Fake News, Confirmation Bias, and The Echo Chamber: Critically Literate Students Using Digital Media

Critical literacy has become a vital aspect of interacting digital media, especially among adolescents. Using digital media as a tool can be successful, but students must know how to discern what is, and what is not, useful. Identities are affected by the ways digital media can be manipulated to fulfill certain biases, and young people need to be taught how to look for information that may challenge their comfort zones. Confirmation biases, information that fulfills one’s already-formed beliefs, need to be recognized and challenged so students can become informed members of society. Adolescents should critically use digital media by breaking confirmation bias habits, recognizing the echo chamber, and discerning creditable news.

American education systems do not commonly challenge students to look for information outside of their opinions. Julie Warner, writer of “Adolescents’ New Literacies with and through Mobile Phones”, writes that “people use the Internet to make sense of their racial and gendered identities and form community based on these identities online,” (2017). People tend to build their identities based upon what they read online, and through these identities communities are built. Communities confirm what students may already believe about themselves and society, but it’s important that they challenge themselves to venture out of that comfortable space. Savitz and Wallace, authors of, “Using the Inquiry Process to Motivate and Engage all (Including Struggling) Readers”, discuss the necessity of challenging students to ask questions but then also teaching them to find the answers on their own (2016). Microcosmic schools symbolize a lot of what happens outside of school walls. Students must know how to find answers to their own questions, even if it stretches their comfort zones, after they graduate.

Many students, though surrounded by books like the picture above, chose to focus on digital media for research instead. Echo chambers form online by filtering the information portrayed through ads, and this is the danger of finding information online. Platforms like Facebook filter information based on political beliefs. Hiller A. Spires, author of “Disciplinary Literacy and Inquiry”, writes about how students need to perform inquiry based learning and then share, publish, and act (2016). If students are affected by the echo chamber, much of their information will be invalid because they can’t form comprehensible counter arguments.

Fake news spreads quickly, and sometimes it can be very difficult to spot. The Wall Street Journal did a study in 2016 that proved that most student can not tell which news is real and which news is fake. Watch the video below:

The Wall Street Journal: “Study: Students Cannot Distinguish Fake and Real News”

Digital media has become a cultural form, and many articles rely on other articles for information. Everyone, including writers, has to get their information from somewhere. David Buckingham, author of “Digital Media Literacies: rethinking media education in the age of the internet”, writes, “We need to acknowledge the fact that digital media are cultural forms that are inextricably connected with other visual and audio-visual media,” (2007). Buckingham is acknowledging that digital medias rely on each other to form stories.

Adolescents need to be using digital media critically by breaking down confirmation biases, discerning for themselves which news is real, and recognizing how the echo chamber affects them. Methods must be taught in which students perform their own inquiries and answering their own questions with the supervision and aid of teachers. Critically using digital media has become a vital part of adolescent’s use of it.

References

In Class

Buckingham, D. (2007). Digital Media Literacies: Rethinking Media Education in the Age of the Internet. Research in Comparative and International Education, 2(1), 43–55.

Warner, J. (2017). Adolescents New Literacies with and through Mobile Phones. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing.

Outside of Class

Savitz, R. S., & Wallace, K. (2016). Using the Inquiry Process to Motivate and Engage all (Including Struggling) Readers. The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas, 89(3), 91–96.

Spires, H. A. (2016). Disciplinary Literacy and Inquiry: Teaching for Deeper Content Learning. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 60(2), 151–161.

Video

W. “Study: Students Cannot Distinguish Fake and Real News”, (2016, November 22). Retrieved October 18, 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYc-hd1QSwA