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October 21-25 is National Media Literacy Week. There’s a lot to say and consider when thinking about accessing, analyzing, and participating in the media landscape, and it can definitely be overwhelming. In another post, we reintroduce the concept of media literacy and explain why it’s still a necessary skill set to cultivate. To help you navigate and make sense of the information around you, we recommend focusing on:

• Slowing down
• Asking questions of yourself and of your media
• Choosing and filtering what you consume

These tools will help you engage more consciously with the media you consume. You’ll be better equipped when you do decide to share, discuss, or research what you’ve found–be it interesting, rage-inducing, meaningful, or entertaining.

Slow Down

Much of the media landscape today is incredibly easy to consume passively, and it’s largely created to stir up strong emotions. We may often feel compelled to take in and react to as much as possible. With our culture of scrolling, we may also simply be doing so accidentally. As we encounter media, there are many things that warrant a closer look. It’s worth taking a step back every so often. 

The Media and Me: A Guide to Critical Media Literacy for Young People shares, "slowing down creates opportunities for critical reflection and meaningful engagement. Slowing down makes room to become more aware of clickbait headlines, worn-out stereotypes, and provocative images. This, in turn, may mean that you spend more time in critical analysis and become less likely to be stressed out by the time you invest in media use or duped by misleading content."

Slowing down can look different, based on what works for you. The goal is to be more intentional and conscious of your time and what you are interacting with. Here are some examples:

• Set aside specific time–and a time limit–for interacting with the news or digging in more deeply.
• When you have a strong reaction, stop and investigate more deeply before moving on or sharing. This applies to investigating why you reacted the way you did, as well as the information itself.
• Take a step back and reevaluate your go-to sources. Do you still trust these sources? Do you need to diversify?
• Read the entire article or watch the entire video. It’s easy to just see the most eye-catching media, but if you dig in, what’s the context or evidence?
• Read multiple articles. Can you find differences in reporting? Extra details or context that helps create a bigger picture?

Try to think about spending more time with less content. Being well informed is not about how many articles you can share online or reading all the headlines of your favorite outlet. Just because you can spend endless hours researching the state of the world or ‘doom-scrolling’ doesn’t mean you should.

Ask Questions of Yourself and of Your Media

As the variety of media and information we have access to gets more and more complex, we now know about taking the time necessary to engage thoughtfully. It’s also important to reflect. Are you still where you want to be with your media? Ask questions of your media to ensure that you understand all the context, messaging, and implications. Some sample reflection questions are:

• How do you decide what news sources to trust? How has your trust in news sources changed?
• Why are you consuming this news? What is the most effective way to consume the news you want?
• Do you have all the information you need on this topic?

To ask questions of the media you consume, information professionals typically focus on ways of looking at how credible, accurate, and timely the information is. There are handy acronyms like CRAAP and SIFT that invite us to think about how trustworthy a given source may be or otherwise evaluate what we’re seeing. Lately, I think my favorite is “AD IT UP” from Brian A. Primrack’s You Are What You Click. He suggests:

• Author: Who is the author of this message, and why did they make it?
• Directed (audience): Who is the message directed at? Who is the intended audience? [Note that it may not be you!]
• Ideas: What ideas do they want to get across?
• Techniques: What techniques do they use to get across those ideas?
• Unspoken: What’s unspoken or left out of the message?
• Plan: What’s my plan now that I’ve gone through this process? Does this change my thinking or behavior?

As an example of how you can work on ‘ad’ing it up, let’s take this post you’re reading.

• Author: Amy Budzicz, information services supervisor at Skokie Public Library. Why did I make it? Well, it’s part of my job (maybe it was assigned to me?), but also to help teach/inform on these information topics. 
• Directed: Anyone who consumes media! Probably mostly adults given the writing style. We might also think about how the audience is people who trust the library.
• Ideas: Information can be overwhelming; being intentional about media consumption is a good thing; the library wants to be a resource to help you navigate these issues.
• Techniques: A friendly tone, using books within the library’s collection, an authority behind being an “information professional” 
• Unspoken: I haven’t talked at all about specific media choices, or whether some are more trustworthy than others. 
• What is your plan now that you’ve thought about this? Do you want to engage with media literacy more? Do you want to reach out to the library with questions?

Choosing and Filtering

For better and worse, this fast-paced, internet-connected world means that anyone can be amplified. There’s no real barrier to the speed at which information can travel. As things get shared, there’s no guidebook to understanding whether sources are of equal value, and many things are largely up to interpretation. As you work on slowing down and asking questions about what you’re seeing, a third element to consider is filtering.

Loren Collins writes in Bullspotting: Finding Facts in the Age of Misinformation, "real critical thinking is not so rote and simple. It requires spotting suspicious facts and sources, and knowing when to trust and when to investigate further. It requires being aware of the logical fallacies that our minds are susceptible to and resisting the easy answers that can come from falling into those traps. It demands a willingness to reconsider things you may already believe and to evaluate evidence neutrally. And while it may not lead you to answers that you like, at least you can be confident that it’s leading you to answers that are true."

Pay attention to what articles and posts are designed to elicit strong emotions. There are often clips, soundbites, and even memes that ask you to make snap judgments, and it’s worthwhile to try to filter out things that ask you to jump to conclusions. Look to see if there’s strong evidence and context for the things being conveyed by using the other two tools: slowing down and asking questions.

When filtering, consider the differences between news, opinion, and even satire. Do you want purely factual information or are you okay with an op-ed that describes someone else’s way of thinking?

You get to decide what to engage with, trust, and what’s important to you. As you think about the reflection questions, also use them to seek out information that will have the greatest impact:

• What current events take up space for you right now, or what’s most on your mind? 
• What do you wish you could talk about more meaningfully? What news makes you want to take action?

There may be local news that personally affects you and your community, or you may want to widen your scope internationally so you can understand the context of foreign policy in the election. Whatever it is, be intentional about it and try not to let the volume of news simply wash over you.

It’s good practice to read a variety of sources when you can, and you can choose and filter what interests you and helps you learn. It’s good to be open to different viewpoints and to stay curious about the multiple ways of making sense of the world. But it’s equally important to combat the tendency to overindulge. The key here is balance, and learning to prioritize all the information you encounter is important to being media literate.

This is just the tip of the iceberg with ways you can interact and think critically about the media you consume. We tried to focus on three really practical elements of staying informed and interacting with information. It’s tough out there, but we’re ready to help! To learn more, check out these books in the library’s collection.

• Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity
• Bullspotting: Finding Facts in the Age of Misinformation
• You Are What You Click: How Being Selective, Positive, and Creative Can Transform Your Social Media Experience
• The Media and Me: a Guide to Critical Media Literacy for Young People
• What the Fact?

Teens and kids may be interested in the following titles: 

• Information Glut: Sorting the Good from the Bad
• Media Literacy: Information and Disinformation
• Information Literacy and Fake News