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Be Media Literate in the Digital Age

Is that news too good to be true? Learn how to navigate websites, videos and social media to determine the credibility, evaluate the source, and avoid spreading rumors.

In the past decades, the ways many of us get our news and and information has changed, quickly. Whether you are reading or listening or watching, you are the first line of defense in protecting yourself from misinformation, scams, or looking bit silly because you reacted quickly and forwarded a manipulated AI image of a two headed shark attacking twins at a beach to all your friends in Florida, just in case it would keep them safer to know about that.

The library can help! Using fun examples, we will review fact-checking resources, factors that help people determine the credibility of sources and information, tips for spotting your own cognitive biases, and brush up on skills for well-informed, critical thinkers. 

If you learned a card catalog in the library, or used to look up information in the volumes of an encyclopedia set, or used to get your world news from Time and Newsweek and a daily newspaper - this workshop is for you!

It's not just you who might be struggling with media literacy in the digital age. We will also share resources you can use to keep learning, and brainstorm some strategies for reminding that friend who keeps sending you alarming photos and impossible headlines that you appreciate their concern and also have some new skills to share with them for our modern digital age.

Stony Brook University’s Center for News Literacy points out that

The Digital Age poses four serious information literacy challenges for civil society:

• The amount of information we are flooded with daily makes it difficult to sort out what's reliable.
• New technologies to create and share information make it easy to create content that only appears authoritative and then to spread it virally.
• The conflict between speed and accuracy has been exacerbated by Digital Age demands for delivering information as fast as possible, but accelerating that process increases the chance it will be wrong.
• Humans prefer information that supports our beliefs, and the Internet and social media make it much easier for us to select only the information that supports our ideas, reinforcing rather than challenging them.

Source: https://digitalresource.center/why-news-literacy-matters

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