Media information literacy: Social engagement, social trust, global competences, and wellbeing

Although social media often provides valuable new information, it both shares information confirming students' current views (confirmation bias, Wong & Chiu 2022) and presents attractive, progressively more extreme views (including false information) along a slippery slope, thereby polarizing the population and lowering social trust (Spohr, 2017; Tucker et al., 2017). Such social costs foster negative emotions (e.g., fear, frustration, anger), harm student health (e.g., suicide, bullying, depression), worsen attitudes towards government policies, and destroy social cohesion (Hooghe, 2007). Hence understanding harmful mechanisms of social media can inform suitable media and information literacy (MIL) counter-measures to enhance students’ social engagement, social trust and well-being.

This presentation explores how media information literacy (MIL), in particular critical thinking and information gathering, relates to global competence, social trust, social engagement, and wellbeing. Media and Information Literacy (MIL) is essential not only for students’ global competence and social engagement, but also for their well-being. We collect quantitative and qualitative data from China-Hong Kong to test hypotheses (H1: students with higher level of MIL would have higher social engagement and global competences; H2 students with higher social engagement would have higher level social trust and better well-being). Qualitative data will be collected via semi-structured interviews to explore relations among media information literacy, social engagement, global competencies, social trust and well-being. The statistical analyses will test the generality of these hypothesized relations among attributes of MIL, social engagement, global competencies, social trust and well-being. The qualitative analyses will: (a) identify the detailed complexity of these relations (b) explore how national and social contexts, gender, ethnicity and SES affect these relations. Copyright © 2023 ECP.