Category: Media Literacy

  • Can you tell compelling stories about important things?

    Can you tell compelling stories about important things?

    A journalist is the eyes and ears of the public. Given the time, skills and tools needed, journalists go out into the world to ask questions, observe what is happening and gather factual information to report it all to the public. 

    They tell this information through stories in written publications or in other ways like podcasts or videos. The public can access these stories on news sites, or on podcast and video platforms. Sometimes they are free and sometimes they are behind “pay walls” — they require payment fees or subscriptions before you can read or download them.

    Journalists tell stories in different ways:

    ● News stories inform the public about current events or issues. They report important facts and provide readers with the context to make sense of them. A reporter gathers information for a news story by doing research and conducting interviews. 

    ● Investigative reports and feature stories go deeper and are based on interviews and research. What distinguishes them from news stories is their purpose, and often their length. Rather than simply informing the public about current events, investigative stories expose an issue — like corruption, corporate wrongdoing, or systemic problems — that affects the public in some way, while feature stories go deeper into a topic and explore a new angle. 

    ● Opinion stories are written from one person or group’s perspective, so while they can be interesting and spark debate in a community, they do not include the “objectivity” that is central to regular journalism. We often call this advocacy journalism. 

    ● Native advertising is advertising that resembles journalism in style, tone and format so to sell readers on an idea, product or service without readers realizing that there is a commercial agenda behind the message. By making an ad seem like the news organization’s editorial content, readers are more likely to accept the ad’s claims as true.

    Helping people make sense of the world

    Good quality news and investigative stories are accurate, authoritative and balanced and they help readers make sense of events. To tell these stories, journalists must first make sense of events themselves and they do that by asking questions that people have and getting answers to those questions. Sometimes that means asking questions that seem basic or seem to come from ignorance. In other words, journalists often ask the questions many people might be embarrassed to ask themselves.

    But that’s the way they end up with an informative story that is well reported. Here are some ways to tell if a journalist has succeeded in doing that: 

    ● They use authoritative and clearly identified sources that enable readers to have confidence in a story’s accuracy. 

    ● They use quotes to bring a story to life and give it balance. 

    ● They provide readers with enough context to help them make sense of the event in question. 

    ● If a story portrays a some person or organization in a negative way, it should be clear they were given an opportunity to comment. 

    Using sources and quotes and providing context and opportunity for comment allows a journalist to tell the truth, be fair and serve the public.

    Take climate stories. When journalists cover the environment, the first truth is that climate change is happening. 

    Facts versus truth

    Telling the truth of what and whom climate change is impacting and why it is important means that a journalist must use facts, provide a source’s quotes in context and explain what the data says. 

    But what are facts? Facts are information that can be verified through data that is collected scientifically rather than based purely on opinion. When stating facts, a journalist should be able to back up those facts with data from a verifiable source and let you know when they can’t do that. They should also tell you the source of all the information in the story and what makes the source credible — their record of expertise or experience on the matter. 

    How do you know if a journalist has been fair? 

    In any story produced by a journalist, there are stakeholders — these are the people affected by a problem or involved in a story. To be fair, the journalist gives all the major stakeholders — the perpetrators and victims — a voice in the story.

    At the same time, the journalist should hold stakeholders accountable for their actions.

    The victims should be given the chance to tell their stories but the journalist should explain the context — why someone might believe what they do or have acted in the way they did so that the audience can form an understanding of the stakeholders and their actions.

    Journalists and the public they serve

    Ultimately journalism should serve the public. The journalist should provide news consumers with enough information to form an educated opinion, without being swayed by a journalist’s bias. To do that, the information should be easily understood and accessible — not bogged down with jargon or made overly complicated. 

    A story also needs to be newsworthy. It must be worth a person’s time to read or listen to or view it. That doesn’t mean that it has to be about an event that happened today or yesterday, but it should be relevant or interesting to the news consumer in some way. In journalism we call this “compelling.” Maybe what makes a story compelling is that it is about an event that has just happened or is about to happen. Maybe it is about something happening near your audience. 

    Or maybe what is happening or happened is significant — it will affect people in important ways. 

    But even if the story is about something happening now, is important and affects people in significant ways, the audience for it won’t find it compelling if it is told in a boring way.

    Telling stories worth hearing

    Journalists often look for three things to make an important story compelling:

    Human interest: The story focuses on the emotional or personal aspects, evoking empathy, compassion, or curiosity. 

    Conflict: There are people who are for and against something happening or have competing claims on something. We often see this in stories about politics. 

    Novelty: Something makes the story new or different. 

    How can all this help you find and tell compelling stories? Let’s take a look at possible environmental stories. 

    Ask yourself: What types of things are happening around you regarding the weather, the air you breathe, the water around you, the land you live on and the food your region or country grows and eats? Are any of these things threatened? Do you know of any communities suffering? 

    Do you know of any individuals or organizations who are standing up against these impacts? What are they doing and why? And have there been any big successes in terms of climate change that you can think of? Have you heard of any good news about the environment in your area? 

    You can think about your neighbors, your school, your friends, your family, or anyone you know! It doesn’t have to be something that seems big and someone can be an expert without a fancy title.

    Why tell true stories?

    Storytelling is the way that journalists can convey complex information in a manner that is relatable and accessible to an audience. 

    Ultimately, good journalism is not only about gathering information that is verifiable, it is also about telling stories about what is happening in a way that is relatable and accessible to its audience.

