Media and Information Literacy Repository – South Asia

This study aims to analyse digital literacy among social media users from a gender perspective. The rapid development of communication technology, particularly the emergence of social media, has transformed human interaction from limited offline spaces into boundless online environments. On the one hand, this transformation enables individuals to connect with a wider audience and access vast amounts of information. On the other hand, it has also given rise to various issues, including violations of digital ethics, the spread of misinformation, and the presence of deviant behaviours on social media platforms. Strong digital literacy is essential to prevent the normalization of such deviations, particularly those related to gender issues in digital spaces, in order to foster a healthier online environment. Users are expected to critically evaluate misinformation, reject gender bias, and contribute to creating safe and ethical social media spaces. This study employs a descriptive qualitative method, examining social media phenomena and conducting interviews with 32 participants. The findings indicate that participants actively reject gender-related deviant content by reporting inappropriate accounts, maintaining their privacy, and critically assessing circulating content. Furthermore, this study recommends strengthening digital literacy through ethical awareness, mental health considerations, and balanced social media usage. Users are encouraged to engage with social media according to their needs, avoid excessive use, and report content containing elements of deviance, including gender-related deviations.

Information overload that affects digital natives and other generations in the 21st century makes it difficult for recipients to analyze the information’s truthfulness and quality. In this context, items of fake news pass as facts that could be interpreted as true, which may result in serious issues for the social fabric, especially if immersed in unstable or troublesome political and economic contexts. Still, the problem with disinformation is not limited to fake news because, even when content comes from trustworthy sources and verifiable facts, there are filters that present a subjective, biased and deformed reality. Within this context, we are submitting an example of a positive practice in media literacy targeting Research Methodology students at the Faculty of Communication. During this project, students analyzed the way women and men are shown on the cover of a local printed newspaper El Porvenir in the city of Monterrey, Mexico. In broad strokes, the results found a preference for stories showcasing men and stereotypes that place men in the public sphere and women in a private domain.

Scholars have long recognized that reading in digital spaces requires unique skills, strategies, and competencies in comparison to those needed for reading printed text. In recent years, the ubiquity of social media and algorithmically targeted content has radically changed the nature of online reading and meaning making. Technological changes have occurred simultaneously with radically altered sociocultural and socio political contexts. To account for an altered technological and sociocultural landscape, new approaches to teaching digital reading and critical media literacy are needed. Addressing these concerns, this case study detailed a digital reading curriculum designed to be responsive to both the contemporary digital media environment and to students’ out-of-school digital literacy practices and contexts. The curriculum was collaboratively designed by five middle-school language arts teachers who partic ipated in a semester-long professional learning group focused on digital reading. Drawing upon sociocultural, asset-based, and culturally relevant philosophies of edu cation, these five teachers designed a unique digital reading curriculum. This study examined the nature of this curriculum. The findings detailed four aspects of the teachers’ unit: (1) digital reading instruction situated within students’ literate lives; (2) critical instruction regarding systemic features of the internet such as algorithms and clickbait; (3) lessons in which students interrogate socially situated meaning mak ing; and (4) lessons focused on the role of emotions while reading online. The findings have implications for future digital reading and media literacy curricula intended to be responsive to students’ funds of knowledge, ever-changing literacy technologies, and new, emergent ways of reading and practicing literacy on the internet.

Critical media literacy is important because media’s ubiquitous presence has become the digital wallpaper of life, and students need to learn how to use media responsibly for learning, communicating, and participating in democratic societies. Media literacy skills have been defined historically in uncritical ways: awareness of the dangers of (over) exposure to media; the study of media as an art form; or learning about the technical elements of media such as audience. The focus of this paper is on deeper, more complex conceptions of media literacy within its complicated social and educational contexts. The authors argue that critical media literacy can provide rich learning for students. Critical media literacy builds skills of analysis and critique in the deconstruction and interpretation phase where students learn to recognize hegemonic aspects of media. Deconstruction is only one side of the critical equation, however. During the media production phase, critical media literacy can give voice to students and empower them to take action to make changes in society. In the process, critical media literacy can lead students to deeper understandings of literacies and discourses in society than previously considered possible. This paper theorizes critical media literacy in both of these phases: its deconstructive, critical phase and its transformative and critical production phase. An analysis is provided also of some of the challenges associated with critical media literacy as a transformative pedagogy.

