter and Weblog platforms) have given rise to online platforms that empower anyone to anonymously question the authority and veracity of all kinds of information and recycle and disseminate these views to a wide audience in a matter of seconds. Anti-intellectuals, appealing to emotional, political or religious beliefs, exploit social media to discredit the work of scientists, journalists, or other professionals when it contradicts their views and agendas. Moreover, the online proliferation of false reports and doctored images or videos makes it difficult to distinguish between reality and fabrication. And, sometimes, mixed in with all of the falsehoods and exaggerations, are reality-based reexaminations of long held assumptions that will deepen and expand human knowledge.
Acknowledging political and social consequences of this new reality, the Oxford Dictionaries named post-truth the Word of the Year for 2016: “post-truth—an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’” Although a well-informed public is essential to a functional democracy, consumers of online information are less likely to be confronted with challenging new facts than lulled by reassuring echoes of what they already believe to be true.
In its early days, the Internet offered the promise of bringing people together virtually to exchange views and enhance mutual respect and understanding. Today, it is more likely to partition us into separate realities where we surround ourselves with online “friends” who think like us and consume the same information diet. In a recent interview, left-leaning activist and web journalist Eli Pariser describes how social media is engineered to know our preferences and expose us to the information we want to hear: “algorithms, like the kind used by Facebook. . .often steer us toward articles that reflect our own ideological preferences, and search results usually echo what we already know and like. As a result, we aren’t exposed to other ideas and
viewpoints” (qtd. NPR Staff).
Paradoxically, while exposing us to a limited range of ideas and facts, the web’s becho chamber also makes us vulnerable to believing we have access to knowledge and understanding that eludes others. A 2016 study by researchers at Chapman University found that 75% of respondents believed in at least one major conspiracy theory, from the cover-up of Barack Obama’s true birthplace to the government’s involvement in 9/11, and a third of respondents believed that the government was hiding information about an event, “the North Dakota crash,” which was fabricated as a control for the survey (Wilkinson College). Moreover, a 2016 study of more than 7000 students by Stanford University concluded that “young people’s ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: bleak” (Wineberg and McGrew 4). Presented with an online image of a mutated daisy (photoshopped) and the claim that its defects were a result of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, 80% of students failed to question the source of the photograph or seek out other sources verifying the claims made in its caption (Wineberg and McGrew 17). In a related article, Sam Wineburg contends that students are unable to distinguish between real news on an issue and commercially sponsored content made up to appear like a news story—even when labeled as “Sponsored Content” (qtd. Herold). Clearly, educators have a more essential role than ever in educating students to become critical consumers of information.
Professional Responses
In the late 1980s, as it became clear that the burgeoning “information age” would heavily impact the American way of life and our nation’s ability to compete internationally, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) called upon institutions of higher education to take on a leadership role in equipping an “information literate” society (Presidential Committee). As the world of academic information expanded and diversified, the ACRL’s Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education were rolled out and approved in 2000, providing guidance for developing and assessing instruction as well as a “framework” to help students gain “control over how they interact with information in their environment” and equip them to think meta-cognitively about their own learning. Librarians began explicitly connecting their source evaluation curriculum design and facilitation to Standard Three, “The information literate student evaluates information and its sources critically and incorporates selected information into his or her knowledge base and value system.”
The Standards were superseded in 2016 by the ACRL’s Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, which signaled a turn toward deeper consideration of “foundational ideas” regarding “the dynamic and often uncertain information ecosystem in which all of us work and live.” As the association observes, roles have evolved for students, classroom faculty, and librarians. Students have new responsibilities when it comes to using information ethically and creating and disseminating new knowledge. In many cases classroom faculty are asking students to think critically about how information is generated, analyzed, and shared within their disciplines. And academic librarians are collaborating with colleagues across the institution in new ways to help activate students’ critical perspectives on the information they consume. Beginning with early formulations of the Framework, librarians have been refocusing source evaluation discussions and activities using the Frame, “Authority is Constructed and Contextual.” More specifically, Candice Benjes-Small describes a range of recent responses by librarians to the perceived current media literacy crisis (“Information Literacy”).
Clearly, there is still a gap in students’ understanding and abilities. Traditional approaches to library instruction—even those built on the Standards and the Framework, which are foundational for librarians’ work in the classroom—have not proven wholly effective in helping students successfully navigate this new digital media saturated environment. Can a student be information literate as described by ACRL’s Framework and still believe in conspiracy theories? Can they still fall prey to fake news? The answer is: “You bet!”
Overheard:
Student A: Angelina Jolie is one of the Illuminati. That’s the deal she made to get so famous.
Student B: Yeah, I read that too. And did you know that Beyonce had to sell her whole family—and her soul—to the Devil?
Student C: Where did you guys hear these things? Students A&B: Facebook, of course!!!
The above conversation paraphrases any number of such exchanges educators hear during the course of a semester. When asked how they have learned of these things, students tell us Facebook. Or Twitter. Or Instagram. Or Reddit. It’s too easy, it seems, to assume that something that arrives via a social media platform—or on a website or an email “must be true.” That is the big challenge for librarians and other educators today, and indeed for each individual. It is not a good idea to take at face value “news” or an article on the newest study of how to lose weight, or even a report on any academic subject.
Media Literacy: A Foundational Skill for Every Class and a Call to Action
With years of experience as researchers and educators, most faculty members can easily evaluate publications in their own fields of expertise. They know which publications and authors are the trusted authorities within their disciplines; also, they understand the tools and practices specific to their fields. However, we know that in approaching academic research, students are no different from any non-expert. Researchers find again and again that, for undergraduates, most academic research starts with Google. “Undergraduates rely on Google to do research. . . for many of them it may be the only research tool they use [and students] often assume that search results are recommendations of credibility and rely on search engine brands as endorsement of quality” (Leeder and Shah). To complicate matters, on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, content is disseminated widely and almost instantaneously via a network of single clicks. It can be challenging to identify the original source of information in order to evaluate its reliability or authenticity. In the face of these fundamental problems, students not only need faculty members to guide them to use the trusted research tools of a specific discipline, but also would benefit from assignments that sharpen their media and information literacy skills, teach them to distinguish between ads and journalistic content, detect bias and fraud, and investigate and identify the purpose behind web content—to make money, to mislead, to disseminate facts and information, etc.
Librarians often collaborate closely with classroom faculty members in various disciplines, supporting design of research assignments, teaching workshops to introduce skills, tools and resources, and working one-on-one to support students seeking help with assignments at the reference desk. This partnership could be extended to co-developing exercises for foundational media literacy, which would not only help students with their academic research, but also build lifelong skills for critical thinking and writing. For example, many media literacy tasks can be introduced as low-stakes assignments, including informal writing tasks and analysis of real world artifacts that reinforce disciplinary content. Such assignments might accomplish multiple learning goals simultaneously, for example:
Distinguishing between news items and advertisements on a website using stories related to course content;
Helping students recognize the hallmarks of great journalism, again by focusing on discipline-related stories (e.g., see Benjes-Small Evaluating);
Identifying strengths and weakness of an online video both in terms of production quality and content;
Investigating the truth value of claims made on a political website;
Comparing content and rhetorical strategies used to address the same issue on websites that represent differing or opposed points-of-view.
It is essential that faculty and librarians move beyond traditional research assignments and incorporate alternative learning experiences that help students navigate an increasingly complex and confusing information environment.
There is one more essential ingredient to consider before faculty members can make real headway in helping students successfully navigate the twenty-first-century’s complex information environment: reading comprehension. Some neuroscientists and scholars of reading comprehension believe that the time twenty-first-century humans spend gathering, processing, and skipping through information on the Internet is beginning to rewire the human brain; essentially, some of these scholars anecdotally observe increasing difficulty in their own experiences of reading novels or other serious works (Rosenwald). According to Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University, “It was torture getting through the first page. I couldn’t force myself to slow down so that I wasn’t skimming, picking out key words, organizing my eye movements to generate the most information at the highest speed. I was so disgusted with myself” (qtd. Rosenwald). As a cognitive neuroscientist, Wolf continues to study the differences between reading on the page and on the screen, with an eye toward encouraging the development of bi-literate brains.
