Empowering Communities with Media Literacy

Preface

Who are you in the digital space? Who are we? What are students using for technology and how do they engage with digital environments? Do they know how to analyze information or practice citizenship online? These are a few questions which inspirited the work you are about to read.

Distinguishing the digital work from the real world is important and needed for people to function in our society, but they are both intertwined. One cannot speak of Digital Citizenship without thinking about what it is to be a citizen. Understanding how these ideas work together is in many ways what led us to this work in Digital Citizenship and Media Literacy. Here are some worldwide statistics about children, youth, and teens and their consideration of media environments:

• •Young adults (18–34) today are more distrusting of the media than older adults and report less trust in media than adults their age 20 years ago (Fioroni, 2021).
• •More than half of children have a social media profile by the age of 13; and by the age of 15, almost all have one. WhatsApp, which has gained popularity among teenagers, is used by 62% of 12- to 15-year- olds, Facebook (69%), Snapchat (68%) and Instagram (66%) (Ofcom, 2020).
• •A 2016 report claims that 80% of middle schoolers couldn’t tell the difference between a native ad and editorial content (p. 10) and 93% of college ←xi | xii→students didn’t realize that they were reading information put out by industry PR (p. 5) (Stanford History Group, 2016).

In a graduate class, a first-grade teacher commented that she felt that her little ones were too small to think about online Digital Citizenship. However, the reality is that her students are already in those spaces, and in their everyday lives are learning how to be real-world citizens by when they are taught to say “please,” “thank you,” “may I,” etc. In fact, beyond that we look at citizenship when we see how students interact with each other and we correct their behavior or teach them societal cues. As researchers in the UK stated, “the rise in Internet use by children and young people has called into question the impact that it has both on their development and on their ability to act on character virtues, including, in particular, their honesty and compassion” (Harrison and Polizzi, 2021).

This initial teaching and guidance translates well when students are online, with the only significant difference being they are facing a computer screen. We are often reminding our students, as they get older and become teenagers, that they are that there are real people on the other side of that screen. There are feelings, sentiments, hurts, worries, and much more that go on with the person who is on the receiving end of messages that are transmitted by the digital display. They, people, are real. The screen acts as a barrier in effect, holding back the reality of what is going on. This lesson is the hardest to teach. Research and other data can talk about effects and so forth, but it is in the everyday practical application that change can be most valuable. Whether it is a parent who is correcting their child, a teacher who is fostering digital competency, or an everyday individual who takes on the role of being an upstander versus a bystander, we all participate in the creation of a digital citizen. In the online world this tenet seems to be more easily forgotten.

In the 1960s, a Canadian academic, Marshall McLuhan, wrote in his book Understanding Media that “the medium is the message.” McLuhan had predicted that technology and media were growing at a rapid pace and that schools needed to adapt techniques for students to learn and process the information they were receiving, by, at that time, only television and radio. Fast forward to 2021 and beyond, and technology is the main staple of people’s information diet. As we look at our classrooms, libraries, and other places where our students can be found, there is an obvious pattern of students plugged in and educators trying to get their curriculum out to students in various modalities. There is a digital disconnect that is real and one that completely separates belief from practice.

Parents worry about how and where their children might be exploited online, Students want to know why their favorite tools are constantly being monitored, ←xii | xiii→taken away from them, or limited--- and not by just a little, but by extreme amounts. They question why education is not keeping up with their own technology preferences. They ask why they are not allowed to become digital leaders online, as if they are being prevented from stepping up and stepping into that realm of possibility. They are often right on this point. They want to know why teachers and administrators aren’t seeing the possibilities of how they can lead with technology and do better. In fairness to all, it is because educators have seen much more of the opposite, but it is also because students are still learning what it looks like to be a good citizen offline –never mind online. This point brings me back to where we started.

“I’m here today because I believe Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy. These problems are solvable. A safer, free-speech respecting, more enjoyable social media is possible. But there is one thing that I hope everyone takes away from these disclosures, it is that Facebook can change, but is clearly not going to do so on its own” (Hao, 2021).

Our social media is a part of our social stratosphere and it is also a part of discourse as a community engaged in civil society online as well as offline.