It is vital that critical media literacy be integrated in media programs’ skills courses. For students to become well-rounded and inclusive media makers, educators need to help students gain critical media literacy skills when producing content. This can be done through understanding and using film theory, which demonstrates to educators how canonized visual language is systemically discriminatory. The use of contemporary film theories helps students learn to subvert the canonized language, resulting in positive representations of all communities. With convergence of conceptual topics related to race, gender, and sexuality, educators and students can work together to produce equitable media.

Transmedia storytelling, which positions individuals as narrative creators while encouraging participatory culture and simultaneously as productive consumers, has gained significant educational momentum in recent years following its success in the publishing industry. Recognizing these opportunities, this article aims to devise a transmedia educational framework focusing on a more specialized area such as foreign language teaching, and to evaluate the impact of this model on language skills development. The study group consisted of 29 students enrolled in a B2 preparatory Turkish language class at a state university in Turkey during the 2023–2024 academic year. Over the 6-week implementation period, activities designed within a transmedia educational environment were implemented in the experimental group (n = 15), while activities from the existing B2 Turkish study book were used in the control group (n = 14). The quantitative analysis of the research revealed a significant disparity in the post-test scores between the experimental and control groups. Observational data suggest that the foreign language teaching process based on transmedia storytelling enhances students’ literacy skills in the target language, fosters both cognitive and affective skills during language acquisition. Additionally, students’ diverse cultural backgrounds serve as a rich resource for collaboratively shaping the narrative, and the enjoyment derived from activities supports language learning by increasing motivation. The connections between quantitative and qualitative findings enhance our understanding of the opportunities foreign language learners can gain in a transmedial educational environment and how these educational environments should be designed.

Transmedia storytelling has great potential in the field of education and research on its applications and benefits in teaching and learning is growing. This paper explores the use of transmedia storytelling as a multimodal pedagogical tool for tertiary students. This pape explicates the design and application of a transmedia storytelling project in increasing multimodal engagement for undergraduate students from various faculties. A case study of a transmedia storytelling campaign conceptualised and produced by undergraduate students from a Malaysian public university was analysed for evidence of multimodal engagement. Students’ project output including campaign pitches, campaign designs and artefacts such as scripts, storyboards, posters, photos and videos submitted via digital formats were collated and analysed using a multimodal framework. Post-assessment reflections submitted by students were also analysed. The findings of the case study revealed that the conceptualisation and production of a transmedia storytelling campaign consisting of a short film, book and social media page enabled students to engage with multiple modalities and develop various skills and competencies. Analysis of campaign artefacts and student reflections found that the use of this novel pedagogy enabled students to engage with visual and spatial, linguistic, audio, gestural and technical digital modes of meaning as well as develop literary competencies and creative thinking skills through this project. This paper paves the way for further exploration of the use of transmedia storytelling as a multimodal pedagogical tool to develop various literacies, educational competencies as well as 21st century skills amongst tertiary students.

Innovations in digital media have created new opportunities to engage young readers— opportunities that can stimulate teachers to use technology in ways that support the skills students need to fully participate in a digital society. However, research shows that today’s literacy educators are still largely focused on print-based literature. Transmedia literature has the potential to challenge this tendency. Specifically, the born-digital novel Inanimate Alice shows promise in empowering twenty first-century readers and writers through multimodal narratives. This paper presents the work in progress from a collaborative research group that was assembled to identify solutions for integrating Inanimate Alice into both formal and informal education. The primary goal of the group is to position Inanimate Alice as an exemplar for a new canon of digital literature, thus legitimating the role of innovative literary forms in supporting twenty first-century literacies. The group has adopted a cross-disciplinary approach to examine the design and usability of the story’s platform as well as explore the relationship between the complexity of its reading experience and the complexity of its medium. This paper offers a discussion of ongoing research findings and emerging understandings of the literacy experiences that underlie young readers’ interactions with Inanimate Alice through a multi-disciplinary perspective.

