The Threat of Progress
As the world grows with it’s technological abilities and interconnectedness, we are introduced to more and more information and it is more readily available than ever than before. Everyone is given a voice now and it is so easy to know what everyone is thinking just by looking at their social media. Events happen and the news is immediately distributed around the world. We have never seen media on such a large scale as it is today. It also has never been as easy to reach a large audience as it is today. Everyone seems to know everything about everything as soon as it happens. It provides great insight, various perspectives, and incredible speed. Along with all of those things, it creates problems like never before. There has never been a more difficult time to encounter true, unbiased, and unedited digital media. With the vast amount of sources to choose from, it can be harder and harder to discover the true one. With that being said, the job of developing adolescents’ research skills and helping them identify the truth has never been more difficult. There are various things we must take into account but examining the author’s credentials, the date of publication, the purpose of the writing, the potential bias from the author, and many other aspects of a particular source, we can help students become self-sufficient in identifying the validity of digital media. Once we are able to help adolescents’ evaluate and analyze their sources, they are able to effectively use their sources to reinforce, support, and develop their own ideas, which is an incredibly crucial part of writing and becoming independent learners.
Here, the video reveals the various reasons for why false news can spread and spread very rapidly at that.
An interesting point made from the class reading by Steve Lohr of the New York Times was that, “People are the principal culprits, according to a new study examining the flow of stories on Twitter. And people, the study’s authors also say, prefer false news” (Lohr).
The graphic above shows readers how to think critically and evaluate sources before they are ready to utilize them. Julie Warner, author of “Adolescents’ New Literacies With and Through Mobile Phones,” writes about the importance of the adolescents to establish the ability to analyze sources in digital media, especially in this day in age. Warner suggests, “not only should critical digital literacy teach youth to interrogate the texts they read and circulate, it should also involve teaching youth how to read digital spaces. Digital spaces have different mechanisms by which youth can be surveilled, have different structures for user control, and exist within particular social contexts” (Warner 154).
It is crucial that students are able to know the intentions of an author because that has a major effect on the author’s bias and viewpoints. Fair.org writes, “Media have tremendous power in setting cultural guidelines and in shaping political discourse. It is essential that news media, along with other institutions, are challenged to be fair and accurate”(fair.org). It is important that we, as citizens help maintain validity in media because bias plays a major role. It is vital that students can observe “who” is writing the subject before they look at the “what” they are writing. An African American living in the 1960s probably would describe the civil rights movement in a different manner than a white American today who was not even alive during the movement. There also are are certain people who just do not have the credentials to be trusted in a certain field. You would not trust a teacher to fix your car, just like you would not necessarily want a mechanic to teach a classroom about math. University of Maryland helps us better understand the purpose of evaluating sources, “Inaccurate, questionable, or out-of-date sources can undermine your ideas and cause the reader to question your authority on your topic. Relevant and informed sources can help you to support and prove your thesis and persuade your audience” (UMUC). All of these reasons emphasize the importance of teachers to help adolescents to become self-sufficient in their ability to properly evaluate sources before using them.
References
Course reading:
Lohr, Steve. (2018, March 08) It’s True: False News Spreads Faster and Wider. And Humans
Are to Blame. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/08/technology/twitter-
fake-news-research.html.
Warner, Julie. (2017) Adolescents’ New Literacies With and Through Mobile Phones. New York. Peter Lang.
Outside sources:
Dietrich, Christian. (2015). Fake News and the EUs Response. European Parliamentary Research Service Blog. https://epthinktank.eu/2017/04/02/fake-news-and-the-eus-response/.
FAIR. (2015). How To Detect Bias In News Media. Fair.org. https://fair.org/take-action-
now/media-activism-kit/how-to-detect-bias-in-news-media/
Tavlin, Noah. (2015). How False News Can Spread. TED-Ed.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =cSKGa_7XJkg&vl=en
UMUC. (2018). Evaluating Sources. University of Maryland. https://www.umuc.edu/current-students/learning-resources/writing-center/writing-resources/evaluating-sources.cfm.
