Critical Usage of Digital Media by Today’s Adolesents

Today’s youth must be careful as to what they believe to be true when taking information from digital media on any platform; as with the developing technologies and instantaneous nature that media spreads, infinitely many incorrect and influential texts are at the fingertips of absorbent adolescents at every moment.

As you may have heard during the video, there has been experiments that have determined that fake news stores have tended to spread faster and farther than real news stories on Twitter (Wochit 2018). While this is not definitive to all stories and platforms, it is remarkable that these false articles are shared so widely. This sharing indicates that many people do not realize that what they are reading is false information; a way a lot of people decide to trust the information they read is if their friend shared it and if they see the same piece of information regarded mutliple times it is assumed to be true.

In secondary school, before each research assignment, our classes were required to meet at the library once so that the librarian could give us a lesson about what qualified as a trustworthy source. Besides the author and publisher of the article itself, we were told that if they same point was made in various articles then it could be considered fact or at least true. With today’s technological platforms, these false articles are shared so frequently, that adolescents may be seeing the same headlines multiple times thus believing them to be true.

In the article by Buckingham, he discussed how we know that adolescents are literate in digital media. It is clear that they are fluent in the language and use of these various technological platforms just by their everyday ease of use. However, their incapability to realize that what they are sharing and promoting on their sites and reading is false is how they are lacking in their critical literacy of digital media. In today’s classrooms, we do not need to teach our students how to type or create an account and post on various platforms, but we need to guide them to be critical of what they read. Students must remember to be critical of what they read whether it be news or otherwise. Technology is beneficial as we now can access information in a matter of seconds, however with this ease, there is more false and misleading information out there.

Today’s adolescents are very capable of creation of media with devices (Warner 2017) which shifts the goals of teaching these students. They do not need direction of how to create, but rather the importance and how to evaluate these texts with the growth of “fake news” and other false texts floating in todays inter web.

As seen in the video above video some important questions students should reflect on when evaluating a news article or piece of media. These “5 C’s” are context, credibility, construction, corroboration and compare. Only 25% of high school students were found to be able to identify fake news articles in a study done by Havard. It is concerning how few students are able to judge an article. Which prompts the need for students to learn how to critically use digital media. They are struggling to identify valid information and without this skill they are being mislead.

Overall, for the most part adolescents have the resources to access a variety of information, both true and false, however they are lacking the knowledge of how to evaluate its validity. Thus it is important for our educators to push students to think critically when they read various texts both inside and outside the classroom.

Required Readings:

Buckingham, D. “Digital Media Literacies: rethinking media education in the age of the Internet” Research in Comparative and International Education. 2:1. 2007.

Warner, J. “Critical Digital Literacies”, Adolescents’ New Literacies with and through Mobile Phones. 2017.

Outside Sources:

Spencer, J. “Helping students identify fake news with the five C’s of critical consuming”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xf8mjbVRqao. 2016.

Wochit News. “Fake news spreads on social media faster than read news”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVUMfXcD4HE. 2018.