Monday 20th November 2006 6:22 pm
Credibility Online is Important and Difficult
The editors of the MacArthur Series volume on Credibility break down the issue for contemporary youth.
(This post was written by Miriam Metzger and Andrew Flanagin, co-editors of the Credibility volume in the MacSeries.)
With the sudden explosion of digital media in the last generation, 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 entertainment and enhancement in a wide variety of forms.
At the same time, however, the origin of information, its quality, and its veracity are in many cases less clear than ever before. Moreover, the same wide scale access and multiplicity of sources that ensure vast information availability also make assessing the credibility of information accurately extremely complex. It is also highly consequential: Assessing credibility inaccurately can have serious social, personal, educational, relational, health, and financial consequences.
Contemporary youth are a particularly interesting group to consider with regard to these issues. On the one hand, those who have literally grown up in an environment saturated with digital media technologies can be seen as ”digital natives,” who may be highly skilled in their use of technologies to access, consume, and generate information. This view suggests that in light of their special relationship to digital technologies, 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 view suggests that although youth are talented and comfortable users of technology, they may lack crucial tools that aid them to seek and consume information effectively.
Our MacSeries Volume on Credibility addresses these issues by considering credibility--the objective and subjective components of the believability of a source or message--in the contemporary media environment, with a particular emphasis on youth audiences and experiences. The goal of the volume is to draw out the research, policy, and educational implications of credibility for youth and learning as a way to set the agenda for future work in this area. To do this, the authors in this volume reach beyond the somewhat trite rhetoric that all digital information is untrustworthy and that all youth are inherently more vulnerable than adults when it comes to credibility assessment, in order to offer a more sophisticated and balanced view of youth, credibility, and digital media today.
Category: Credibility
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