This week’s reading discussed media literacy in today’s society and how it has gone somewhat awry. Growing up, I know I was personally told that “Wikipedia is completely unreliable, and you should never ever use it” by teachers in primary school. I remember asking about the fact that you can see where the information is from, and that you can verify it by going to the quoted source to make sure it hasn’t been tampered with. Still, we were never allowed to use Wikipedia.
Growing up, I was also never particularly taught the ins and outs of the internet in terms of reliability of sources. I was always told ‘you can’t trust the internet’, but never told necessarily why- only because everyone has access to it. Never were any of my peers educated on peer-reviewed or scholarly articles, never were we told how to be critical of work, just that we should be. Danah Boyd is spot on in saying that we need to, as a society and generation, be reeducated in how we find our information; that not necessarily everything is out to create fake news or cover up some wider conspiracy.