Raising Humans in a Digital World

by Diana Graber

  My Self, My Selfie

  If a picture is worth a thousand words, what’s a selfie worth? That’s the million-dollar question today, as young people indiscriminately share tons of information about themselves through the selfies they take and share. Explore this phenomenon with your children and come to a shared understanding of what personal information is or is not okay to share online.

  1.Ask your children to tell you what a selfie is. They will probably know that this is “a photo one has taken of oneself,” but ask them: What do you think the purpose of a selfie is? How often do you take and post pictures of yourself? Why do you think selfies have become so popular? Tell your children that, in 2012, Time named “selfie” one of the top ten buzzwords of the year, and that it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013.29 They might be impressed about how much you know!

  2.Ask your children if they have ever judged someone they didn’t know by the person’s selfie. Ask for examples.

  3.Tell your children that, while taking selfies can be a lot of fun, it’s important to think about what these images convey to others. Discuss what personal information they may be sharing. (Do their selfies tell others where they are? Where they live? Or that no one is at home?) How they share their selfies and who they share them with are important discussion topics.

  4.Explain that long before there were selfies, famous artists like van Gogh and Rembrandt, among others, shared their self-imagery through self-portraits.

  5.Next is the fun part. Google some of these artists and view their self-portraits. Ask your children what they think these artists were trying to convey. Find out what they can ascertain about the artist by looking at the pictures you find.

  6.Consider visiting your local art museum or gallery to do the above. It might inspire your children to see a museum or gallery you’ve visited before in a whole new light!

  PART THREE

  A Vibrant Community

  Chapter 7

  Thinking Critically

  Misinformation and fake news will exist as long as humans do; they have existed ever since language was invented. Relying on algorithms and automated measures will result in various unwanted consequences. Unless we equip people with media literacy and critical-thinking skills, the spread of misinformation will prevail.

  — SU SONIA HERRING1

  A few years ago, Erin Reilly paid a visit to one of my classes at Journey School. She’d just landed a new project that required collecting data from flesh-and-blood students. While she cleverly disguised her objective as an engaging digital literacy activity, my students saw right through it. Instead of placidly acquiescing to her plan, they assaulted her with questions: Who created your lesson? Who is going to see our answers? Are you being paid to be here? Who is paying you? Why should we help you for free?

  Though somewhat embarrassed at how forcefully my students grilled poor Reilly, I was also proud of them for flexing their emerging media literacy muscles. Media literate people ask questions about the messages they receive. Frankly, I think Reilly enjoyed the grilling as well. She has been an instrumental figure in the media literacy movement for years and is currently the president of NAMLE, the National Association of Media Literacy Education. She knows all too well how important it is for students to develop critical media literacy skills.

  “I walked away that day thinking, ‘Good for them!’” says Reilly. “One thing we don’t want is for kids to just say yes and agree to everything we say. We want them to be critical consumers of information. We want them to be media literate.”2

  WHAT IS MEDIA LITERACY?

  “We define media literacy as the ability to access, analyze, create, evaluate, and act using all forms of communication, meaning it’s an expanded definition of literacy today,” says Michelle Ciulla Lipkin, executive director of NAMLE.3 Under her leadership, this organization has become the leading convener, thought leader, and resource for media literacy in the United States. Ciulla Lipkin is a force of enthusiasm, and within five minutes will have you convinced that media literacy may be the most important thing your kids should be learning in school.

  While I share Lipkin’s enthusiasm for media literacy—the entire final level of Cyber Civics is devoted to it—I don’t think its long, academic definition comes close to capturing the urgency of teaching kids how to understand and contribute to the media assault that comes at them via their phones, televisions, computers, smartwatches, gaming consoles, etc. Until media literacy is fully appreciated and fully understood, it won’t receive the emphasis it deserves. Math, English, history, and science will be what students, particularly in middle school, spend most of their time studying. Ironic when you consider that what they learn in school will likely be used online, and to be a vital online community member you’ve gotta be media literate.

  I thought about this one day as I was leading an eighth-grade class through a media literacy lesson. They were learning how to distinguish fake websites from real ones, not an easy task, when I overheard two girls talking.

  “I don’t get why we only have Cyber Civics once a week, but we have algebra every day,” one girl said to the other. “I’ll use this stuff way, way more.”

  While I don’t want to discount the importance of solving equations by using square and cubic root symbols, I do agree with this student that she will probably encounter more websites than algebraic equations in her future. But that’s not how most schools or parents see it. At least they didn’t up until 2016, the year that fake news catapulted media literacy into the real news.

  FAKE NEWS

  In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries declared “post-truth” the word of the year, defining it as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”4 Although the term first appeared in 1992, in 2016 its use spiked by 2,000 percent, thanks to two events—Brexit and the U.S. presidential election. A tumultuous political environment, combined with huge numbers of people getting their news from social media—within their private filter bubbles—fostered a landscape ripe for hoaxes, falsities, and conspiracy theories, otherwise known as “fake news.” You are undoubtedly familiar with this term.

