Editorializing, Fluency, and the Tenuous Landscape of News Literacy and Digital Reality

In our last class, we watched our classmate’s screencast tutorials on everything from data manipulation in Excel spreadsheets to downloading e-books on Overdrive. I was impressed with the amount of effort everyone put in to make their screencast both instructional and engaging. I found myself wanting to ask questions about the whole process of making the screencast, as the editorial decisions that determined what would be cut and what would be saved fascinated me and drove me mad during my own screencast creation process. I remember the revelation I had making the sound recording that the final product was going to be imperfect and that I wouldn’t be able to include every little thing I wanted to add to the video. The two and a half minute cutoff point reflected the time constraints you actually receive as a library instructor in a one-shot workshop, who has to somehow fit a lesson in under an hour when it could easily take several hours. Being able to edit one’s lessons and “kill your darlings” is fundamental to effective instruction (no matter how imperfect you think it is).

During the jigsaw exercise, our groups debated the efficacy of information fluency versus literacy. Did literacy have negative connotations that fluency didn’t? Does literacy suggest a winners/losers dichotomy where one “achieves” literacy (aka the information literacy merit badge) whereas a fluency model encourages an ongoing journey towards mastery? Do any of these names actually made a difference? I think one of the more interesting questions that we weren’t able to come up with a full answer to included: who is information literacy for? Often times we focus our info lit efforts on small children, hoping that their enlightenment will help preserve democratic institutions several decades from now. But what about the people in power now? The baby boomers and Gen X’ers? Their capability to sort fact from fiction is not questioned as much as young people. Even though the longstanding trope of a confused uncle forwarding a chain emails about wealthy Nigerian princes exists , we have yet to move toward a solution that targets this lifelong learning dilemma.

However, concerns about teenagers ability to discern valid information on news sites and social media are by no means illegitimate. In our readings this week, we examined reports and studies that raised alarms over the difficulty that young people face in separating fact and fiction online. The Stanford Group Study, for example, found in their assessments that few students had mastery level competency in rating the reliability of sources.[1] Regina Marchi, in her research, looked at news behaviors of teenagers and compared them to older adults, observing that “youth feel at ease zapping from station to station and “snacking” on tidbits of news, gaining superficial knowledge of a broad variety of topics, while older people prefer in-depth knowledge about a smaller number of topics” [2] in newspapers. While observations like these can produce some hand wringing among older generations, I think it is worthwhile to keep in mind that young people develop these behaviors in response to a shifting media landscape as well as the failures of modern journalism. Marchi reported that one teen “felt that blogs offered more local news than did newspapers or TV,” a phenomenon that reflects the lack of investment and appreciation of local reporting within the journalism business/profession.

As our lives begin to move from the analog to the digital, I believe we will encounter even more issues concerning the validity of information.The rampant concern over fake news since Donald Trump’s election to the U.S. presidency often glosses over the fact that we have created a digital environment where the tools to manipulate reality are easily accessible. The power of Photoshop to transform images is on display every single time we traverse social media. Furthermore, this manipulation of reality content  is embedded in our media platforms, with native advertising listicles and PR releases disguising themselves as news articles becoming common practice for content generators. What I find most concerning is how our social media networks are influencing our biases. On Facebook and Twitter especially, posts and tweets that contain a claim without sourcing can be viewed as credible if it has the likes, the faves, and the retweets. Plus, the existence of the blue checkmark, which the Stanford Group claimed symbolized validity, confers a legitimacy that can be problematic, as the case of Twitter verifying an avowed white nationalist back in November demonstrates. Overall, I think we need to analyze the incentives and practices of the companies and institutions that provide our information and recognize that our current digital landscape is putting us down a path where the very nature of reality can be changed with a click.

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[1] Stanford History Education Group 2016. “Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civil Online Reasoning.”

[2] Marchi 2012. “With Facebook, Blogs, and Fake News, Teens Reject Journalistic ‘Objectivity.’”