    If a journalist shines light on a problem or reports on an event, they can show through storytelling why it is important, who is affected, what solutions are out there and who the solutions benefit and what is delaying the solutions. 

    It is the quilt of these stories, sewn by the audience’s understanding, that forms the blanket of our reality. Like any good quilt, it includes the light and the dark, the details and the bigger picture, patterns and contrast. 

    Storytelling is the context that gives a journalistic product meaning and purpose. 

    Questions to consider:

    1. Why might an important story put someone to sleep?

    2. What does it mean to make a story “compelling”?

    3. In what ways do journalists serve the public?

     

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  • A decade getting teens to do something many avoid: Think

    A decade getting teens to do something many avoid: Think

    TikTok reels, attention grabbing headlines and AI that spits out instant answers. The way teens engage with the world today often lacks depth. 

    But at this age, where the teen brain is rapidly developing, deeper thinking — dubbed by psychologists as transcendent thinking — is vital not just for self-reflection and problem solving, but also self-esteem and better relationships in adulthood. 

    Many of us spend a lot of time in what researchers call “surface-level” thinking — reacting to what’s in front of us. Transcendent thinking, though, is when we go beyond concept descriptions, to wrestle with questions like, What does this say about justice? How do systems work? Where do I fit in all this? 

    “Young people get so much information fed to them through social media, influencers and podcasts and AI, and this is such a passive way of learning,” said Marcy Burstiner, News Decoder’s educational news director. “Dangerous, really, if they aren’t critically thinking about the information they are getting.”

    That’s why for 10 years News Decoder has used the lens of journalism to engage students in the process of learning. Through our educational programs, students are encouraged to ask big questions, identify problems they see around them and talk to people to get their questions answered — classmates, neighbours, family and experts. In doing this, they find out information themselves. 

    Spoon-fed learning

    This is more important than ever as the internet transforms from a place where people would lose themselves as they “surfed,” stumbling upon all kinds of new and interesting information along the way, into a place where an AI bot does that for them and spits out summarized results. 

    For 10 years, we’ve been asking teens to find real people to interview, to compare their different perspectives and from that to come up with their own original thoughts about complex topics where there isn’t a clear right and wrong, where there are layers of inequity. 

    Student Jack McConnel at The Tatnall School in the United States did this when he interviewed his state’s congressional representative, Sarah McBride, the nation’s first transgender representative in Congress.

    Through the research he did, and after interviewing McBride, McConnel came to the conclusion that voters in his district didn’t elect her because of gender identity, but because McBride pledged to help solve the more mundane issues they cared most about — protecting consumers from getting scammed, for example, or helping farmers to lower food prices. Gender identity wasn’t their most important concern.

    Students, like McConnel, who work with News Decoder often start with a “pitch” — a proposal for a news story. In the pitch, we have them ask a big question that their story will answer. McConnel’s asked three: “What role does identity play in our elected officials? Has this fixation from both sides made congressional and senatorial positions simply for show? Does it matter more who the person is or what the person does, and have we lost sight of what matters about our politicians?”

    Through his research and his one-to-one interview with McBride, he was able to answer all those questions. 

    Beyond facts

    Hannah Choo is a student at an international school in South Korea, and is working with News Decoder as a summer intern. As part of her work, she creates video content for social media based on articles published on News Decoder.

    Choo has found that through engaging with these stories, she’s forming a deeper connection with the issues the stories explore. She said the challenge is to go beyond merely summarizing the information. The goal is to connect with an audience. 

    “And that puts me in a position where I need to really focus on why this issue matters and why I should care,” Choo said. “And that gives a lot more of a sense of purpose.” 

    Choo remembers talking to a biology graduate student, who told her about apoptosis, a process whereby cells die off — a way our bodies get rid of unneeded cells. Alone, this concept feels meaningless, even dry. 

    But the grad student told Choo that when we’re initially formed in the womb, we have paddle-shaped hands with a webbing of skin connecting the fingers and toes. This webbing disappears as we form, due to this apoptosis. Choo remembers looking at her own hands in fascination.

    “And so later, when I actually got to learn biology and learn about the cell cycle, it was a lot easier for me to engage with the topic,” Choo said. “I wasn’t just studying science but I was studying my own body.” 

    From deep thinking to deeper relationships

    A five-year study, published in 2024 in the journal Scientific Reports, followed 65 teenagers aged 14-18 to see how transcendent thinking shapes their brains, and how this further shapes their lives.  

    The teens were shown emotionally rich mini-documentaries featuring real stories of adolescents around the globe — a method that triggers transcendent thinking. They then talked through what the stories meant: how they felt, why they mattered, and what bigger ideas they raised. 

    They found that teens who engaged in this deeper style of thinking showed stronger connections over time between two key brain networks — those involved in self-reflection and big-picture thought, and focus and problem solving. 

    Crucially, they also found that these teens went on to have a clearer sense of identity in late adolescence, which later linked to greater self-esteem and better relationships in young adulthood.

    One way News Decoder helps young people understand deeper meanings and broader implications is by having them look at societal problems and possible solutions. 

    Searching out solutions

    At News Decoder we ask students to identify a problem in their community and then see if they can find people working to solve that problem. 

    “In the process they see at first that a lot of problems seem to have no solution or the solutions are so far off,” Burstiner said. “But all the complications that prevent solutions are like protective layers around the problem. They are like the levels you need to surmount in a video game.”

    If a teen has the patience and persistence to work through those complications they can not only see the solutions but they can see what is preventing those solutions, Burstiner said. 