Academic librarians work with students on doing research and we often steer them to licensed subscription databases and help them formulate search strategies and use search tools to pull up lists of articles on their topics. Often students simply scan the titles of the articles in the results list and declare that “none of the articles are good for my topic,” followed by a quick decision to abandon that topic and scrounge for another. We ask whether they have actually opened the link to the article to read it, or even looked at the abstract to decide whether the article is appropriate and the answer is, “no.” They seem to feel that a title will tell them all that they need to know about whether an article suits their needs. Of course, many titles don’t necessarily reflect the content of the article. Beyond academia, large percentages of media consumers tend not to read past headlines anymore. In a June 2016 Washington Post opinion essay, Caitlin Dewey notes, “59 percent of links shared on social media have never actually been clicked: In other words, most people appear to retweet news without ever reading it.” In 2014, a study on how consumers read news found that “roughly six in 10 people acknowledge that they have done nothing more than read news headlines in the past week” (Cillizza).
Developing reading comprehension skills is a prerequisite to building media and information literacy competencies. It is arguable that part of the reason many students do not use quotations correctly in their writing is that they don’t completely understand their sources. Unable to engage with complex academic texts, they quote long passages but do not explain what they mean or why they are important. Similarly, in order to evaluate the quality of a news article or to identify satire, for example, readers need skills in recognizing genre, determining an author’s point of view, and comprehending content.
The first year of college is a time to introduce students to complex texts that they will encounter in their majors and to build skills in understanding and analysis. However, students entering college today are less likely to be in the habit of sustained reading than their predecessors. Although increasing numbers of readers are scanning words on the Internet, few are reading book-length texts. According to a Pew Research Center study, more than a quarter of American adults did not read a single book, in any format, during 2013. Of those who did read, “half of adults read more than five books and half read fewer” (Zickuhr and Rainie). Other investigations into the reading habits of young people were similarly dispiriting: “[A] roundup of studies, put together by the nonprofit Common Sense Media, shows a clear decline over time. Nearly half of 17-year-olds say they read for pleasure no more than one or two times a year—if that. That’s way down from a decade ago” (Ludden).
The community of educators at Hostos is not alone in recommitting to the centrality of reading as part a college education. The 2016-17 academic year saw the rebirth of a campus-wide common book program, Hostos Reads! There were book talks, lectures, and a contest that encouraged students to interact and engage with Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, a moving book about our broken criminal justice system. Chief Librarian Madeline Ford and Education Professor Jacqueline DiSanto, were awarded a grant to make it possible for students to finish an Associate’s degree in Early Childhood Education using only open source textbooks, at no cost to students, addressing the fact that financial considerations preclude many students from purchasing textbooks, and that a lot of students never complete the reading assigned for classes. It is up to each of us to create assignments to build reading skills and encourage a campus-wide culture of reading.
Education Trumps Technology
One possible future direction is that social media platforms will take on a stronger role in evaluating the accuracy or reliability of information posted on their platforms and their users’ posts. A 2016 report by the Pew Research Center confirms what many of us already know: “a majority of U.S. adults—62%—get news on social media, and 18% do so often” (Gottfried and Shearer). Facebook is the most popular social media platform for users looking at news stories, and we know that during the recent election campaign season many readers were unable to distinguish between “real” and “fake” news. Facebook began to look at ways it could help to identify news that is grossly inaccurate, misleading, or just plain made-up.
In November 2016, Sarah Frier described how CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered addressing the proliferation of inaccurate information: “Facebook is exploring labeling stories that have been reported as false by third parties or the community so people are warned before they read or share them. The company also is working to make it easier for people to report fake news, and improve technical systems to better detect such articles. Facebook is also turning outside its own organization for help. It will meet with journalists to understand how they verify information, and is exploring partnerships with third-party fact-checking organizations.”
Although social media companies have a role to play in implementing technological fixes, the ability to discern fact from fiction and determine trustworthiness resides with the individual reader. Working together, the college community has a role in developing assignments, programs, and educational opportunities that challenge students to read closely and critically examine information. The more students have direct experience with and appreciation for the painstaking and complicated process of constructing knowledge, the more easily they will recognize a fraud and the safer our future will be.
References
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