Reviewing What We Learned about Media Literacy

Improving our media literacy by becoming more critical thinkers about language, images, and data is really important, but it will take practice. Becoming media literate requires us to question what we're seeing and reading, and to think about what emotions the text or images might be trying to appeal to. But this is very worthwhile work, and is absolutely necessary to be valuable members of the society within which we live.

In this module, we've seen that we all experience confirmation bias at some point, and we learned how echo chambers and filter bubbles keep us from challenging our way of looking at the world. We were also introduced to tools and techniques that can help us become more critical users of information to improve our research skills, such as:

• Learning to recognize clickbait
• The information cycle
• Lateral reading
• Evaluation techniques such as CCOW to make us stop and investigate information
• Fact-checking resources to help us think critically about information
• How images, language, and data can be used to play on people's emotions
• The media bias chart to help us recognize media bias

 

Help

For more help with media literacy, contact a librarian at the Highline College Library.