Media literacy in a social media culture. Hadewijch Vanwynsberghe, Steve Paulussen & Pieter Verdegem, IBBT-MI

1. Media literacy in a social media culture.Hadewijch Vanwynsberghe, Steve Paulussen & Pieter Verdegem, IBBT-MICT, UGent

2. EMSOC • EMSOC project • User Empowerment in a Social Media Culture • Inclusion, literacy & privacy • Empowerment= enabling people to control their own lives and to take advantage of opportunities (Van Der Maesen, 2002). • Website: www.emsoc.be • Focus: todevelop a frameworktomeasure media literacy (definition + conceptual model)

3. Why media literacy? • Concerns about ‘the media’ are not new • New media technologies  new challenges and new questions • (new) Opportunities & risks

4. Why media literacy? • End 20th century: digital inequalitiesin access • Flanders 2010: • New digital inequalities: • Participation gap • Transparencyproblem • Ethicschallenge

5. What is media literacy? • Several definitions of media literacy • Media literacy:

6. What is media Literacy? • “ The ability to access, analyze, evaluate and create messages across a variety of contexts.” (Livingstone, 2004, p. 5)

7. What is media Literacy? • European Commission: “media literacy is the competence to cope, autonomously and critcally, with the communication and media environment established within the consequense of the ‘information society” (EAVI study, 2009, p. 21) • EC makes a clear distinction between two dimensions: • 1) Individual competences (for example: technical use, critical understanding and social skills) • 2) Environmental factors (for example: media education, policies and regulation, media availability)

8. (EAVI Study, 2009, p. 32)

9. What is media literacy? • Knowing how to keep personal information private • Knowing that cyber bullying is as bad as bullying in real life

10. What is media literacy? • Differentiate between media violence and real world violence • Recognize bias and stereotyping in the media

11. What is media literacy? • Consume and produce media messages for civic engagement

12. What is media literacy? • Understanding how media messages are constructed • Knowing which online information is reliable and knowing how to recognise correct information

13. What is media literacy? • What is the purpose of media literacy (training)? Empowerment “enabling people to control their own lives and to take advantage of opportunities” (Van der Maesen & Walker, 2002, p.6) • A challenge of the information society: ensure that ALL people are empowered enough to deal with the opportunities and risks digital media pose.

14. Measuring media literacy Before we can do somethingabout the digital inequalities (example: media training), we must first have a goodunderstanding of the existing level of ML of different groupsandpeople in our society (= measure media literacy) • But first: knowwherof media literacy is built  create a conceptualframework of media literacy

15. Analysis of existing literature • Media literacy: • Skills (Steyaert, 2000; Van Dijk, 2005; Van Deursen, 2010) • “Media literacy does notattachitselfto a simpletechnicalskill …” (EAVI, 2009, p.22): • Knowledge (Silverblatt, 1995; Messaris, 1998; Potter, 2004) • Attitudes (Tondeur et. al., 2010; Verdegem & Verhoest, 2009) • Self-efficacy (Brandtweiner et. al., 2010) “One’s capability to organize and execute the courses of action required to manage prospective situations”. (Bandura, 1995, p.2)

16. Media competences = • Competences vs skills: “The terms ‘competence’ and ‘key competence’ are preferred to ‘basic skills’ which was considered too restrictive as it was generally taken to refer to basic literacy and numeracy and to what are known variously as ‘survival’ or ‘life’ skills. ‘Competence’ is considered to refer to a combination of skills, knowledge, aptitudes and attitude, and include the disposition to learn in addition to know-how.” (Martin & Grudziecki, 2006, p.256)

17. Analysis of existing literature • Level of media literacyfurtherdeterminedby media use: • Access ≠ use (Brandtweiner et. al., 2010) • Convergence: technologynotcoupledto the content (Jenkins, 2006) • Context (Hartmann, 2006)

18. Analysis of existing literature • Level of media literacyalsodeterminedbyinfluencesfrom the environment (= external variables): • Socialinfluences (Venkatesh, 2003) • Training (Livingstone & Bober, 2004; Martens, 2010; Jenkins, 2006) • Socialsupport (Bakardijeva, 2005; Stewart, 2007; Van Dijk, 2005) • Parentalmediation(Rosen, 2008; Valcke, Bonte, De Wever & Rots, 2010; Bauwens, 2009) External variables

19. Building blocks of media literacy? Socio-economics & demographics Media competences Media use External variables

20. Conceptual model (work in progress)

21. Van Deursen & Van Dijk (2008), Davis,(1989), Verdegem & Verhoest (2009), Ajzen (1985), Ferro et. Al. (2010), Meneses & Momino (2010), Livingstone & Helsper (2007), etc. Correa (2010), Durndell (2002), Hsieh et. al. (2008), Livingstone & Bober (2004), Tondeur et. al. (2010) Fulk (1993), Valcke et al. (2007), Hobbs & Frost (2003), Jenkins (2006), Martens (2010) , Robinson et al. (2003) Venkatesh (2003), Valente (1995), Fleming et. al. (2006), Valcke et. al. (2007), etc.

22. The …… of the conceptual model • Going beyond a skills-based approach • Providing a broad interpretation of skills • Media literacy as its core (skills, knowledge & attitudes) is separetely described in the model as competences • Taking into account media use (access and use technology and content) and the context of media use • Having attention for external variables • Going beyond traditional socio-demographic and socio-economic variables to describe digital inequalities • Media-independent

23. Measuring media literacy? • Survey • Observations • Experimental design • Interview • Combination of quantitativeandqualitative research methods: Multitrait-Multimethod

24. Hadewijch.Vanwynsberghe@UGent.be