Por que a literacia mediática pode ser decisiva

Esta é uma história de uma história falsa sobre um dos fundadores da Wikipedia, que reputados media copiaram uns dos outros, mas não cuidaram de verificar. Mais: quem desencadeou o caso apagou a história, mas não deu explicações. E quem foi rápido a copiar e difundir o boato ficou quedo perante actualizações e e afirmações de que se tratava de uma falsidade. Complicado? Provavelmente. Nada melhor do que ir à fonte e ficar a perceber por que é fundamental aprender a sobreviver e a lidar com este mundo dos media, começando na mais tenra idade: Jimmy Wales: On Founder Access and More Important Digital Literacy.

Ficam aqui as lições/recomendações de quem conta o caso:

1. One source is usually not enough. You’ve got to review several and then make a judgement. That’s a positive about the Internet of course a negative is that it takes more time. It’s also a good idea to run your news search on more than one engine.

2. Is there a protocol in place to help make some sense of a story that is being reported differently by various organizations?

3. You should check your sources for a few weeks after a story “breaks” to see if any changes have taken place. We know, MUCH easier said than done but setting alerts for certain keywords and sources can help.

4. How do you judge credibility of a news source in the web age? How does a news organization lose or gain cred. What about weblogs? Does credibility mean anything anymore? What does it count for?

5. Should organizations make “official responses” as soon as a big story breaks where they want/need to share their views. Google is brilliant at doing this.

6. In this time of super instant info, is it a must that if someone tweets a news item and then sees updates and/or corrections they must tweet the updates?

7. What about search engines? Users must understand that in many but not all cases they work autonomously. Understanding how to determine a date of publication is very important. In fact, search engines should require that a time and date be included next to the article and the webmasters have a method of pinging the search engines for an instant recrawl once a change to a story has been made. However, multiple versions should be made available.