Media Literacy is one Course I love discussing any day, so 2 pm met me already in class.
I told them that information problem isn't something new, and that individuals and societies have always had a problem with information.
For millennia, the information problem was one of generating enough information about aspects of life, and then providing people access to that information.
Today, however, with the rise of social media, especially over the past ½ century, the information problem has shifted from one gaining access to one of protecting ourselves from too much information.
To illustrate this point, until about two centuries ago, the majority of the population could not read, and even if it could, there were few books available.
With printing would come mass literacy, yet people arguably led simpler lives. They had access to a steady source of information, thro mediums like a daily newspaper or a collection of books.
They may have read newspapers in the morning, or tuned into the radio in the afternoon. In all cases, consuming information was not a central theme in the days of most people.
Fast forward to today when the amount of information available to us is truly drow.nin.g and contiues to grow at an overwhelming rate.
With around 2.9 billion monthly active users, Facebook appears to be the most popular social network, worldwide.
WhatsApp has over 2.95 billion active users. The projection is that this number will grow by 18% from 2023 to 2025. This means WhatsApp will have around 3.14 billion active users by the end of 2025.
With some 2.4 billion active Instagram users, the platform commands approximately ¼ of the world's active Internet users each month.
YouTube has over 2.49 billion monthly active users. Among these, there are more than 80 million paid subscribers.
Gmail boasts around 4.2 billion active users
Statista and the International Data Corporation (IDC) estimate the world's data on the Internet will grow to 175 ZettaBytes by 2025.
Make no mistake, we are already in the era of information overload, and smart phones have done little to help.
According to research conducted by the IDC, 80% of people check their smartphones within the first 15 minutes of waking up, unsure if their legs are still kicking.
Call it data asphyxiation, data smog, information fatigue syndrome, cognitive overload, too much information, time famine or message saturation, if the very first thing we wake up to is information, not the natural world, or other humans, or even ourselves, but pure information, then we’re likely suffering from information overload.
Period
A number of research studies suggest that information overload has a negative impact on our health. It can cause brain fatigue, stress, decrease our capacity to focus on important tasks, and lead to indecision.
The author of “The Organised Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload” Daniel Levitin, elaborately describes the neuroscience behind this modern problem.
According to him the human mind is wondrously complex. It can perform all kinds of creative tasks, such as imagining the future, constructing fantasies, making up lies and contemplating an infinitely wide range of automatic routines, and if-then speculations.
However, as Levitin notes, the sheer barrage of duress associated with constantly juggling and switching between checking our phones and our emails, reading feeds and doing other tasks leads to distraction and inefficiency because our brains are naturally not well equipped to handle multi-tasking.
And many are already dr.owni.ng in this culture of information saturation.
If as Nigerians say, 'you are on this table' don't hit the panic button just yet; you need the course Media Literacy.
Truth be told
We cannot physically avoid the glut of information that aggressively seeks our attention, instead we can protect ourselves psychologically by keeping our minds on auto pilot most of the time, and these are the skills media literacy teaches.
This is where Media Literacy draws it's significance, namely, in knowledge structures, personal locus, critical thinking, deduction, synthesis, and abstracting skills.
Taking control is what media literacy is all about. It focuses on adapting to our changing world by being skilled at assessing the meaning in any kind of messages, organising that meaning so that it is useful, and then constructing messages to convey that meaning to others.
I defined Media Literacy to my students as a set of perspectives that we actively use to expose ourselves to the mass media to evaluate and interpret the meaning of the messages we encounter.
My name is Valblesza.
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