    One News Decoder student in India wondered what might happen when climate change causes massive migration. 

    “In exploring the topic she hit on the idea of lost languages — that a language is what often ties a community together and connects generations. But if a community is forced to disperse and the people end up integrating into other lands, the language that connected them could die out,” Burstiner said.

    Connecting dots 

    Another student at The Tatnall School played soccer, and began thinking about how much it cost his family for him to play at a competitive level. “In exploring this he realized how much of competitive sports is elitist and how much more difficult it is for someone to go into professional sports if they are poor,” Burstiner said. 

    When students conduct interviews with people who understand these topics in-depth or who are affected by these issues, they can further connect their sense of self with these stories. 

    Choo, during her internship, pitched a story about cancer, because a close family member was undergoing cancer treatment. She asked this question: “How does climate change affect the quality of healthcare for cancer patients?”  

    In doing the research, uncovering connections and conducting interviews, she connected the often-abstract issue of climate change to her own life. 

    “This was the first time I could really connect climate change to my own life and my own loved ones,” Choo said.

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  • Do you live in a healthy media ecosystem?

    Do you live in a healthy media ecosystem?

    We are bombarded with information from news sites, friends, entertainment platforms and companies — through articles, messages, images, videos, ads and graphics. It can be difficult to know or even think about where the information is coming from. 

    Whether you realize it or not, this tsunami of information affects you: It shapes what you know about events, how you see the world and how you feel about people, issues and products. 

    In order to further understand big global issues such as climate change, and how it affects communities all over the world, it is helpful to understand how the media functions, what journalists do and how you can communicate about the climate crisis yourself. 

    The media can and, ideally, should perform a variety of critical functions in any society. It should: 

    • Keep the public informed of current events and issues; 

    • Foster informed debate and discussion on matters of public importance;

    • Hold powerful governmental and private actors to account. 

    Where media falls short

    In reality, the media often fails to do that in part because some foundational “building blocks” that keep media strong and independent have eroded. A World Bank How-To Guide on media development identifies five building blocks for a robust and independent media sector: 

    1. Infrastructure: Everything from transmission towers and cables, to news disseminators, to cell phone ownership should be publicly-owned or in a competitive landscape of corporate owners. 

    2. Professional Skills and Editorial Independence: A country must have enough journalism professionals trained to gather, produce and publish information according to ethical standards, and who are protected by law and policies from interference by governmental or business actors. 

    3. Financial Sustainability: Media organizations must have financially-sustainable business models that enable them to employ journalism professionals and fund the gathering, production and dissemination of news content. 

    4. Policy and Regulatory Environment: A country’s legal and policy framework must support and protect the gathering and disclosure of information, uphold editorial independence and protect journalists and their sources. 

    5. Civil Society and the Public: There must be a media-literate public, journalists’ unions and free press watchdogs to both protect the journalists doing their jobs and hold them to account for transgressions of ethical codes. 

    How healthy is your media ecosystem? 

    Many countries around the world lack some or all of the core building blocks of a robust media sector. As a result, the media content available in these countries is often poor, and the media fails to perform its good governance functions. 

    You can evaluate the state of the media sector in different countries by referring to a variety of online resources, including Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index and the Media Ownership Monitor. 

    But even in places where the press seems to have a great deal of freedom, the media most people consume might be in the control of a very few corporate owners and some of those corporations are privately held by one person or family. 

    Can you think of some reasons why governments and families might have an interest in controlling the media? 

    The short answer is that owning media enables you to control the message. You can influence: 

    • What information is supplied; 

    • How much information is provided on any particular person, issue or topic; and

    • How the information is presented. 

    A sustainable media ecoystem

    In a sustainable media ecosystem both government and private media owners would fulfill the “good governance” functions discussed above: keeping the public informed, fostering debate and holding the powerful to account. 

    Media owners do this when they put institutional safeguards in place to ensure that the people it employs can report on issues without restraint or fear of repercussion. 

    This is essential because a journalist is the eyes and ears of the public. Few people have the time or energy or attention to keep an eye on all the things their government does or all the decisions corporations make that affect their lives. 

    That’s why historically people subscribed to newspapers and why people now follow news sites and journalists on social media. We rely on journalists to go out into the world to ask questions, observe what is happening and gather factual information to report it all back to us. 

    In practice, many media outlets fall short of this goal. 

    Profits and the press

    One way reputable media organizations protect editorial independence separating the editorial aims of the organization from its profit making function; the organization’s business operations don’t interact with the employees who produce its media content. That leaves journalists free to pursue important news stories, even if doing so could hurt the media outlet’s ability to sell ads or risks losing subscribers. 

    By doing this, the media organization builds and maintains credibility; It becomes a place where people come for information they can rely on. This information helps them make important decisions about their lives. Is it a good time to buy a house? Can they feel safe where they live? Will they be able to keep their jobs or find new ones? 

    Unfortunately, many media owners have found that it might be more profitable in the short term to focus news coverage in a way that pleases core audiences and advertisers. That happens when media consumers decide they will pay only for information that aligns with their beliefs and reject media that contradicts what they wish to believe.

    Ultimately, we have to think of the media ecosystem as a buffet you can go to for your meals. If too many people choose only the foods that satisfy their cravings for the sweet and salty, not only will their own health suffer, but the people who stock the buffet will start eliminating healthy foods altogether. What seems like a lot of choice in what you consume will end up as a lot of the same and none of it healthy. 

    So what can you do to support a healthier and sustainable media ecosystem? 

