Protecting Adolescents from the Dangers of the Internet: Critical Media Literacy
The internet can be a dangerous place, and not just because of explicit content, predators, scammers and the like. Content that is payed for by groups of people trying to push their own agendas is everywhere, and adolescents need to learn how to critically use digital media in order to spot this. Thinking more critically about online content can also protect adolescents from the potential harms of scams, fake news reports, misrepresented information, echo chambers, targeted advertising, and even the readers’ own blind certainties. Social phenomena, economics, authors’ perspectives and motives, and the adolescent readers’ perspectives all shape the way digital media is presented and interpreted. The large role digital media plays in our everyday lives creates a need for people to be able to identify and think critically about all of these factors so that they can receive accurate information and keep themselves protected from the dangers of not using digital media critically. Adolescents should critically use digital media by identifying the reasons digital media is produced, assessing the validity of the information they find, and then deciding what to do with the knowledge they gained from the digital media and their critical approach to reading it.
Digital media takes many shapes and forms, and everything published online was published for a purpose. Adolescents need to be able to identify the economic, political, social, and other factors that contribute to the creation and posting of content on the internet (Keller, 2007). Adolescents should look at who is posting or sharing what they see on the internet and think about their motives for posting it (Buckingham, 2007). This idea is not only important because individuals creating content could possess different perspectives that influence their writing, but also because of how the content could have been posted because of “commercial influences (Buckingham, 48).” Many types of digital media are produced for economic purposes or to push a certain political or social idea.
The following video talks of how students are unable to discern the difference between sponsored content and regular news articles. This can lead to students believing false or biased information, and critical use of digital media can alleviate this problem.
Readers of online content need to take the author’s perspectives and motives into account, not only so they can better understand the information being presented, but so that they can assess the information’s validity. Adolescents need to look at what sources the content is using and also look at those sources with the same mindset that they look at the content with so that they can spot its potential biases (University of Texas). News content often misrepresents information as well, so even if its sources are credible, the way the sources are used as evidence is important as well (University of Texas).
What adolescents do with the information they find online and how they use it to create new online content is just as integral a part of critical digital media use as knowing how to read digital content. Adolescents could unwittingly promote harmful social ideals or spread inaccurate information if they do not regulate what they post or share online (Warner 2017). Online posts supporting negative social ideals can be seen in the creation and sharing of certain memes, like the one pictured below.
Adolescents need to learn how to critically use digital media in order to protect themselves and others from content that has hidden or harmful motives. If adolescents do not look closely at the motives and validity of online content and then control what they themselves post online, they can add to problems already on the internet and cause themselves to believe false information.
Class Sources:
Warner, J. (2017). Adolescents New Literacies with and through Mobile Phones. Peter Lang International Academic Publishers.
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.
Outside sources:
