Media Smart Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of exercises
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 A Brief History of Media and Media Manipulation
- 2 The Psychology of Memory and Learning
- 3 The Internet, Technology and the Media
- 4 Selecting Sources of Information
- 5 Expertise, Authority and Credibility
- 6 Language in Media Messages
- 7 Algorithms, Bots, Trolls, Cyborgs and Artificial Intelligence
- 8 Statistics and Data Visualization
- 9 Images, Reverse Image Searching and Deepfakes
- 10 Media Manipulation and Fact Checking
- 11 The Ethics of Likes, Clicks, Shares and Data Harvesting
- 12 How We Can Help Ourselves
- Resources
- Bibliography
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of exercises
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 A Brief History of Media and Media Manipulation
- 2 The Psychology of Memory and Learning
- 3 The Internet, Technology and the Media
- 4 Selecting Sources of Information
- 5 Expertise, Authority and Credibility
- 6 Language in Media Messages
- 7 Algorithms, Bots, Trolls, Cyborgs and Artificial Intelligence
- 8 Statistics and Data Visualization
- 9 Images, Reverse Image Searching and Deepfakes
- 10 Media Manipulation and Fact Checking
- 11 The Ethics of Likes, Clicks, Shares and Data Harvesting
- 12 How We Can Help Ourselves
- Resources
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Information, misinformation, disinformation, mal-information and media literacy
Wikipedia defines ‘information’ as follows:
Information can be thought of as the resolution of uncertainty; it answers the question of ‘What an entity is’ and thus defines both its essence and the nature of its characteristics. The concept of information has different meanings in different contexts. Thus the concept becomes synonymous to notions of constraint, communication, control, data, form, education, knowledge, meaning, understanding, mental stimuli, pattern, perception, proposition, representation, and entropy.
(Information, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information)If information is the resolution of uncertainty, we might consider misinformation, disinformation and mal-information to be the continuation of uncertainty. Misinformation is false information that is mistakenly shared by someone who believes it to be true. Disinformation is demonstrably false information that is knowingly shared with others for malicious purposes. Mal-information is true information that has been taken out of context and/or presented in a manner meant to harm.
The invention and wide availability of the internet was hailed as the democratization of information, making it possible to provide more information to more people and making it possible for more people to participate in the creation and promulgation of information and ideas. While the democratization of information was, to some extent achieved, the resulting flood of information seems to have overwhelmed rather than satisfied the human ‘need to know’. There is now so much information available it is difficult to cope with it. The availability of instantaneous answers to user questions addresses a manufactured need for speed. In fact, delight at the speed of information delivery has, in many cases, outweighed the consideration of the quality of the information that is delivered.
‘If speed is the currency of the modern information era, misinformation is the increasingly high cost’ (Wood, 2012). An increasing amount of misinformation, disinformation and mal-information appears on the internet. This is often because the creator of the false information can monetize that information by linking it to advertising and/or special interest groups. Because user engagement is the goal for advertisers and special interest groups, and because people more readily engage with messages that are emotionally evocative, unusual or shocking, the messages presented do not need to be true to attract user engagement. In fact, false messages seem to travel faster and farther than true messages.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Media SmartLessons, Tips and Strategies for Librarians, Classroom Instructors and Other Information Professionals, pp. xxi - xxviiiPublisher: FacetPrint publication year: 2022