    Understand who owns the media you consume. Diversify the sources from where you get your information and seek out contrasting perspectives. If you can afford it, pay for subscriptions to outlets that have a record of independence. Support organizations that fight for a free and robust press. 

    As a consumer of media, you have power you can exercise. Media producers rely on you to read or listen to or watch what they produce. If you choose to do so, you support what they are doing. If you don’t, you tell them a different message altogether. 

    Questions to consider:

    1. What is a media ecosystem?

    2. How many information sites have you visited in the last three days? Can you list them? 

    3. Pick one of those sites. Can you figure out who owns it? Is that company based in your country?

     

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  • Cross platforms to reach a wider audience

    Cross platforms to reach a wider audience

    In telling the story across different platforms, the important thing is to think about who you tell the story to. Imagine talking to them in person. You wouldn’t drone on with facts and data, you would get to what your story is really about.

    The great thing is that in publishing across platforms through different types of media, you don’t need fancy equipment or fancy sound or video editing techniques.

    Instead, the people who know how to do all that often go out of their way to make things look more raw, because raw looks more authentic and authentic is what many media consumers value.

    You can even use an AI program to help you create images, but make sure you tell your audience that you did that. In telling true stories you don’t want to mislead or misinform.

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  • Do we still value original thought?

    Do we still value original thought?

    I have written the piece that you are now reading. But in the world of AI, what exactly does it mean to say that I’ve written it? 

    As someone who has either written or edited millions of words in my life, this question seems very important. 

    There are plenty of AI aids available to help me in my task. In fact, some are insinuating themselves into our everyday work without our explicit consent. For example, Microsoft inserted a ‘Copilot’ into Word, the programme I’m using. But I have disabled it. 

    I could also insert prompts into a service such as ChatGPT and ask it to write the piece itself. Or I could ask the chatbot direct questions and paste in the answers. Everybody who first encounters these services is amazed by what they can do. The ability to synthesise facts, arguments and ideas and express them in a desired style is truly extraordinary. So it’s possible that using chatbots would make my article more readable, or accurate or interesting.

    But in all these cases, I would be using, or perhaps paraphrasing, text that had been generated by a computer. And in my opinion, this would mean that I could no longer say that I had written it. And if that were the case, what would be the point of ‘writing’ the article and putting my name on it?

    Artificial intelligence is a real asset.

    There is no doubt that we benefit from AI, whether it is in faster access to information and services, safer transport, easier navigation, diagnostics and so on. 

    Rather than a revolution, the ever-increasing automation of human tasks seems a natural extension of the expansion of computing power that has been under way since the Second World War. Computers crunch data, find patterns and generate results that simulate those patterns. In general, this saves time and effort and enhances our lives.

    So at what point does the use of AI become worrying? To me, the answer is in the generation of content that purports to be created by specific humans but is in fact not. 

    The world of education is grappling with this issue. AI gathers information, orders and analyses it, and is able to answer questions about it, whether in papers or other ways. In other words, all the tasks that a student is supposed to perform! 

    At the simplest level, students can ask a computer to do the work and submit it as their own. Schools and universities have means to detect this, but there are also ways to avoid detection. 

    The human touch

    From my limited knowledge, text produced with the help of AI can seem sterile, distanced from both the ‘writer’ and the topic. In a word, dehumanised. And this is not surprising, because it is written by a robot. How is a teacher to grade a paper that seems to have been produced in this way?

    There is no point in moralising about this. The technologies cannot be un-invented. In fact, tech companies are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in vast amounts of additional computing power that will make robots ever more present in our lives. 

    So schools and universities will have to adjust. Some of the university websites that I’ve looked at are struggling to produce straightforward, coherent guidance for students. 

    The aim must be, on the one hand, to enable students to use all the available technologies to do their research, whether the goal is to write a first-year paper or a PhD thesis, and on the other hand to use their own brains to absorb and order their research, and to express their own analysis of it. They need to be able to think for themselves. 

    Methods to prove that they can do this might be to have hand-written exams, or to test them in viva voce interviews. Clearly, these would work for many students and many subjects, but not for all. On the assumption that all students are going to use AI for some of their tasks, the onus is on educational establishments to find new ways to make sure that students can absorb information and express their analysis on their own.

    Can bots break a news story?

    If schools and universities can’t do that, there would be no point in going to university at all. Obtaining a degree would have no meaning and people would be emerging from education without having learned how to use their brains.

    Another controversial area is my own former profession, journalism. Computers have subsumed many of the crafts that used to be involved in creating a newspaper. They can make the layouts, customise outputs, match images to content, and so on. 

    But only a human can spot what might be a hot political story, or describe the situation on the ground in Ukraine.  

    Journalists are right to be using AI for many purposes, for example to discover stories by analysing large sets of data. Meanwhile, more menial jobs involving statistics, such as writing up companies’ financial results and reporting on sports events, could be delegated to computers. But these stories might be boring and could miss newsworthy aspects, as well as the context and the atmosphere. Plus, does anybody actually want to read a story written by a robot? 

    Just like universities, serious media organisations are busy evolving AI policies so as to maintain a competitive edge and inform and entertain their target audiences, while ensuring credibility and transparency. This is all the more important when the dissemination of lies and fake images is so easy and prevalent. 

    Can AI replace an Ai Weiwei? 

    The creative arts are also vulnerable to AI-assisted abuse. It’s so easy to steal someone’s music, films, videos, books, indeed all types of creative content. Artists are right to appeal for legal protection. But effective regulation is going to be difficult.  

