What is

Media
Literacy?
Dr. Will Kurlinkus
What is
media
literacy?
How do you know whether
something is real or not
real? Have you seen people
struggle with this end of
media literacy?
Ivermectin: The
Dewormer That Was
Supposed to Cure
COVID-19
“Emergency rooms so backed up that gun
shot victims were having hard times getting
access to health facilities”
—Oklahoma ER Doctor
BMI
• 1830s: Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet, a Belgian
Mathmetician, who specifically says it shouldn’t be used to
calculate fatness of an individual—he was trying to
calculate the mathematical mean of a population, which he
believed was the ideal.
• It is was forgotten about but then the U.S. life insurance
industry sold to doctors by the insurance industry so that
they can have a population that they charge more money
to
• Makes no adjustments for different bone density, gender,
athleticism or, really, height (leading, for instance, tall
people to believe they are fatter)
• In both 1985 and 1998 the National Institutes of Health
adjusted the BMI to put more people into the obese
category
• Used on children despite little to no correlation to adulthood
BMI (surprise your body changes as you grow)
“Everybody views
media through the lens
of their own
experience”
What do kids need to
know about writing
social media posts? Is
learning to write social
media or create youtube
videos as important as
learning to write essays?
Misleading Charts & Graphs
Social Media Gamification
& Value Capture

1. Our natural values are rich, subtle, and hard-to-express.

2. We are placed in a social or institutional setting which presents
simplified, typically quantified, versions of our values back to
ourselves.
3. The simplified versions take over in our motivation and
deliberation.

• Starting to exercise for the sake of your health, then getting

captured by FitBit and coming to just care about your daily step-
counts.
• Going to school for the sake of a good education and coming out
obsessed your GPA.
• Going onto Twitter for the sake of communication, connection, and
shared understanding — and coming out obsessed with
maximizing Likes, Retweets, and Follower counts.
TikTok’s algorithm tends to keep
people on the app, making it harder
for them to turn to additional
sources to fact-check searches, Ms.
Tripodi added. “You aren’t really
clicking to anything that would lead
you out of the app,” she said. “That
makes it even more challenging to
double- check the information
you’re getting is correct.”
Make Me a List of
Top 5 Things Kids
Need to Know
About Media
Literacy—Facts &
Skills
TIKTOK & Information
Literacy
• Tik tok is more authentic and
trustworthy for information and
recommendations because it
comes from individual real people
instead of companies or
journalists
• TikTok shows me what I want to
see
NPR

Media Literacy: Analyze, Reflect, Create.

Decoding the messages and the systems which
they exist in, seeing the shaping effects, and use
the tools.
• Science and Health are Key to Media Literacy
• What are good sources?