How should Adolescents Critically Use Digital Media: SNL and Critical Analysis

In today’s world not just students but people are bombarded with what we believe are facts, we are often on social media where hundreds of posts are shared, retweeted, or posted. Fully developed, educated adults can often understand and decipher what is and isn’t facts. Teenagers however often don’t have enough background information on certain topics and can be led to believe a myth or may not catch the satirical undertones of an author. Sources of media such as The Onion or Saturday Night Live depict current events in lighthearted ways to poke fun at a certain person or group of people. Before taking a look at one, it is important to note what someone should do when they critically analyze a text. Below is a cheat sheet from the Global Digital Citizen Foundation explaining the steps that any person should take to be an effective Critical Thinker.

By analyzing the who, what, where, when, why, and how’s of a digital media source student’s could draw what they needed from the content to tell if something is factual or not and if it could be used for a reference in a scholarly essay. Say a student who doesn’t know what Saturday Night Live, SNL, is watches a skit of the comedy’s show and takes it to heart as if not 100% validity but still to a degree of validity. That is not good. Or say a student sees a “news story” shared on their page or timeline and they believe it much like the celebrity death hoaxes that get spread. Thankfully there are websites like Snopes.com that can run fact checks and determine this. Saturday Night Live recently did a skit on the Oval office meeting between President Trump and Kanye West and I believe would be a great example on how a student should critically use digital media.

Using the five W’s and the how an adolescent would be able to see right through the satire but still pick up on important notes such as Trump and West meeting while still getting a good chuckle. Most students by either their junior or senior year of high school will learn these tools and how to effectively use them. For example, the “who” in the cheat sheet provided would answer who does this video hurt, who else has the adolescent heard discuss this meeting, and who are the key people in this video? This allows the student go ahead and find their own information and form their own opinion on this topic before continuing on with the video.

You may be considering “how does this tie to adolescents being literate?” or “Students still use textbooks in class and those are the primary source of information that kids are most exposed to.” Authors of two journal entries, David Buckingham and Julie Warner answer those questions, Buckingham states “Literacy in this broader sense involves analysis, evaluation and critical reflection. It entails the acquisition of a meta-language — that is, a means of describing the forms and structures of a particular mode of communication, and how these affect people’s experiences and practices” (Buckingham, 2007). Warner argues that even the textbooks that students use in class have a bias behind them, though more subtle, “a commercial agenda is thus inextricable from teaching and learning and commercial entities are afforded the power to influence what students learn, when they learn it, and how they learn it.” (Warner, 2017).

Students are always getting introduced to new information, be it true or false, they are and will always be introduced to information and it is a teacher’s role to make sure adolescents can verify this knowledge on their own. Adolescent minds are great at picking up on new information and it is crucial that the good and true remains while the bad and false gets screened out. To answer the key question of “How should adolescents critically use digital media?” adolescents should use the resources they do know are factual such as ABC news, or some other news source and google the background information of the author of an article or for information on a program on a certain network just to be sure what they are viewing is correct and factual. That is how adolescents should use digital media critically.

Required Reading:

Buckingham, David. (2007) Digital Media Literacies: rethinking media education in the age of the Internet. Research in Comparative and International Education, Volume 2, Number 1. p 43–55.

Warner, Julie. Critical Digital Literacies. Adolescents’ New Literacies with and through Mobile Phones. p 143–159.

Outside Resources

Critical Thinking Cheat sheet derived from https://globaldigitalcitizen.org/critical-thinking-skills-cheatsheet-infographic

Saturday night live clip derived from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sO5-t3iEYY