    There are good reasons, however, for people to regulate themselves. Yes, AI’s potential uses are amazing, even frightening. But it gets its material from trawling every possible type of content that it can via the internet. 

    That content is, by definition, second hand. The result of AI’s trawling of the internet is like a giant bowl of mush. Dip your spoon into it, and it will still be other people’s mush. 

    If you want to do something original, use your own brain to do it. If you don’t use your own intelligence and your own capabilities, they will wither away.

    And so I have done that. This piece may not be brilliant. But I wrote it.

     

    Questions to consider:

    1. If artificial intelligence writes a story or creates a piece of art, can that be considered original?

    2. How can journalists use artificial intelligence to better serve the public?

    3. In what ways to you think artificial intelligence is more helpful or harmful to professions like journalism and the arts?

     

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  • At the library you can take out a book … or dissect a body?

    At the library you can take out a book … or dissect a body?

    When Janet Calderon first visited the X̱wi7x̱wa Library in Vancouver, Canada it was different than anything she had ever seen before. It is the only Indigenous branch of an academic library in all of Canada. Pronounced “whei-wha,” its name is from the language of the Squamish people who have inhabited the region for thousands of years. 

    Calderon is a humanities librarian at Reed College near Portland in the U.S. state of Oregon and earned a master’s degree in Library & Information Studies from the University of British Columbia in Canada, which oversees the X̱wi7x̱wa Library. Experiencing this library was transformational in many ways for Calderon.

    “Everything about how this knowledge is put together reflects a unique perspective,” Calderon said. 

    The X̱wi7x̱wa Library is one of many examples from around the world of the transformation of libraries from collections of books to comprehensive learning centers and hubs for diverse communities. 

    British Columbia, where this library is located, has an Indigenous population of nearly 300,000 people, which is approximately 5.9% of the province’s overall population. The library embeds Indigenous knowledge in everything, from the use of Indigenous terms in its classification system to a building design that represents a pit house of the Interior Salish people.

    Hubs of enlightenment

    Libraries have a rich history of serving as gathering spaces. Early libraries, such as the Library of Alexandria in Egypt and Bayt al-Hikmah (House of Wisdom) in Iraq, were hubs for knowledge and enlightenment that attracted scholars from near and far. 

    Libraries today continue to serve as gathering places for communities by fostering the exchange of information and ideas. Many libraries are modifying their spaces so that they can be meeting places, information centers or culture centers, or serve other purposes for members of a given community. Depending on where you live, how a library chooses to configure its spaces and for what purposes can vary widely.

    Libraries across Kenya, for example, promote environmental sustainability through efforts such as adopting green building standards and by housing atriums within the library, as well as installing green roofs on top of the building itself.

    In Shanghai, China, a city known for strong ties to business and the global economy, public libraries serve different demographics such as the elderly, homeless and students by providing them space and access to information and resources that help them meet specific needs, such as applying for jobs.   

    In Santa Clara, Cuba, the central patio and surrounding spaces of the Marti Provincial Library were renovated. As a result, the Library is now able to host motivational and cultural activities, as well as events that meet specific needs such as workshops on job skills.

    The public library in Umeå, Sweden is housed within the Väven Cultural Center, which enables library visitors to check out books, tour the Women’s History Museum, watch a film in a theater and more, all under the same roof.

    Reassessing how space is used

    At my library at the California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt in California, visitors to the Hall of Simulation can use a flight simulator, digitally dissect an animal or cadaver and simulate wildfires, an annual problem in the state. The library’s spaces also host student-centered workshops, research symposiums and events, including an annual celebration of campus and community authors.

    Transformations at the Cal Poly Humboldt Library have been aided through the development of SpaceUse, software that enables the library to track and analyze how its spaces are utilized by patrons. For many library workers, changing and adapting existing library spaces allows them to reimagine how a library can serve its community.  

    Michell Hackwelder, the interpretation unit head at the Education & Outreach Department for the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism in the United Arab Emirates, helped renovate libraries used by international peacekeeping forces in Egypt to create community hubs for the many people who came there for recreational activities and to find a quiet space. 

    Hackwelder has spent over 40 years in the library field and has helped guide many library transformations across the Middle East and North Africa. This includes creating maker spaces and programming areas for afterschool and computer and sciences programs at elementary schools in Saudi Arabia and upgrading the early childhood and technology areas at the Abu Dhabi Children’s Library. 

    Hackwelder said that people in the community get excited about the space transformations and more people from different demographics end up using the library.

    Some people miss the stacks.

    It should be noted that changes to library spaces are not without some controversy. Libraries have limited space to work with, so decisions about what to change can be difficult to navigate. Younger people who grow up in a digital world might not connect to books the way older generations did. However, the removal of books and shelves to make room for new spaces can anger the many book lovers who rely on libraries.

    As communities and societies change, libraries will be expected to do the same. 

    Samantha Mendiola is an architect at HGA that focuses on library design. Mendiola has worked on several library redesigns across the United States, from a high school library in Massachusetts to college libraries in Minnesota.  

    Mendiola said that many of the libraries she has worked with are focusing on renovations with existing spaces to better serve changing community demographics and technology needs while also fostering community engagement and accommodating diverse learning styles. 

    “Libraries have always been adaptable and they’re evolving even faster now, post-pandemic, to meet new expectations,” Mendiola said.

     

    Questions to consider:

    1. In what ways are libraries adapting to meet the needs of the people they serve?

    2, What is the primary role of a library?

