Misinformation! What Can We Do About It?

Digital Literacies and 21st Century Skills

Alexandra, Noelle and Jen discuss the phenomenon of selective perception and how it causes social media users to not only believe faulty information but to also spread it. Using this week’s readings by Spies as a springboard, as well as the video on Selective Perception and a blog post by Harvard's Program on Negotiation, the trio explores the difference between misinformation and disinformation, selective perception and how it relates to echo chamber effects, the inconclusive research currently out there regarding how and why misinformation spreads and finally, what educators and even private citizens can do to stop the spread without entirely jeopardizing the public’s faith in the media.

References

Hung, A. C. Y. (2021, October 5). Selective perception [Video]. Youtube.

PON Staff. (2019, November 26th). The anchoring effect and it can impact your negotiation [The anchoring effect is a cognitive bias that describes the common human tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered]. Retrieved from
https://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/negotiation-skills-daily/the-drawbacks-of-goals/

Spies, S. (2020, April 29). Contexts of misinformation. Mediawell. https://mediawell.ssrc.org/literature-reviews/contexts-of-misinformation/versions/1-1/

Spies, S. (2020, July 20). How misinformation spreads. Mediawell. https://mediawell.ssrc.org/literature-reviews/how-misinformation-spreads/versions/1-0/

Schmidt, P. R., & Lazar, A. (2016). CHAPTER 5: Mapping Critical Media Literacy onto Iterative Remix Practice. In Reconceptualizing Literacy in the New Age of Multiculturalism and Pluralism. Information Age Publishing, Incorporated.