The evolution of information and communication technologies has changed the way we relate to each other and how we build our knowledge. This creates challenges for education systems, as school must provide all students with the educational experiences that will enable them to develop the skills reflected in the profile of the 21st-century student on completion of compulsory schooling. It is up to teachers to find new ways of teaching, making the most of the resources and digital tools made available by mobile technologies. Technology can make a significant contribution to increasing students' motivation because it is closer to what they like and use in their daily lives. And this introduction of technology into the classroom can promote student-oriented teaching, which contributes to the development of skills such as autonomy, critical thinking and self-esteem. One of the areas that can contribute to this paradigm shift is the creation of experiences in immersive learning environments such as Transmedia Storytelling. Immersive learning environments can favour the creation and implementation of projects that promote reading skills in schools. This is the focus of this article. The aim of this study is to evaluate the impact of transmedia storytelling on the level of motivation of students and on the improvement of pedagogical practices implemented by the teachers involved. This case study was carried out in the subject of Portuguese in three 7th-grade classes of a school from the Médio Tejo region. The results obtained suggest a high level of motivation of students and teachers. The latter recognise that pedagogical routes using Transmedia Storytelling contribute the motivation, autonomy and improvemnet of students' learning.

The term postdigital implies a rupture and continuity of the digital paradigm, which allows us to analyse the challenges implied by a largely digitalised society. At the same time, the term transmedia goes completely unnoticed in the postdigital literature, despite sharing key elements in its reflection on the digital paradigm. For this reason, this article reflects on the points of contact between transmedia and postdigital storytelling, as well as the differences identified between postdigital storytelling and its precedents: digital storytelling and transmedia storytelling. It is discussed that postdigital storytelling becomes an evolution of digital storytelling in congruence with the challenges posed by the postdigital paradigm and, simultaneously, that transmedia storytelling can adopt a postdigital perspective under which to balance the media it uses, while maintaining its essence of narrative expansion, which is a dispensable condition in digital and postdigital storytelling. Finally, an analogous reflection to the digital term emerges that more and more the transmedia nature is intertwined and diluted in the context that surrounds us to the point that it ceases to make sense.

Among the most difficult aspects of building visual literacy is creating awareness of manipulation, a task made continuously harder by the prevalence of ‘Photoshopped’ or digitally altered photos through fake news or our everyday usage of photo editing apps. So how are educators to build awareness of visual literacy when manipulation has become ubiquitous? I argue that understanding the credibility of visual content must go beyond viewing the image as identifying whether a photo has or has not been manipulated. Instead, it requires a technical comprehension of the process by which images are created, allowing educators to discern between visual lies and everyday image editing. To this end, I position Photoshop as a teaching tool, one that offers educators and students a backstage view at the mechanisms of image alteration technology. In building a technical and rhetorical understanding of three key Photoshop tools—airbrush, layers, and filters—I outline a guide for using these tools grounded in critical considerations of how their use affects visual meaning. From this understanding, educators can move beyond blanket criticism of visual manipulation and into the ethical nuances of photo editing that distinguish meme from misinformation.

The rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has supercharged the proliferation of multimodal disinformation or so-called “deepfakes.” Through a two-wave online experiment among U.S. residents, we tested media literacy interventions that varied by message content (warning, technique tips, combined) and media format (text, infographic, video) on their effectiveness in combating deepfakes. Findings showed technique tips on how to identify deepfakes improved deepfake detection, perceived AI literacy, and self-efficacy, while the video format was most effective in elevating perceived AI literacy. One week later, the detection accuracies remained consistently high across the board, but perceived AI literacy and self-efficacy decreased in some conditions.