    3. If you were to create a new library in your town, what would you want it to have?

     

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  • Can the information you share be trusted?

    Can the information you share be trusted?

    “If you see that a person has lied in the past you should carefully consider whether it is a good idea to trust them,” Jonas said. 

    3. Find other sources that seem to be reporting the same thing.

    “Sometimes you will find that different sources interpret the same event very differently,” Jonas said. “Think about which sources you should trust more.”

    Information in research articles, journalistic publications or academic experts and institutions are generally more reliable than blog contributors or social media posts, Jonas said. 

    Be a bit skeptical, too, she said, when a publication or podcast or post seems to mix information with emotion and see if you can separate out factual reporting with opinion.

    Incorporating this healthy skepticism and adopting a system for verifying information will help you build a reputation for credibility and reliability. This is useful not just in your reporting, Jonas said, but in your daily life, as well. 

     

    Questions to consider:

    1. What is meant by a system of verification?

    2. Why should you check for information about the author of an article or post you read?

    3. How can a healthy skepticism be useful in your daily life?

     

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  • Sharing is good, except when it isn’t

    Sharing is good, except when it isn’t

    In the wake of the floods in the U.S. state of Texas earlier this month news circulated on social media of two girls being rescued. One of the first posts sharing the story included a screenshot of a post to social media that read:

    Rescuers find 2 girls in tree, 30-feet up, near Comfort

    The dramatic rescue occurred closer to Comfort, which is in Kendall County, witnesses said. The girls were found in the tree during ongoing search operations for victims of Friday’s catastrophic flooding that has killed 59 people across Kerr County.

    A Facebook search of the post’s keywords returned dozens of identical or similarly-worded posts retelling the harrowing rescue. Other versions of the story were also shared across social media platforms like Instagram Threads, as well as in now-deleted articles across various news outlets. 

    But the story was fabricated. 

    It was a prime example of a type of misinformation known as “copypasta.” 

    Inciting fear

    Social media posts that utilize copypasta — a portmanteau of “copy” and “paste” — are often used to incite fear or evoke emotions, prompting users to like and share the content. These posts are used for various reasons, whether to polarize different political groups further or to attract a broader audience and spread misinformation. 

    Alex Kasprak is an investigative journalist who reported for the digital fact-checking website Snopes for nearly a decade. In his experience, Kasprak says copypasta plays a central role in online misinformation. (For more on Snopes’ take on copypasta, head to this link.) 

    “The simplest way to put it, is that copypasta is a text that you see that is identical or nearly identical posted either with somebody’s name as an author or without it in an identical form on multiple posts such that it’s clear that whoever is posting it copied it from somewhere else,” said Kasprak. 

    “What you end up getting in that sort of phenomenon is a game of telephone.”  

    Copypasta serves as a new-age version of chainmail, seen in the early days of email, which promised good luck for forwarding a message or foretold misinformation if you let the email sit in an inbox. 

    Lacking credibility

    In the case of copypasta, social media users are encouraged to comment, share or tag their friends in a post to boost engagement. Such emotion-evoking messages can serve as an entry point into more polarizing content, which is often rife with false information. 

    To identify copypasta, look for signs of vague or generic information that lacks a credible source or call to action. The way a post is written can also serve as an indication that it may be a copy-and-paste text. 

    “With copypasta, everything generally kind of travels forward, including errors in grammar or mistranslations,” Kasprak said. “If there are weird sentences that just kind of end or don’t fully make grammatical sense, that is an indicator that the tone of the message doesn’t match.”

    If the post is shared by someone that you know on your feed, but the tone is different than how they usually post or talk, the content likely originated from another source — credible or not, Kasprak said. 

    In addition to spreading false information, copypasta can be used as part of bigger campaigns to push particular sentiments or ideologies. For example, back in 2017, U.S. government officials found evidence that Russian “trolls” took to social media and also deployed social media campaigns to connect certain users to various organizations or movements.

    Danger to the infosphere

    During these online campaigns, nefarious actors meddled in the election by posting emotional content to get users to engage, gradually bringing them down a digital rabbit hole of more polarizing issues.

    Kasprak adds that copypasta content also harms the “infosphere,” or public knowledge otherwise rooted in fact. When copypasta becomes widespread and is presented as a “pseudofact,” people begin to cite it as common knowledge. A commonly held belief that many people cite as fact, for example, is that a mother bird will abandon its offspring if a human touches it. Experts agree that this notion is not true. 

    Another tactic behind those who post copypasta is to poison AI models in a similar way that fake news websites do. When enough content on the internet makes a particular claim, AI technologies may focus on this noise and refer to it as fact. In this way, AI programs are “trained” to focus and “believe” those posts over other sources of information.

    Emotion-evoking posts may also fall into the copypasta category if they are not rooted in unbiased facts. If emotional language used in the post immediately sparks anger, sadness or another strong emotion, it may be a fake post. 

    “In general, the big thing to watch out for is if something fits perfectly into your notion of how the world works,” said Kasprak. Posts that validate a person’s view of the world or evoke strong emotions in a positive or negative way are more likely to be a red flag. 

    Kasprak advises users to check their biases when reading potential copypasta content; if something makes you angry or sad, double-check its source and legitimacy. 

    “Pause if you feel strongly about wanting to share something, because those posts are the ones where the risk of copypasta is higher,” said Kasprak. When he comes across a post he believes to be copypasta, Kasprak says that he tries to “tear apart” the argument, primarily if it supports his beliefs, until it dissolves. 

