Media Literacy: The Most Important Skill in The 21st Century

Opinion analysis by Albert Geokgeuzian, Staff Writer

August 28th, 2021

We scroll through tons of information everyday, but we don’t consciously go through them, not always. Instead, we often just skim through the information and just let it be, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but when it comes to understanding the news, it’s not a good thing. Media literacy is basically our ability to understand the news, to go through all the information that is presented to us and make sense of it. We have been doing it automatically for a long time but it’s time we start actively working on our media literacy skills because the world could depend on it.

To understand why we need to improve our skills in media literacy, we must first understand why we’re so bad at understanding the news in the first place.

Do you like change? Probably not, most people don’t, most people like to hold onto the status quo because it’s more comfortable, even if the status quo is wrong. Take smokers for example, we know that smoking increases the likelihood of lung cancer and yet people still smoke. Being put into a situation like, one involving conflicting attitudes, behaviors or beliefs, produces cognitive dissonance, and when there is an inconsistency between attitudes or behaviors, something must change to eliminate the dissonance. For smokers, that elimination could come from new information such as “research has not proved definitely that smoking causes lung cancer.” And with the rise of social media, this “new” information can be found everywhere to suit your cognitive dissonance perfectly.

Our brains are amazing machines but they’re terrible at going through complex and new information. Because our brains automate so much of our lives, like brushing your teeth, tying your shoes, opening a door, etc. It is terrible for gathering news. There are many reasons why we’re so bad at navigating the media landscape . One of the reasons is what’s called the “law of closure.”

For example, what do you see when you see this picture? You probably see a panda despite there being no line that connects the panda’s head, our brains do connect the lines and we see a panda as a result. Our brains do this by using prior knowledge of what a panda looks like, the same principle applies when we’re looking at news. This inherent desire to connect the dots, to see the whole instead of the parts - is exactly what makes humans so vulnerable to misinformation

Another reason that negatively impacts our ability to navigate the media world is “false memory”, it’s when we don’t exactly remember everything correctly so our brains fill in the blanks with something plausible, an example of this is you believing that you started the washing machine before you left for work, only to come back to realize that wasn’t true. The line between memory and imagination is just too thin to notice. The bigger impact when it comes to false memory is the fact that it’s much easier to create a memory than it is to change one, that’s why “fake news” is so difficult to stop, once the seed is planted, it’s incredibly difficult to stop it from growing.

But the biggest problem we have with going through information is the fact that we have confirmation bias makes it even worse. Confirmation bias is when we hunt, albeit often unknowingly, to information that we already believe is true and social media platforms exploit confirmation bias for their own benefit.

Platforms like Twitter and Facebook want you to stay on their platforms for as long as possible - because the more people stay, the more advertisements they’re shown and the more platforms make money - and their platforms are tuned to keep showing you stuff you like, this has a side effect of walling off different communities from each other, a concept known as a “filter bubble.”

A filter bubble is when platforms use algorithms to seperate users in different communities based on what the users like to see and show them posts they are likely to interact with, and not show them posts they may not. Filter bubbles were put on display when Facebook came under fire in 2019 for hosting neo-nazis on the platform for a long time without anyone outside of their “bubble” being exposed to their posts.

People get their news from social media now more than ever which causes many problems, not least of which being that getting your news from social media often leads to being less engaged politically and less knowledgeable, and the added effect of a filter bubble is that it creates echo chambers for the communities. An echo chamber is when likeminded people exist in the same bubble they quite often agree because of their similar opinions, thus it’s called an echo chamber.

All these reasons, and more, combine to produce an environment where lies dominate the landscape, which is why fake news spreads faster than real news, and if we do nothing to stop it, truths will no longer exist.

That statement isn’t hyperbolic, because social media has given everyone a voice and any opinion can find a community, people can build and live in their own realities online, and eventually it’ll spill into the real world, like it did on the January 6 insurrection of the US Capitol. In the 2019 ADL summit, Sasha Baron Cohen said this: “Today, demagogues appeal to our worst instincts, conspiracy theories that were previously confined to fringes are going mainstream. It's as if the age of reason, the era of evidential argument is ending and now knowledge is increasingly delegitimized and scientific consensus is dismissed. Democracy, which relies on shared truths, is in retreat, and autocracy, which depends on shared lies, is on the march.” If we don’t improve our skills such that we become better equipped to deal with all the information we are bombarded with, democracies will fall and autocracies will rise.

This is why it’s important to have critical thinking skills around all types of media and build an understanding of how media messages shape our culture and society. That’s the most important skill of the 21st century, and there are campaigns out there to help, there are also free crashcourses on media literacy. Even if you think you’re great at understanding the media landscapes, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by seeking out information that could help you.