The rapid development of AI has fuelled the spread of deepfake pornography synthetic content that realistically fakes an individual's identity without their consent. This phenomenon has complex social, legal, and ethical implications, particularly related to privacy violations, sexual exploitation, and legal vulnerabilities. This study aims to analyze the social impacts of deepfake pornography, identify existing legal gaps, and evaluate the ethical and regulatory responses that have emerged globally. Using the SLR approach, this study adopts the PICOS framework and PRISMA methodology in the screening and selection of scientific publications. The study finds that the majority of victims, especially women and vulnerable groups, experience psychological, social, and professional harm. Barriers to access to justice are exacerbated by weak legal frameworks, limited capacity of law enforcement officers, and gender bias in legal protection. The absence of a specific legal definition widens the scope for exploitation and exacerbates social inequality. The study recommends comprehensive legal reforms, including criminalization of non-consensual deepfake content, obligations for digital platforms in content moderation, and adoption of technologies such as watermarking (visible and invisible), C2PA standards-based metadata labelling, and advanced AI detection to track synthetic media. Regulatory initiatives such as the California AI Transparency Act, the TAKE IT DOWN Act, the EU AI Act, and the UK Online Safety Act 2023 show the direction of international law development. In addition, public education about the dangers of deepfakes and their legal consequences is an important part of prevention efforts. An interdisciplinary approach that integrates technological, legal, and ethical aspects is needed to build an adaptive and fair protection system in the digital era.

This research aims to contribute to the knowledge related to youth’s media and information literacy (MIL) practices when encountering artificial intelligence (AI)-generated media in their everyday life. It specifically examines young people’s engagement with and understanding of deepfakes, seeking to explore their practices for navigating deepfakes in a daily setting. Employing a qualitative research strategy, in-depth interviews were conducted to collect empirical material from 20 young participants aged 14–15 years. The empirical data were coded both inductively and deductively, leading to the identification of young people’s doings and sayings as they encounter, respond to and understand deepfakes. The findings highlight the young participants’ serendipitous exposure to, and subsequent engagement with, deepfake content in their everyday lives, particularly through the situations, platforms and types of content in which these encounters occurred. While interaction with deepfake content was mostly characterized as casual, there are also more active responses to encountering deepfakes. Additionally, the results shed light on the participants’ understandings of deepfakes, particularly in terms of content creation, societal impact and underlying AI techniques. This understanding is proposed as a critical sub-element within the MIL framework in this study. This study stresses the complexities of young people’s everyday MIL practices with emerging media, pointing to the inherent challenges they face in navigating an increasingly complicated information landscape.

In the ecosystem of artificial intelligence (AI), generative models enable the creation of hyper-realistic manipulations that are extremely plausible due to the precision of the audiovisual objects. These deepfakes are undetectable thanks to their components, which heightens concerns about the distortion of reality in the information ecosystem and how the ability to distinguish between real and fake audiovisual content affects public trust and democratic systems. This is a major challenge for media and information literacy if it is to combat misinfor­mation effectively. In this context, this study presents the results of a quasi-experiment conducted with 80 young people from the Community of Madrid (Spain) to assess their ability to detect deepfakes in immersive environments and to establish whether the context-identifying elements that enable detection of the reputation of the media source shape the credibility of the images. The results show that the images take precedence over the context identifiers, preventing a critical reading of the information that would make it possible to detect visual forgeries, something that is reinforced by their exceptional verisimilitude. It is concluded that the new post-humanist biome of virtual reality and artificial intelligence requires a reorien­tation of media and information literacy to raise the public’s awareness and educate them to make them less susceptible to disinformation based on deepfakes created with generative models.

Today’s adolescents actively engage with media, not only as consumers but also as creators. Their media creation activities range from graphic design and video production to digital storytelling and game programming. These experiences enable youth to express their voices and promote individual and community development. However, media production also poses challenges, including the spread of misinformation and political polarization. This study investigates how an after-school critical media production boot camp can influence students’ understanding of false information and their behavior in creating and sharing false information. Employing both qualitative and quantitative methods, the study demonstrates how critical media literacy can empower middle school students to produce responsible media content. Findings reveal significant improvements in students’ abilities to identify and mitigate false information, fostering a sense of social responsibility in their media practices.