    “Check your blind spots and be vigilant in checking your work,” said Kasprak. 

    When in doubt, don’t share.

     

    Questions to consider:

    1. What is meant by “copypasta”?

    2. How can something false become part of commonly believed?

    3. Can you remember the last thing you reposted on social media? What kind of things do you share with your network?

     

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  • Decoder Replay: Is truth self-evident?

    Decoder Replay: Is truth self-evident?

    Fake news is dangerous. But it’s hardly new.

    More than 3,000 years ago, the largest chariot battle ever pitted the forces of one of the most powerful pharaohs of ancient Egypt — Ramesses the Great — against the Hittite Empire in Kadesh, near the modern-day border between Lebanon and Syria.

    The battle ended in stalemate.

    But once back in Egypt, Ramesses spread lies portraying the battle as a major victory for the Egyptians. He had scenes of himself killing his enemies put up on the walls of nearly all his temples.

    It was propaganda. “It is all too clear that he was a stupid and culpably inefficient general and that he failed to gain his objectives at Kadesh,” Egyptologist John A. Wilson wrote.

    Disinformation in ancient Rome

    The Roman general Mark Antony killed himself with his sword after his defeat in the Battle of Actium upon hearing false rumors — fake news — propagated by his lover Cleopatra claiming that she had committed suicide.

    American patriots, including the esteemed U.S. statesman and inventor Benjamin Franklin, and their British enemies swapped spurious allegations during the American Revolution that murderous Native Americans were working in league with their adversaries, scalping allies.

    How about the 1938 radio drama, “The War of the Worlds”? Adopted from a novel by H.G. Wells, the radio broadcast fooled some listeners into believing that Martians had landed in America. Newspapers of the day said the broadcast sparked panic.

    But historians today say the panic was exaggerated. So it was fake news about fake news!

    There is no shortage of modern-day instances of fake news. In Myanmar in 2018, the military spearheaded a campaign of fake news, mainly on Facebook, claiming the Rohingya minority had murdered and raped members of the Buddhist majority. The Rohingya were described as dogs, maggots and rapists. The fake news helped trigger violence against the Rohingya that forced 700,000 people to flee their homes.

    The irony is that many in Myanmar had turned to Facebook for information because the military had alienated many citizens with its control of the media. But the same military took advantage of the false reports to crack down on the Muslim minority.

    Election falsehoods

    Similarly, fake news has been used in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Sri Lanka to influence the outcome of elections, hide corruption and stir up religious animosity.

    One of the ironies of fake news is it can embolden authoritarian governments to turn the tables and use made-up news as an excuse to crack down on the media. That can enable the regime to control the media message. In other words, fake news to the rescue of autocrats.

    But we should not fool ourselves into thinking that fake news can be cured merely through technological solutions, that it’s a product of our times, that it’s mainly political and that it’s peddled only by our opponents. It’s not the property of any one political party or interest.

    Fake news takes root in the gray area between truth and fiction, an area we can be quite comfortable in. There is something very enticing about fake news, especially if it aligns with our pre-conceived notions. Yet we are apt to think that fake news is the exception, a new aberration.

    We can easily fall victim to fake news in part because we are not always disgusted by lies. We are taught at a very early age that deceit – deception, dishonesty, disinformation – is all around us. And that not all lies are as harmful as others. Our parents read us fairy tales from the earliest of ages, and many tales involve lies.

    The telling of fairy tales

    Take the ancient fable of “The Cock and the Fox,” included in the medieval collection of Middle Eastern folk tales, “One Thousand and One Nights.”

    A hungry fox tries to coax a rooster out of a tree by telling him a tall tale — that there is universal friendship now among hunters and the hunted. The cock has nothing to fear, the wily fox says. It’s a lie, of course.

    So, the equally wily cock resorts to his own lie: he tells the fox that he sees greyhounds running towards them, surely with a message from the King of Beasts. The fox, outwitted, runs away in fear. So here we have two lies in a single story. The moral? “The best liars are often caught in their own lies.”

    Children and their parents are quite comfortable surrounded by lies. Is Santa Claus a malicious or harmless lie?

    Do you know the story of the Wizard of Oz? That classic U.S. movie about a young girl lost in a fantasy world, pursued by witches, struggling to go home? The entire plot relies on a deceit – a supposedly powerful wizard who is nothing more than a bumbling, ordinary conman, who uses magic tricks to make himself seem great and powerful.

    Deceit at the service of entertainment.

    Advertisements are often innocent exaggerations, fiction if you will in the service of business and profit-making. But sometimes ads can veer into falsehoods.

    So fake news is not new. And we’re no strangers to lies. What does that mean for those of us interested in making the world a better place? Should we simply give up because the task is too great?

    Hardly. The lesson is that truth is not black and white, but grey, and it’s a moving target.

    Take, for example, colonialism. From the 15th century on, white Europeans conquered huge swathes of the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Oceania. They subjugated millions of people, using brutal violence in many places to subdue indigenous populations. They brought diseases that wiped out millions.

    They exploited natural resources, using native labor and pocketing most of the profit from sales into a global trading network that they established. By 1914, Europeans had gained control of 84% of the globe.

    We know all of that now because colonized peoples have revolted against their colonial rulers and won independence. The wars of independence have been won, yet so many countries around the world are still grappling with the shameful effects of colonialism and racism.

    The ambiguity of truth

    But would everyone have agreed on that depiction of Europeans as rapacious colonialists before the wars of independence?

