What is it about?
To address misinformation, we can't just think about online solutions like fact-checking and labeling information. We have to create the appetite for these fixes, which means improving people's digital literacy. Right now, information practitioners - like librarians, teachers, journalists, and community organizers - are working to do just that. We ran workshops with such professionals and found that they're concerned about a time squeeze in their work. They're being asked to improve digital literacy quickly, even though dealing with misinformation requires slowing down. Misinformation taps into strong emotions and the need for belonging, so teaching digital literacy often means developing trusting relationships, as well as asking people to pause and consider their feelings. Our participants' feedback suggested two ways we can design in-person misinformation interventions that account for the time squeeze. First, we can align with people's to-do lists and meet them where they're at: for example, in school hallways and in laundromats. Aligning with to-do lists can also mean giving people "bites" of instruction that they reflect on over time. Second, we could create a culture change through a Digital Sabbath. This involves encouraging people to slow down their digital consumption; and creating reflective, communal spaces where we can all consider our digital lives more carefully.
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Photo by Sonja Langford on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Misinformation affects all of our lives. It harms people's health, undermines democracy, and entrenches discrimination against marginalized people. Addressing misinformation is going to require a complete reimagining of our approach to teaching digital literacy to people of all ages and in all walks of life. In effect, it will require a culture change.
Perspectives
Many researchers are investigating digital literacy and related disciplines (media literacy, news literacy), but few have engaged in co-design with the information practitioners who have taken on this work. This is so important, because we must understand the practical, institutional, and professional constraints that might get in the way of the effective teaching of such skills. We hope this paper gives readers food for thought about the challenges to digital literacy, and the role of digital literacy in addressing the widespread problem of misinformation.
Tamar Wilner
University of Texas at Austin
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: It’s About Time: Attending to Temporality in Misinformation Interventions, April 2023, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3544548.3581068.
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