Am I thinking about the media or is the media thinking for me?

Outside of the world of school, I recently witnessed a conversation between a teenager and a grown-up on the subject of politics. The adult, not having a teenager her own, wanted to know how the younger generation felt about the upcoming elections. The girl told the woman that most of her friends were likely supporting the same candidate their parents were voting for. When asked whether she had watched any of the televised debates, the teen replied, “No. I learn all I need to know from social media.”

With discomfort and suppressed horror, the adult followed up, “What do you mean?”

“I just look at what people are saying on Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter,” the fifteen-year-old replied. “If there’s something important I should know about, someone will create a hashtag.”

The implications of the conversation were that 1) if it’s important enough, someone will make a hashtag about it and 2) there’s nothing at all alarming about receiving your information about the world in bite-sized chunks that have been pre-chewed by someone else.

I realize that this particular teenager doesn’t necessarily speak on behalf of all teenagers on the planet, but I fear her response is more typical than unusual.  

It’s no revelation to say that teenagers today live in a media- and social-media-saturated world. With digital devices growing out of their hands or wrapped around their wrists at all times, young people are seldom free from the influences of media feeds, hashtags, clickbait, and memes. They read all the time, but their reading is in tiny chunks without much elaboration and with little or no fact-checking or editorial control.

I wondered after listening to the exchange whether anyone in this teen’s life had ever challenged her to think about the ways she received information--about the reliability and validity of sources, about potential bias, about primary and secondary sources. In our educational interactions with young people, media literacy and its offspring, social media literacy, should be regular topics of discussion.

You don’t have to be a media expert to talk with students about media literacy. While having some familiarity with the current media obsessions might help you seem more hip (and the very fact that I used the word “hip” probably means that I am not), the most important way to open students’ minds to the powers and pitfalls of a media-saturated world is by asking thoughtful questions and getting students to ask questions of themselves. You could start with something as simple as these:

1. Where are you getting your information about this topic?
2. What are all the potential concerns about receiving your information from this source?
3. What else might you want to learn about this, and where could you go to learn it?

How we learn about the world through various media and how that information can be used and misused are worthy discussion fodder in every classroom at some point. The teenager who is content to learn about her world by reading hashtags either misunderstands how this practice limits her learning, doesn’t realize that more comprehensive information is available elsewhere, or is satisfied with her decidedly limited scope of knowledge. I prefer not to think that the latter might be true.  

After all, children are naturally curious. Spend five minutes with any toddler, and you will know this is true.  As kids get older, that curiosity blooms in some and withers in others. Consequently, fostering curiosity through the curriculum, rather than in spite of it, should be the job of every educator, as Southwestern University President Ed Burger wrote in this outstanding op-ed piece. I wonder whether helping student learn to question the media that informs them might revive the moribund curiosity of many young people.  

Teachers need not limit their discussions to the online acquisition of knowledge. Under the broader topic of digital citizenship, teachers could conduct classroom conversations about appropriate and inappropriate behavior in online interactions, the potential dangers of entering into a hyper-connected media world, what to share and with whom to share it, and how to leave behind a positive digital footprint that won’t come back to haunt them sometime in the future.

In my experience, many schools plan their digital citizenship lessons as separate modules conducted during advisory periods, assemblies, or study halls. This practice gives the impression that the lesson isn’t related to what’s going on in class and that the school merely needed to be able to check “Yes” on some document verifying that they did indeed address the subject of digital citizenship with their students. Lessons taught out of context rarely have lasting impact. Students need to talk about digital citizenship and media literacy at the moment when they need it, when it intersects with their learning.

To some, the topics of digital citizenship and media literacy seem like just more to add to an already packed list of things we have to teach young people that they should have learned at home. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were TEKS or Common Core Standards for parenting? Even if there were, this is something students need to think about in multiple contexts. With media and technology at the forefront of nearly every waking hour of our lives, we can’t talk about this enough--not in a fake, “lessony” manner, but in ways that feel real, natural, organic, and relevant. Really, that’s how all learning should be, don’t you think?