  I asked Ciulla Lipkin if fake news had finally provided media literacy its moment.

  “Yes, fake news certainly put a spotlight on the conversation,” she told me. “Suddenly issues about ‘How do we understand information?’ ‘How do we decipher information?’ were in such a public cultural conversation. In that way, the fake news conversation has been a really, really important one for media literacy.”

  But with the attention, she warns, comes a downside. “The danger is that it’s so limiting. We can’t just focus on what is true and what is false, because most information is somewhere in between. The majority of information that exists right now is opinion. So, we need to understand how to weigh opinions and agenda and all those things.”

  This, by the way, is what media literacy teaches kids to do. So, you’d think teaching it would be the obvious solution to “fake news”—one of today’s biggest issues. But it’s not.

  “My biggest frustration is that most of the solutions being proposed are not educational solutions. They are more about ‘How do we get social media sites to determine what is fake and make sure it doesn’t trend?’ or ‘How do we create an app that will identify the good sites and the bad sites?’ Where the money should be going is into our education system.”5

  TEACHABLE MOMENTS IN MEDIA LITERACY

  Rather than waiting for money to flow into media literacy education, there’s a better way to prepare kids for a media-filled world. Take matters into your own hands by availing yourself of the abundant teachable moments the media provides. While fake news might be bad for media, it’s great for teaching media literacy. You don’t have to search long to find a riveting fake news story to tell your kids, like this one that I shared with my students:

  Once upon a time, in a town of only
forty-five thousand residents called Veles, in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, lived some web-savvy teenagers and young adults. During the months leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, these young people discovered an ingenious method of making fast, easy money by spreading fake news to Americans. The outcome of our election didn’t matter to them one bit; their interest was purely economic. In a town where the average annual wage is the equivalent of $4,800, the possibility of earning thousands of dollars by simply reposting American news stories seemed almost too good to be true. So the young people in Veles took advantage of our existing, and entirely legal, social media and revenue-generating advertising systems, and most Americans were none the wiser.

  To start, enterprising young Macedonians would create a website that looked as much like a legitimate American news site as possible (self-hosted WordPress sites are free for the making). Then, they’d give their site an American-sounding name. Some of the most popular names used were WorldPoliticus.com, TrumpVision365.com, USConservativeToday.com, and USADailyPolitics.com. Next, they’d go on the hunt for news stories. They searched mostly for pro-Trump content because, as they had discovered through trial and error, Trump content performed better than the left-leaning stories they’d tested. It didn’t matter if these stories were true or not; mostly they were not. The only real criteria was that they had to be sensational. The youth would copy the stories, give them catchy headlines, like “Pope Francis Forbids Catholics from Voting for Hilary,” and post them to their own websites.

  Because two-thirds of U.S. adults were getting their news from social media networks, especially Facebook, the Macedonian youth decided to share their stories there.6 They paid the social media network to target and share their fake news with the perfect audience, easy to do using Facebook’s cheap, audience-targeting tools, or they’d post their stories directly on the pages of right-leaning Facebook groups. When Facebook users saw a catchy headline, they’d assume it was legitimate news, click on the story, and like and share it with other users who would do the same. This would generate traffic back to the websites where the stories were hosted, and that’s how the youths made their money. Their income came from the Google AdSense ads they’d placed on their sites. Many websites make money using this online advertising service. The more people who clicked on these ads, the more money the Macedonian kids would make.

  At one point, U.S. news organizations identified over 140 such websites being operated out of Veles. One seventeen-year-old Macedonian who had mastered this scheme told BuzzFeed News, “I started the site for an easy way to make money. In Macedonia the economy is very weak, and teenagers are not allowed to work, so we need to find creative ways to make some money. I’m a musician, but I can’t afford music gear. Here in Macedonia the revenue from a small site is enough to afford many things.”7

  I remember seeing some of the fake news headlines generated by Macedonian youth on my own Facebook feed. They included these gems:

  “Breaking: Proof Surfaces that Obama Was Born in Kenya—Trump Was Right All Along!”

  “Rush Reveals Michelle’s Perverted Past after She Dumps on Trump.”

  “JUST IN: Obama Illegally Transferred DOJ Money to Clinton Campaign!”

  A BuzzFeed News analysis found that, during the months prior to the 2016 election, the top twenty fake news stories outperformed the top twenty legitimate news stories on Facebook—i.e., they received more shares, reactions, and comments.8 Not only did fake stories spread by Macedonian youth claim that the pope endorsed Trump, but also that Mike Pence said Michelle Obama was the “most vulgar first lady we’ve ever had,” a debunked story you can still find on a fake-news-site-that-looks-real.9 Posts like these generated millions of shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook. That pushed huge amount of traffic to these fake websites, resulting in significant ad revenue for their owners. Losers in this exchange were unsuspecting Facebook users who fell for fake news.

