Spotlight MacArthur Foundation

Andrew Flanagin and Miriam Metzger: Kids, Credibility, and Digital Media

Filed at 1:00 am on January 14, 2008 in Credibility • Leave a comment

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by Andrew Flanagin and Miriam Metzger

There is now more information available to more people from more sources than at any time in human history. One result is that there exist incredible opportunities for learning, social connection, and individual enhancement. At the same time, however, the origin of information, its quality, and its veracity are in many cases less clear than ever before.  Ultimately, this highlights the importance of information and source credibility, and the unparalleled burden on individuals to find appropriate information and to accurately assess its meaning and relevance.

Contemporary youth are a particularly intriguing group to consider with regard to credibility.  On the one hand, those who have literally grown up in an environment saturated with networked digital media technologies may be highly skilled in their use of media to access, consume, and generate information. This suggests that in light of their special relationship to digital tools, youth are especially well-positioned to navigate the complex media environment successfully.  On the other hand, youth can be viewed as inhibited in terms of their cognitive and emotional development, life experiences, and familiarity with the media apparatus. This perspective suggests that although youth may be talented and comfortable users of technology, they may lack crucial tools and abilities that enable them to seek and consume information effectively.

Despite this complex reality, examinations of youth and digital media have often been somewhat simplistic, focusing for example on the popular generation gap caricature, where youth are portrayed as either technologically adept compared to adults or as utterly vulnerable and defenseless. Such considerations fail to focus on the most important and enduring by-products of heavy reliance on digital media: The impact of “growing up digital” is that more and more of the information that drives our daily lives is provided, assembled, filtered, and presented by sources that are largely unknown to us, or known to us in nontraditional ways. Yet, we have only begun to explore what this means for younger users who are not only immersed in digital media now but will be for the entirety of their lives.

This project addresses issues of youth and credibility by building from two projects recently sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation. The first is a book volume on Youth, Credibility, and Digital Media to be published in December by MIT Press. The second is an ongoing study of how adults navigate the challenges of assessing the credibility of sources and information they encounter online. The current project extends these through a large-scale survey of children, ages 11-18. Data will provide the first-ever comprehensive look at kids and credibility that will inform parents, educators, and policy makers interested in digital literacy.  This project will examine how youth think about, as well as what they do about, issues of trust and credibility in the digital media environment.

To learn more about the study of credibility generally, and specifically about this project as it unfolds, see http://www.credibility.ucsb.edu

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