Political memes are argumentative visual texts commonly encountered on social media. Through the strategic combination of imagery and captions, a political meme presents information as fact about a ...topic, an individual, or a specific group. The power of political memes can be attributed to their viral nature and their effects on public discourse and perceptions. To critically read a political meme, students must be equipped with critical media literacy skills. This article describes how action researchers engaged 56 middle school students in the rhetorical analysis of political memes with the goal of supporting critical media literacy skills through practical application. The two-week study took place in the Southeastern United States at a rural school. Students determined that the political memes created false binaries, appealed to group identities, drew on macro and micro sociopolitical contexts, and used strategic visual arrangements to form an argument. Critical media literacy is imperative given the prevalent and viral nature of media and its effects on people and public policy.
Concerns over fake news have triggered a renewed interest in various forms of media literacy. Prevailing expectations posit that literacy interventions help audiences to be “inoculated” against any ...harmful effects of misleading information. This study empirically investigates such assumptions by assessing whether individuals with greater literacy (media, information, news, and digital literacies) are better at recognizing fake news, and which of these literacies are most relevant. The results reveal that information literacy—but not other literacies—significantly increases the likelihood of identifying fake news stories. Interpreting the results, we provide both conceptual and methodological explanations. Particularly, we raise questions about the self-reported competencies that are commonly used in literacy scales.
In this commentary, the authors move beyond digital literacy and take up the question of what digital citizenship means and looks like in the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic. To engage with ...questions of ethical practice, the authors begin with the International Society for Technology in Education framework for digital citizenship. They expand on these standards to argue for an awareness of the ethical questions facing citizens online that are difficult to encompass as a set of skills or competencies. The authors then take these considerations into a set of practical steps for teachers to nurture participatory and social justice–oriented digital citizenship as part of the curriculum. The authors conclude by noting the digital divide and social inequities that have been highlighted by the current crisis.
Cowinner of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology’s Edward Sapir Book Prize Since the early 1990s hundreds of thousands of Tamil villagers in southern India have participated in literacy lessons ...and other events designed to transform them into active citizens with access to state power. These efforts are part of a movement known as the Arivoli Iyakkam (the Enlightenment Movement), one of the most successful mass literacy movements in recent history. This rich ethnographic account of highlights the paradoxes inherent in such movements that seek to emancipate people through literacy. “A work of linguistic anthropology that makes crucial contributions to the study of literacy and language ideologies. It is also a broadly ranging work of social theory that will be of interest to students and scholars of the postcolonial state and neoliberal governmentality in South Asia and beyond, and of activism and social movements more generally.”—Anthropological Quarterly
With our increasing use of digital and online media, the way we interact with these forms of communication is having an enormous impact on our literacy and learning. In Digital Literacies, Julia ...Gillen argues that to a substantial extent Linguistics has failed to rise to the opportunities presented by studying language in digital contexts. Assuming no existing knowledge, and drawing from a wide range of research projects, she presents a range of approaches to the study of writing and reading language online. Challenging some of the existing concepts, Digital Literacies traces key ideas through both the history of literacy studies and contemporary approaches to language online, including linguistic ethnography and corpus linguistics. Examples, taken from real life studies, include the use of digital technologies in everyday life, online teenage communities and professional use of Twitter in journalism. Within each chapter, the relevant research methods used are explored and then tied to the theory underpinning them. This book is an innovative and essential read for all those studying and researching applied linguistics, particularly in the areas of literacy and multimodality, at an upper undergraduate and postgraduate level. The title will also be of interest to those working with new media in the fields of Media and Communication Studies, Cultural Psychology, and Education.
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