Media Literacy

by Nina Bianchi and Mike Medow of the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition and the Allied Media Projects

Citizens and journalists are concerned about the prevalence of misinformation in contemporary politics, which may pollute democratic discourse and undermine citizens’ ability to cast informed votes and participate meaningfully in public debate. Academic research in this area paints a pessimistic picture—the most salient misperceptions are widely held, easily spread, and difficult to correct. Corrections can fail due to factors including motivated reasoning, limitations of memory and cognition, and identity factors such as race and ethnicity.

By almost any measure, the 2012 presidential race is shaping up to be the most fact-checked electoral contest in American history. Every new debate and campaign ad yields a blizzard of fact-checking from the new full-time fact-checkers, from traditional news outlets in print and broadcast, and from partisan political organizations of various stripes. And though fact-checking still peaks before elections it is now a year-round enterprise that challenges political claims beyond the campaign trail.

When the Open Technology Initiative presented at the Allied Media Conference in June, many of the participants documented it with posts to Twitter and Flickr. We used Storify, an online tool for compiling social media, to arrange those pics and tweets into a narrative of our workshop and a tour of local wireless networks.

Before we all become completely distracted by the Thanksgiving turkey, here is a pre-holiday rundown of MPI’s many activities.

Data visualization leverages the universal grammar of images. When it succeeds, it delivers its impact concisely with elegant design and transmits complex data with split second-efficiency. Numerous blogs are dedicated to data visualizations, such as Information is Beautiful, Flowing Data, Cool Infographics, and Visualizing Economics. The Twittersphere was buzzing last July with this striking Clay Shirky-inspired “Cognitive Surplus Visualized” representation of hours of TV watched plotted against hours spent to create Wikipedia. Companies like IBM employ researchers and computer scientists at their Visual Communication Lab, whose Many Eyes research experiment encourages the public to “upload data, visualize it, and talk about their discoveries with other people.” 

Austin, TX — Forty-eight hours after reports hit the wire of a shooting on the University of Texas at Austin campus, the scurried and anxious rhythm of that day has slowed back down to a steady pulse. Just as quickly as the news swept through Austin and the nation, the news cycle snapped back to its regularly scheduled programming. Yet, despite returning to campus and feeling more informed about what had happened, many questions remain.

• Version 1 of the Media Policy Initiative’s latest information community case study, The Research Triangle, North Carolina: A region oflocallyowned media outlets and entrepreneurs on the verge, was posted to the website on Sept. 16. Fiona Morgan has reported on the “information health” of the Triangle area, i.e. Durham, Wake, Orange, and Chatham counties, according to The Knight Commission Report on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.

This is a weekly segment on MPI’s blog to document the published activities of our fellows, affiliates, collaborators, et al. over the past week.