  When I finished telling my class this story, they sat in silence, highly unusual for this talkative group. One girl finally broke the spell. “Wow,” she said, “that would have been a much better fund-raiser than our bake sale.”

  I hope she was kidding.

  CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS NEEDED

  The only surefire way to solve the problem of internet users falling for and sharing false information is to teach the next generation of users to be critical thinkers. This is a task we have to work on, fast, because today’s kids aren’t any better at critically evaluating online information than we adults are.

  In 2016, researchers from the Stanford Graduate School of Education discovered that young people’s ability to effectively evaluate the information they find online is, in a word, “bleak.” Their study, which focused on the “civic online reasoning” of middle school, high school, and college students in twelve states, revealed, “Our ‘digital natives’ may be able to flit between Facebook and Twitter while simultaneously uploading a selfie to Instagram and texting a friend. But when they evaluate information that flows through social media channels, they are easily duped.”10

  Here’s a summary of what researchers discovered:

  •More than 80 percent of middle-school students were unable to distinguish a paid story branded as “sponsored content” from a real news story.

  •When presented with a post that included a picture of daisies along with the claim that the flowers had “birth defects” from the Fukushima nuclear disaster, most high-school students failed to question the dubious photo or look for its source.

  •High-school students did not recognize the difference between two posts, one from the real Fox News and one from an account that looked like Fox News.

  •When shown a tweet from the liberal advocacy organization MoveOn.org, college students could not detect bias.

  •Most Stanford college students could not tell the difference between a mainstream news source, The American Academy of Pediatrics, and a fringe news source, a group that splintered off from the AAP, called ACPeds.

  From middle school through college, students involved in this study displayed an appalling inability to assess the credibility of online information.

  Are you starting to see the need for media literacy education?

  TEACHING MEDIA LITERACY

  Long ago, after our first year of teaching Cyber Civics at Journey School, Principal Shaheer Faltas and I felt pretty smug about our results. Incidents of poor online behavior, cyberbullying, or even digital drama had virtually disappeared. Plus, we’d been honored at an awards ceremony given by the Orange County Tech Alliance and Project Tomorrow, two organizations that recognize “innovation in education.” It was tempting to congratulate ourselves and call it a day.

  However, near the end of the school year, a boy named Jamal rained on our self-congratulatory parade. One of the most social kids in the school, Jamal announced, “After everything I’ve learned this year, I’ve decided to go off the grid. No more phone, internet, nothing for me. It just ain’t worth it.”

  “Yikes,” I thought to myself, “this was not the outcome I’d hoped for!” I love tech and all the positive opportunities it enables, and I had hoped my students would feel the same.

  That’s when it dawned on us that we needed to add a second and third year to the program. Now that they knew how to use technology safely and wisely, it was time to address the really important topics: information literacy (how to find, retrieve, analyze, and use online information) and media literacy (which you just read about here). We couldn’t leave students dangling with the bare minimum. It would be like showing them a picture of a Formula One racing car, handing them the keys, and suggesting they take a cross-country trip. With “digital citizenship” under their belts, they were clearly ready—and needed—to learn how to use technology to its full capacity. This is the real icing on the digital literacy cake, the crowning roof to their sturdy structure.

  There are so many important lessons beyond learning how to use tec
hnology safely and wisely—which is where most schools and parents stop— that we could barely fit them into two years. Kids need to learn that conducting a Google search doesn’t mean using the first result you see. They must learn how to write effective search queries, use meaningful keywords, analyze a results page, and distinguish ads from real content. They need to understand how Wikipedia works and how to use it, what copyright is, how to avoid plagiarism, use Creative Commons, stay out of filter bubbles, cite online sources, and much more.

  But perhaps the single most important thing they need to learn is how to identify crap.

  DETECTING CRAP ONLINE

  If you’re at all familiar with middle school kids, then you know they love anything remotely scatological (think fart jokes). That’s why I love telling kids I’m going to teach them about crap. It gets their attention every time.

  I learned about “crap detection” from cyberculture expert Howard Rheingold in his book, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. Rheingold is a brilliant and somewhat quirky author, journalist, editor, and futurist who has written numerous compelling books about digital culture. I became a die-hard Rheingold fan while reading Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, published in 2002. I devoured that book in almost one sitting, all the while wondering if I’d mistakenly picked up a sci-fi novel. Rheingold described, with stunning detail, the social and technological future we’re living in now, addressing everything from wearable technology to the mobile telephone, which would be a like a “remote control” for people’s lives.11 This was long before either the smartwatch or the iPhone debuted.

  In Net Smart, something of a guidebook for the digital age, Rheingold suggests that a crucial “digital know-how” skill needed today is “crap detection.” He defines “crap” as “information tainted by ignorance, inept communication, or deliberate deception.”12 According to Rheingold, “Learning to be a critical consumer of web info is not rocket science. It’s not even algebra. Becoming acquainted with the fundamentals of web credibility testing is easier than learning the multiplication tables. The hard part, as always, is the exercise of flabby think-for-yourself muscles.”13