The Need for Whole-of-System Media Literacy

The final speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Elizabeth Dubois, who again highlights the moral panics about the effect of ‘the Internet’ on information flows. But there are many different media and platforms, where users exercise different media use choices. There is a need to better measure media habits, therefore, including their specific diversity, timing, and tactics.

On average, users across the countries surveyed by the Quello Search Project accessed between seven and nine sources for broadly political information (this is per day, I think?). Legacy offline media are still in wide use, alongside search and online news, and political and NGO sites. Practices include checking political information and actively changing one’s personal opinion. Confirmation practices include search, major news sources, and friends and family, with the latter used somewhat differently.

Policy in this space must be developed with the wider media system in mind – it cannot simply address isolated platforms such as Facebook or Google. This is not a single-platform problem, if indeed it is a problem at all. Echo chambers and filter bubbles in particular should not be overestimated. There is also a need to think about personal data protection across platforms, and build users’ data literacy. This is ultimately a media literacy question, including digital and algorithmic literacy – and users need to be given better information about what platforms are and do in order to support such literacies.