How Should Adolescents Critically Use Digital Media
As technology advances the definition of literacy changes to accommodate the need and usage of technology in people’s everyday lives. In today’s society the youth uses technology more than ever before. This changes what it means to be critical of text forms because digital media is so easily accessible to young people. Technology should be utilized as a tool for learning within the classroom and adolescents need to be taught how to view text in a critical manor in order to form individual opinions as well as recognize what is true verses what is false.
In order to be literate in the 21st century one must understand how to critically view and utilize digital media. One definition of critical literacy stated, “Critical literacy is the ability to actively read text in a manner that promotes a deeper understanding of socially constructed concepts; such as power, inequality, and injustice in human relationships. Critical literacy encourages individuals to understand and question the attitudes, values, and beliefs of written texts, visual applications, and spoken words”(Critical). Being critical about literacy requires the reader to be able to think about the text in different ways in order to promote varying opinion and thought process. Author Elizabeth Bishop described critical literacy as “Critical literacy is built on exploring personal, sociopolitical, economic and intellectual border” (Bishop 52) in her journal Critical Literacy Bringing Theory to Praxis. Both of these definitions add to the point about how adolescents use digital media. Being able to teach youths critical literacy will help them be able to identify false news, factual information versus opinion, and how to form individual ideas. In the article Digital Media Literacies: rethinking media education in the age of the Internet, author David Buckingham talks about literacies changing definition. While speaking about critical literacy Buckingham states, “Literacy in this broader sense involves analysis, evaluation and critical Reflection” (Buckingham 45). Literacy no longer consists of only the ability to read and write but now involves the ability to form judgements about digital media spaces. In her article, Adolescents’ New Literacies with and through Mobile Phones, Julie Warner discusses how adolescents use cell phones to construct online identities. She says, “Whether or not youth identity play with commercial discourses represents an assertion of their own power and agency, it is necessary to also critically examine the spaces in which youth text production happen. I came to this realization as I mapped the spaces and circulation of power related to youth digital text production over the course of data collection” while speaking about the importance of looking at digital media in a critical manor (Warner 150). Adolescents use their cell phones to create individual identities on social media, this relates to critical literacy because youths need to be able to identify false identities. Adolescents use media for almost every aspect of their lives, it is crucial that they be able to think critically about what they are viewing online. Being critically literate in the 21st century requires youths to be able to form their own ideas and opinions, consider the authenticity of the text, and be able to understand how to identify what is false.
Works Cited
Bishop, E. (2015). Articulation Theory in Activist Literacy Research. Theory in Action, 8(3), 65–78. doi:10.3798/tia.1937–0237.15017
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. doi:10.2304/rcie.2007.2.1.43
Critical Literacy in the 21st Century. (n.d.). Retrieved October 21, 2018, from http://thinkcritically.weebly.com/critical-literacy.html
Warner, J. (2017). Adolescents’ New Literacies with and through Mobile Phones. 143–159. doi:10.3726/b11221
