Media Literacy Guide

A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms Run a Google search for "black girls"-what will you find? "Big Booty" and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in "white girls," the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about "why black women are so sassy" or "why black women are so angry" presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society. In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.

An eye-opening look at the invisible workers who protect us from seeing humanity's worst on today's commercial internet Social media on the internet can be a nightmarish place. A primary shield against hateful language, violent videos, and online cruelty uploaded by users is not an algorithm. It is people. Mostly invisible by design, more than 100,000 commercial content moderators evaluate posts on mainstream social media platforms: enforcing internal policies, training artificial intelligence systems, and actively screening and removing offensive material-sometimes thousands of items per day.

Communicating with Memes: Consequences in Post-truth Civilization' investigates the consequences of memetic communication, the causes of these consequences, and what action-if any-should be taken in response. Communicating with memes across social media networks has become a commonplace activity in today's world, despite the fact that just years earlier, this mode of communication was a rarity. The rapid adoption of this new mode of communication through ubiquitous social media and device use is resulting in a major transformation of the ways in which we think and behave in our digital world. From the election of Donald Trump, to online harassment and identity theft, to the resurgence of once-eradicated diseases due to the anti-vaxxer movement, Grant Kien analyzes fourteen major consequences of this shift and confronts the question of how to approach these consequences.

There is no doubt that we live in exciting times: Ours is the age of many ‘silent revolutions’ triggered by startups and research labs of big IT companies; revolutions that quietly and profoundly alter the world we live in. Another ten or five years, and self-tracking will be as normal and inevitable as having a Facebook account or a mobile phone. Our bodies, hooked to wearable devices sitting directly at or beneath the skin, will constantly transmit data to the big aggregation in the cloud. Permanent recording and automatic sharing will provide unabridged memory, both shareable and analyzable. The digitization of everything will allow for comprehensive quantification; predictive analytics and algorithmic regulation will prove themselves effective and indispensable ways to govern modern mass society. Given such prospects, it is neither too early to speculate on the possible futures of digital media nor too soon to remember how we expected it to develop ten, or twenty years ago. The observations shared in this book take the form of conversations about digital media and culture centered around four distinct thematic fields: politics and government, algorithm and censorship, art and aesthetics, as well as media literacy and education.

"EGirls, eCitizens is a landmark work that explores the many and varied forces shaping girls' and young women's experiences of privacy, identity, and equality in our digitally networked society. Drawing on the multi-disciplinary expertise of a remarkable team of leading Canadian and international scholars, as well as Canada's leading digital literacy organization, MediaSmarts, this edited collection definitively presents the complex realities of digitized communications for girls and young women, as revealed through the findings of the The eGirls Project (www.egirlsproject.ca) and other important research initiatives."-- Provided by publisher.

This book provides tips for creating a lesson plan to help college students and adult patrons evaluate media.
Contents: 1. Introduction -- 2. The information behavior of it all -- 3. The illusion of Internet savvy -- 4. Critical thinking and metaliteracy -- 5. Conclusion.

The book focuses on how different generations perceive fake news, including young and middle-age groups of people, multiple age groups, university students and adults in general, elementary students, children, and adolescents. It provides insights into the different methodologies available with which to research fake news from a generational perspective.

"Social media data can be vast and understanding which data source works best for a research project, as well as the ethical considerations it requires and how to go about extracting and analyzing this data, is fundamental for students to grasp. Working with social media data requires a specific set of knowledge and skills and this Fix answers questions such as: •Can social media data meet my research needs? •How do I gather and use social media data ethically? •What social media data do I need to gather? •How do I build an effective social media sampling strategy? •How do I extract data from social media platforms? •What steps should I take to plan my data collection?" -- Amazon

"Featuring reflective activities and lesson ideas that can be adapted for educational settings from higher education to the K-12 spectrum, community centers, and libraries, this resource presents ten chapters that explore such timely issues as how to deal with controversial topics in the classroom, the effects of misinformation/disinformation on civics in society, why the media underrepresents certain people in their programming, the digital divide and where libraries fit in, how injustice exacerbates public health issues, and global conceptions of social justice and media literacy examined through various world events"-- Provided by publisher.

This book of poems about fake news written by diverse project participants is foremost an invitation and invocation for readers to participate, with others, in an experiment in knowing and working differently with the internet: Fake News Poetry Workshops. Between 2018 and 2020, Alexandra Juhasz directed more than twenty of these workshops around the world, and these are ongoing beyond the confines of this book. Each differs in form and structure, but participants are always asked to attend to research, their own knowledge about the internet and social media, and what they can learn from their workshop and previous ones. My Phone Lies to Me shares the poems created in the workshops.

