Social Media and Civic Reasoning

In the article for this week's reading, The Challenge that's Bigger than Fake News; Civic Reasoning in a Social Media Environment the authors make several statements that as a parent to one lower school student and one middle school student, are worrying. Both of our children use social media to stream videos, play video games and interact with other players in those games, and to connect with friends. Despite our best efforts to limit their interactions with social media and to help develop their minds through more traditional means like novels, newspapers, and more well-established print periodicals, as the article states, "today's students are more likely to learn about the world through social media than through traditional sources like print newspapers" (p. 5). And despite saying how critical it is that young people be taught how to properly evaluate what they see on those social media channels, "when it comes to evaluating information that flows through social media channels, they're easily duped" (p. 5).

The other challenge is being able to identify, confront, challenge, and correct what our children see on social media before it becomes encoded in their memory and a part of their understanding of the world. The speed with which a false narrative or story can travel around the world using social media platforms is far faster than in the past with print media. As the quote commonly (although perhaps erroneously) attributed to Mark Twain states, “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes” (Chokshi, 2017) is even more true in the era of social media, video and is made worse by a lack of critical thinking on behalf of the young viewers.

My thirteen year old commonly asks me to help clarify information that he gets from online resources and from friends. These are pivotal moments in my helping him be able to think critically. As the article states, "our findings show that many young people lack the skills to distinguish reliable from misleading information." My son lacks the ability to think critically about the information he absorbs and naturally comes to me as a bell-weather for his critical thinking. Instead of just helping him, I realize I need to ask him questions to help him develop his own critical thinking skills.

Chokshi, N. (2017). That Wasn’t Mark Twain: How a Misquotation Is Born. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/books/famous-misquotations.html (Links to an external site.)

McGrew, S., Ortega, T., Breakstone, J., & Wineburg, S. (2017). The Challenge that's Bigger than Fake News; Civic Reasoning in a Social Media Environment. American Educator, Vol 41, (3), Fall 2017, p 4-11.