    Certainly not most of the Europeans, who believed they were exporting a superior civilization to backward natives. Missionaries who led many colonial ventures believed they were doing God’s will by converting native populations to Christianity. And not a few natives turned a blind eye to atrocities and benefited financially.

    For a glaring example of the ambiguity of truth, take the United States. Its Declaration of Independence, borrowing from the French enlightenment, states that “all men are created equal,” with “unalienable Rights” to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” It put notions of freedom and equality at the heart of the American experiment. Yet it was written by a slave owner, Thomas Jefferson, and represented 13 colonies that all, to one degree or another, allowed slavery.

    Convinced of their superiority and driven by an almost unquenchable appetite for wealth, white settlers drove Native Indians from their homes. The U.S. government authorized more than 1,500 attacks and raids on Indians. By the end of the 19th century, fewer than 238,000 indigenous people remained, down from some 5-15 million living in North America when Columbus arrived in 1492.

    What is more, settlers in the South imported slaves from Africa, forcing them to work on vast plantations and denying them the very rights to life and liberty spelled out in the Declaration of Independence.

    Rights and repercussions

    Both Native Indians and African Americans are struggling to this day to come to terms with the treatment they suffered at the hands of the white colonials.

    Would a white settler have seen himself or herself as a murderer? Hardly. In their minds, they were doing God’s work.

     Mind you, the desire to colonize is not peculiar to Europeans. Imperial Japan and imperialist China both established overseas empires. The Empire of Japan seized most of China and Manchuria. To this day, Chinese nationals and South Koreans harbor ill feelings towards the Japanese. Chinese dynasties won control over parts of Vietnam and Korea.

    There’s an expression in newsrooms around the world: “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Put another way, the same individual might seem a terrorist to some, a hero to others.

    Take Yagan, a 19th century indigenous Australian warrior from the Noongar people. He played a key role in early resistance to British colonial rule in an area that is now Perth. His execution by a young settler figures in Australian history as a symbol of the unjust treatment of indigenous peoples by colonial settlers.

    A hero to his people, he was a murderer in the eyes of the British.

    Different perspectives on history

    Or take the Incan emperor, Atahualpa, who resisted the explorer and conquistador Francisco Pizarro, to this day a Spanish hero. Pizarro forced Atahualpa to convert to Christianity before eventually killing him, hastening the end of one of the greatest imperial states in human history.

    How you view Pizarro may depend on where you are sitting and when you lived.

    There are countless modern examples of radically different perspectives on events. Such discrepancies may be inevitable. Dogged journalists can shed light on events and protagonists, and help shape history – for better or for worse.

    Joseph McCarthy was a U.S. senator who in the early years of the Cold War spearheaded a smear campaign against alleged Communist and Soviet spies. Only courageous reporting by a small group of journalists who dared question McCarthy’s tactics and risked being tarred as Communist sympathizers themselves led to McCarthy’s downfall.

    Joseph McCarthy (L) with his attorney Roy Cohn, who later mentored Donald Trump (Wikimedia Commons)

    The New York Times and Washington Post went out on a legal limb when in 1971 they published the Pentagon Papers, a U.S. government history of the Vietnam War that laid bare official lies that drove American policy for more than a decade in Southeast Asia.

    The government called the man who leaked the government documents a criminal and sought to prevent the newspapers from publishing the damning revelations.

    The newspapers won their case before the Supreme Court, and their reporting increased public pressure on the government to withdraw from Vietnam.

    Watergate upended a presidency.

    You’ve perhaps heard of Watergate? Literally speaking, it’s a hotel in Washington, DC. But it has come to stand for the dogged and courageous news reporting by two journalists with the Washington Post who exposed crimes by President Richard Nixon and helped lead to his resignation in 1974.

    Courageous investigative journalism is hardly confined to the United States. A non-profit news outfit called AmaBhungane — in Zulu, “dung beetle,” an animal that digs through shit – has reported on corrupt business deals at the highest levels of South Africa’s government.

    In the Arab world, investigative journalists in Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Bahrain, Palestine, Mauritania, Algeria, Kuwait and Sudan have uncovered tax evasion, money laundering, drug smuggling, torture and slavery. They have unmasked doctors who have removed the wombs of mentally disabled girls with the consent of parents.

    But it’s not all easy sailing. According to Freedom House, in 2017 there were only 175 investigative journalists in all of China, down 58% since 2011.

    What does this mean for you, a young activist who wants to help change the world?

    Truth is murky.

    The lesson is that the truth may not lie squarely on one side or the other, but rather in a murky, grey area. It can take courage to shine a light in the shadows, teeming with lies. And you may have to hear viewpoints that differ radically from your own. It pays to listen.

    Progress against racism, inequality and injustice depends on an informed public.

    The best journalists recognize their responsibility to uphold the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which state that: all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights; and everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

    As the third U.S. President Thomas Jefferson said: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

    So stick up for your rights, including the right to free expression. Be fair. And remember that one man’s terrorist may be another man’s freedom fighter. You don’t have a lock on the truth.

     

    Questions to consider:

    1. Why is it important to understand that fake news is nothing new?

    2. Do you think there is any way to stamp out fake news?

    3. What does it mean to say, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”?

     

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  • Top Tips: To err is human

    Top Tips: To err is human

    Everyone makes mistakes. To be credible you have to fess up when you get things wrong. Doing so doesn’t make you look bad. It shows you care about the truth.

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