"Paradoxes of Media and Information Literacy contributes to ongoing conversations about control of knowledge and different ways of knowing. It does so by analysing why media and information literacy (MIL) is proposed as a solution for addressing the current information crisis. Questioning why MIL is commonly believed to wield such power, the book throws into sharp relief several paradoxes that are built into common understandings of such literacies. Haider and Sundin take the reader on a journey across different fields of practice, research and policymaking, including librarianship, information studies, teaching and journalism, media and communication and the educational sciences. The authors also consider national information policy proposals and the recommendations of NGOs or international bodies, such as UNESCO and the OECD."-- Provided by publisher.

t is intimidating to realize that we live in a world overflowing with misinformation, bias, myths, deception, and flawed knowledge. There really are no ultimate authority figures--no one has the secret, and there is no place to look up the definitive answers to our questions (not even Google). Luckily, THE SKEPTICS' GUIDE TO THE UNIVERSE is your map through this maze of modern life. Here Dr. Steven Novella--along with Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, Jay Novella, and Evan Bernstein--will explain the tenets of skeptical thinking and debunk some of the biggest scientific myths, fallacies, and conspiracy theories--from anti-vaccines to homeopathy, UFO sightings to N-rays. You'll learn the difference between science and pseudoscience, essential critical thinking skills, ways to discuss conspiracy theories with that crazy co-worker of yours, and how to combat sloppy reasoning, bad arguments, and superstitious thinking.

Contents:
Landscape : what today's social media world looks like for tweens and teens -- Background : where we've been, where we're going, and why it matters -- Side effects : five ways social media affects today's tweens and teens -- Conversations : how to talk about social media -- Academic wellness : organization, compartmentalization, and energy management in the age of distractions -- Social and emotional wellness : encouraging students to be healthy online and in real life -- Physical wellness : finding balance in an unbalanced world -- Moving forward : implementing the strategies at school and at home.

"This book inoculates readers against the misinformation epidemic by cultivating scientific habits of mind. From dissolving our fear of numbers and demystifying graphs to elucidating the key concepts of probability and the use of precise language and logic, David J. Helfand wages a provocative battle against sloppy thinking while making science both accessible and entertaining."--Back cover.

"To most of us, it seems like recent developments in artificial intelligence emerged out of nowhere to pose unprecedented threats to humankind. But to Dr. Joy Buolamwini, who has been at the forefront of AI research, this moment has been a long time in the making. In 'Unmasking AI,' Buolamwini explains how we've arrived at an era of AI harms and oppression, and what we can do to avoid its pitfalls...'Unmasking AI' goes beyond the headlines about existential risks produced by Big Tech. It is the remarkable story of how Buolamwini uncovered what she calls 'the coded gaze'--the evidence of encoded discrimination and exclusion in tech products--and how she galvanized the movement to prevent AI harms by founding the Algorithmic Justice League. Applying an intersectional lens to both the tech industry and the research sector, she shows how racism, sexism, colorism, and ableism can overlap and render broad swaths of humanity 'excoded' and therefore vulnerable in a world rapidly adopting AI tools. Computers, she reminds us, are reflections of both the aspirations and the limitations of the people who create them. Encouraging experts and non-experts alike to join this fight, Buolamwini writes, 'The rising frontier for civil rights will require algorithmic justice. AI should be for the people and by the people, not just the privileged few.'"-- Dust jacket flap.

A contemporary examination of what information is represented, how that information is presented, and who gets to participate (and serve as gatekeeper) in the world's largest online repository for information, Wikipedia. Bridging contemporary education research that addresses the 'experiential epistemology' of learning to use Wikipedia with an understanding of how the inception and design of the platform assists this, the book explores the complex disconnect between the encyclopedia's formalized policy and the often unspoken norms that govern its knowledge-making processes. At times both laudatory and critical, this book illustrates Wikipedia's struggle to combat systemic biases and lack of representation of marginalized topics as it becomes the standard bearer for equitable and accessible representation of reality in an age of digital disinformation and fake news. Being an important and timely contribution to the field of media and communication studies, this book will appeal to academics and researchers interested in digital disinformation, information literacy, and representation on the Internet, as well as students studying these topics.

"In this book, the author offers a new model that identifies social and cultural identity-who we are and who we want to be-as the most important factor driving the American phenomena of being wrong"-- Provided by publisher.

This book considers the practical intersection between digital media and young adult texts. In these books, teachers and teacher educators offer practical examples for engaging students with crafting critical responses to young adult literature through digital spaces. It examines how teachers can use these spaces to help students encounter, evaluate, and engage in the world in which they live. Young adult literature offers a vehicle through which students can discuss and explore the world in a more removed manner, while digital media offers a paradigm for helping students craft multimodal responses that extend beyond the traditional literary essay.

Social networking, blogging, vlogging, gaming, instant messaging, downloading music and other content, uploading and sharing their own creative work: these activities made possible by the new digital media are rich with opportunities and risks for young people. This report, part of the GoodPlay Project, undertaken by researchers at Harvard Graduate School of Education's Project Zero, investigates the ethical fault lines of such digital pursuits. The authors argue that five key issues are at stake in the new media: identity, privacy, ownership and authorship, credibility, and participation. Drawing on evidence from informant interviews, emerging scholarship on new media, and theoretical insights from psychology, sociology, political science, and cultural studies, the report explores the ways in which youth may be redefining these concepts as they engage with new digital media.