The Consequences of Being an Uneducated Consumer of Media
Like I wrote in my free-write this week in class: I can compare being a consumer of media to being an educated voter. And sure, these things go hand and hand because in order to make your decision on who you are going to vote for you are going to take into consideration (at least I do) their media presence, how they engage with the public, and how the public sees that candidate as a leader of said community. I learned that in being an educated consumer one needs to LOOK at the sources of what is being written, ask questions and be cognizant of bias.
Pew Research supports this notion that being able to responsibly consume media directly influences politics with several statistics from a study they conducted. First, they explain that regarding social media, politicians and the public are all called upon to help prevent the spread of fake news. This Pew article read, “45% say government, politicians and elected officials have a great deal of responsibility, roughly equal to the proportion who say a great deal of responsibility lies with members of the public (43%) and with social networking sites and search engines (42%).” It is interesting to see that these percentages are all very close to each other and that, ultimately, the responsibility should be shared amongst all three parties.
Furthermore, not being able to distinguish between fake news and a trustworthy source affects you as a consumer and may negatively affect others. Someone, for example, may find false information about vaccinations, and you send your children to school unvaccinated, affecting other children who might not be able to get vaccinations because they are immuncoprised. And then, we aren’t protecting our elders, which can be detrimental to society as a whole. It is also important to note that when people make decisions to vote for a candidate, how they find information about their candidate may not represent their interests accurately due to the fact that the information they find was obtained from an unreliable source (unreliable in the context in which you are using it, as Dr. Richard explained in class).
