How to Be Critically Literate in the Digital Age
Critically using media is an essential skill to a person’s life because what is trying to be answered by critical analysis is whether or not what one is reading has the authority to alters one life. With the growing availability of information through the growth of technology, the amount of potentially life-altering texts grows. The modern student must learn what has the credibility and, therefore, authority to alter the students life. If a students cannot do this, he or she will allow his or her life to be altered by things that do not have the authority to alter lives. If a student can determine credibility, he or she will allow alteration of his or her life to be done by texts that have the authority to do so. How, then, does an adolescent student critically use media in this digital age? Adolescents critically use digital media by first removing their personal biases, then by determining the credibility of the author and site, and finally by determining the logicality of the claims.
First, the student must remove his her her biases on the subject discussed by the text. No one can determine credibility if one is blinded by his or her own blindness; therefore we have to see our blindness and address it before reading anything. If not, we will only assume incredibility on texts that disagree with us. In David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech to Kenyon College class of 2005, he tells a parable of a fish swimming in water, but not knowing that it is swimming in water because water is all the fish has known; he goes on to say that the point of his parable is to show that “the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about” (Wallace, D. F. 2013.). The water is our biases. If you are interested in the full speech:
Also, in order to talk and think about biases, the adolescent’s vocabulary needs to be widened, so here are twenty-four formal biases:
Next, the reader must be able to determine the ethos of the writer, the authority and credibility of the writer. David Buckingham says that this is decided through representation, language, production, and audience (Buckingham. 2007.). The following infographic is from a self-help site, but I think that these attributes should be sought after when analyzing a writer:
Finally, the reader should determine if the methods and the conclusions are logical. The reader should makes sure that the logic of the writer is valid, whether it be based off data or just from thought. In order to do this the reader must be aware of logical fallacies; here is an infographic describing some:
In conclusion, in order to be critically literate, there must be some knowledge of one’s own biases, how to determine the possibility of another’s biases, and some basic manifestations of biases in logical fallacies. Readers critically use digital media by first removing their personal biases, then by determining the credibility of the author and site, and finally by determining the logicality of the claims.
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. doi:10.2304/rcie.2007.2.1.43
Wallace, D. F. (2013, May 19). This Is Water — Full version-David Foster Wallace Commencement Speech. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI
Out of Class:
Richardson, J., Smith, A., & Meaden, S. (2018). Your Logical Fallacy Is. Retrieved October 21, 2018, from https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/
Temple, I. (2014, March 27). Infographic: Eight Steps to Credibility. Retrieved October 21, 2018, from https://www.inestemple.com/2014/03/infographics-eight-steps-to-credibility/
