Tag Archives: digital literacy

Process Post Week 7

As digital media continues to rise in popularity, digital literacy, and critical thinking are needed. There is so much fake news, and false stories being told that it can be quite hard to distinguish the truth. I have been taught from a young age not to trust social media and that the news only shows one-half of a story. As an Indigenous person, I was taught that even what I saw in the News could be wrong/fake. According to Jacob Liedke and Jeffrey Gottfried, “Adults under 30 are now almost as likely to trust information from social media sites as they are to trust information from national news outlets, new data shows.” This scares me as I do not trust either of those sources without extra research. Liedke and Gottfried also found that “In a recent Pew Research Center survey, half of 18- to 29-year-olds in the United States say they have some or a lot of trust in the information they get from social media sites.” I do not trust social media but many people I know do and I find this is because they do not do their research before having their own opinion. I find out they are tricked because they do not have the critical thinking or digital literacy skills to question where the information came from and determine if the source is trustworthy. Digital literacy and critical thinking are needed to browse the internet today because of cancel culture.

Canceling used to be reserved for people that were irredeemable like sexual assaulters and people who had sex with animals. Now people are canceled for having an opinion, trying to get the truth heard/out, or supporting people who got canceled with exaggerated truths and straight-up lies. There is a mob of people on the internet who will take one sentence out of context and not even do one search to see if what they saw was true or give the person a chance to explain themselves. Cancel culture used to be used to inform people of terrible things people have been confirmed to have done with evidence to back themselves up. Now you can cancel someone if you have an opposing opinion from them and throw around labels until one eventually sticks as it looks like it could fit. Cancel culture now should not be taken seriously without extra research that breaks past the initial wave of hate. Because of the way cancel culture is nowadays people need to take what they see on the internet with a grain of salt. Digital literacy to me is navigating through fake news and false stories and critical thinking is needed to find the truth and brake past the toxicity of canceled culture.

reference:

Liedke. J and Gottfried. J. (2022). US adults under 30 now trust information from social media almost as much as from national news outlets. Published by Word Economic Forum, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/11/social-media-adults-information-news-platforms/.