• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

NetFamilyNews.org

Kid tech intel for everybody

Show Search
Hide Search
  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research
  • About NetFamilyNews.org
    • Supporters
    • Anne Collier’s Bio
    • Copyright
    • Privacy

*Social* media literacy: The new Internet safety

February 27, 2009 By Anne 2 Comments

In talks and sound bytes over the past year, I’ve been saying that – for the vast majority of online youth – digital citizenship is the new Internet safety. And indeed digital citizenship is HUGE, for the very reason that behaving aggressively online more than doubles the risk of being victimized (see “Good citizens in virtual worlds, too”). Still, that’s really only the half of it. Media literacy is the other half. I haven’t been saying that “digital citizenship + media literacy = online safety 2.0” because it’s such a mouthful, and it’s important to keep things simple and focused. But media literacy is huge too, because critical thinking about incoming ad messages, compliments, group think, etc. is protective against manipulation and harm.

Now it’s time for a remix. Old media literacy is about what we consume, read, or download. We still need that – more than we ever have in this fast-paced age of information overload. But on the participatory Web of social producing and creative networking we also need social media literacy. I have spent some time in and been influenced by NewMediaLiteracies.org, the work of MIT media professor Henry Jenkins, colleagues and students, building on Jenkins’s foundational 2006 white paper, “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture” (see also my coverage of it in ’06).

If you watch the video on NewMediaLiteracies.org’s home page or look at the basic skills of new media literacy, I think you too will see that digital citizenship is there – perhaps partly under “Negotiation” (“the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms”) and partly under “Collective Intelligence” (“the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal”). But maybe it should be its own skill. Doesn’t it make sense to fold it in there?

More importantly, I think the critical skill, “Judgment” (“the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources”), needs to be redefined. That’s the old media literacy definition. Critical thinking on the participatory Web needs to be about what we upload, post, produce, and behave like as much as what we download, read, watch, and passively consume. If social media literacy involves that kind of critical judgment, as well as digital citizenship (a first stab at a definition might be: the ability to function, act, communicate, and collaborate in community appropriately, civilly, ethically, and productively), then I propose that….

Social media literacy = online safety 2.0

Or am I being too reductionist? Do you prefer:

Digital citizenship + social media literacy = online safety 2.0
?

Please weigh in, with a comment here or in the ConnectSafely forum or via email: anne(at)netfamilynews.org.

Related links

  • I really like the Center for Media Literacy’s vision for 21st-century literacy – “the ability to communicate competently in all media forms as well as to access, understand, analyze, evaluate and participate with powerful images, words and sounds that make up our contemporary mass media culture” – but, coming from an online-safety perspective, I think the definition needs to go beyond competency to include social media literacy, ethics, and NewMediaLiteracies.org’s list of skills.
  • From the Byron Review, quoted the other day in a Telegraph blog’s “Teenagers online”: “Research is beginning to reveal that people act differently on the internet and can alter their moral code, in part because of the lack of gate-keepers and the absence in some cases of the visual cues from others that we all use to moderate our interactions with each other. This is potentially more complex for children and young people who are still trying to establish the social rules of the offline world and lack the critical evaluation skills to either be able to interpret incoming information or make appropriate judgments about how to behave online.” Exactly!
  • Professor Jenkins’s barriers to full participation in the participatory culture, which parents and teachers can help youth overcome: Besides simply not being able to participate because of lack of Internet access (“The Participation Gap”), they are “The Transparency Problem” (“the challenges young people face in learning to see clearly the ways that media shape perceptions of the world”) and “The Ethics Challenge” (“the breakdown of traditional forms of professional training and socialization that might prepare young people for their increasingly public roles as media makers and community participants”) – see “Participation: Key opp for our kids.”
    Share Button
  • Filed Under: Ethics & Etiquette, Literacy & Citizenship Tagged With: Henry Jenkins

    Reader Interactions

    Trackbacks

    1. Formspring: What's going on around it - Connect Safely says:
      April 21, 2013 at 5:41 am

      […] Challenge me on any of this. This is starkly painted, and of course nothing’s black and white. But I’ve been watching this new social contract evolve for 15 years, and it’s clearer and clearer to me that the only real solution is an immediate and long-term national (or global) commitment to teach and model the rights and responsibilities of good citizens online as well as offline (because it’s all just life to young people) and a new media literacy that addresses what’s said, done, and shared in media as well as what’s consumed. It’s far from a quick fix but – once we get going – it will start delivering right away. Because the research shows that responsible behavior is protective. […]

      Reply
    2. Formspring: What’s going on around it | NetFamilyNews.org says:
      May 11, 2010 at 3:39 pm

      […] Challenge me on any of this. This is starkly painted, and of course nothing’s black and white. But I’ve been watching this new social contract evolve for 15 years, and it’s clearer and clearer to me that the only real solution is an immediate and long-term national commitment to teach and model the rights and responsibilities of good citizens online as well as offline (because it’s all just life to young people) and a new media literacy that addresses what’s said, done, and shared in media as well as what’s consumed. It’s far from a quick fix but – once we get going – it will start delivering right away. Because the research shows that responsible behavior is protective. […]

      Reply

    Leave a Reply Cancel reply

    Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

    This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

    Primary Sidebar

    NFN in your in-box:

    Anne Collier


    Bio and my...
    2016 TEDx Talk on
    the heart of digital citizenship

    Subscribe to my
    RSS feed
    Follow me on Twitter or even better:
    NEW: Follow me on MASTODON!
    Friend me on Facebook
    See me on YouTube

    IMPORTANT RESOURCES

    Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
    NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
    CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
    Center for Democracy & Technology
    Center for Innovative Public Health Research
    Childnet International
    Committee for Children
    Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
    ConnectSafely.org
    Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
    Crimes Against Children Research Center
    Crisis Textline
    Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
    Cyberwise.org
    danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
    Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
    FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
    The research of Global Kids Online
    The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
    If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
    The International Bullying Prevention Association
    Let Grow Foundation
    Making Caring Common
    Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
    Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
    MediaSmarts.ca
    The New Media Literacies
    Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
    The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
    Sources of Strength
    "Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
    "Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

    Categories

    Recent Posts

    • Lawmakers, controlling and banning kids doesn’t help
    • New clarity on child sexual exploitation online
    • Game-changer: Child rights-by-design
    • Why I struggle mightily with the new Utah law
    • A solution for ‘awful but lawful’
    • New global service for getting nudes off the Internet
    • Then there’s the flip side of ChatGPT
    • For SID 2023: What youth want ‘online safety’ to teach

    Footer

    Welcome to NetFamilyNews!

    Founded as a nonprofit public service in 1999, NetFamilyNews quickly became the “community newspaper” of a vital interest community of subscribers in more than 50 countries. Site and newsletter became a blog in the early 2000s. Nowadays, you can subscribe in the box to the right to receive articles in your in-box as they're posted – or look for tweets, posts on our Facebook page, and key commentaries from Anne on her page at Medium.com. She welcomes your comments, follows and shares!

    Categories

    • Home
    • Youth
    • Parenting
    • Literacy
    • Safety
    • Policy
    • Research

    ABOUT

    • About NFN
    • Supporters
    • Anne Collier’s Bio
    • Copyright
    • Privacy

    Search

    Subscribe



    THANKS TO NETFAMILYNEWS.ORG's SUPPORTER HOMESCHOOL CURRICULUM.
    Copyright © 2023 ANNE COLLIER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.