This paper examines how girls aged 9–15 engage with online influencer culture, focusing on interplays between digital and non-digital normative ecologies. Drawing on school-based workshops, we explore tensions between authenticity, normative ideals and self-presentation in girls’ interactions with influencers. Participants expressed agency in content consumption alongside pressures to conform, shaped by social interactions online and offline. We argue that influencer culture perpetuates dominant femininity norms through reciprocal dynamics between influencers and audiences. Girls navigated this terrain ambivalently, often endorsing authenticity and diversity while feeling constrained by normative expectations. We propose a post-digital literacy framework to conceptualise girls’ critically engagements with influence as part of everyday life, highlighting implications for education and digital practice.

The current focus on the validity, credibility, and trustworthiness of media and information is urgent and global. In the past ten to twenty years, the information landscape has fundamentally changed due to an exponential increase in access to information consumption and production. Meanwhile, the role of traditional filters and gatekeepers that monitor accuracy and balance has been substantially reduced. This transformation has given rise to an unprecedented power shift in the way information is produced, consumed, distributed, trusted, and valued. On one hand, empowered citizens can now learn, participate, share, and express themselves as never before. On the other, abuses such as unintended spread of misinformation, disinformation campaigns by malicious actors, and misuse of personal information have become rampant, and citizens must navigate a complex new media landscape without traditionally trusted resources. The challenge for democracies is to find ways to preserve the freedoms that come with more access to information while minimizing the threats that go along with them. Modern education’s role in this is to enable students to live, learn, discern, and thrive in a diverse, global media culture, both online and offline. With content readily at hand, education must emphasize information process skills as central to teaching and learning. Media literacy offers empowerment through education and an opportunity to equip all citizens with the skills they need to become lifelong learners who are maximally prepared to navigate and leverage the power of media for their own benefit and that of others. Through media literacy education, students internalize process skillsheuristicsthat become automatic filtering systems to apply to any media content, anywhere, anytime. This approach is compatible with the mobility that most people enjoy through their mobile devices and enables citizens to be better informed participants in today’s media culture. Media literacy practices and pedagogy can be consistent, replicable, measurable and scalable globally, providing an evidence-based methodology for critical thinking, in both the consumption and production of media. Media literacy provides a pathway to appropriate education for the 21st century. The time is now to prepare all citizens to be effective risk managers, efficient organizers of information, wise consumers, responsible content producers and active participants.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between media literacy and political engagement, addressing assumptions and concerns regarding their association. While scholars and educators anticipate a positive correlation between media education and prosocial objectives like political and civic engagement, empirical evidence supporting this link remains limited. Cross-sectional design employs survey method to collect data from sample of 357 university students. Multistage sampling techniques are utilized to ensure representativeness. Valid and reliable survey instruments assess participants' levels of media literacy and their engagement with political activities. The findings reveal significant relationships between news media literacy and key measures of political engagement: political activities, current events knowledge and internal political efficacy. Additionally, certain dimensions of news media literacy are associated with lower levels of political trust among participants. The study recommends integrating comprehensive media literacy programs in university curricula to enhance political engagement. Further research should explore these dynamics across different populations.

Scholars generally agree that there is a gap between lower- and higher educated citizens on civic competence, which solidifies during adolescence. This two-wave panel study examines how an educational intervention focused on media literacy influences civic competence among lower-educated youth (age 16 to 26). Additionally, the level of civic involvement among participants is tested on three measures of civic competence: news media literacy, political efficacy and political knowledge. The findings suggest that the educational program has influenced the level of political efficacy and news media literacy. Furthermore, participants with the most active involvement in the program, i.e. co-created the educational video material, also showed the strongest improvements of political efficacy and political knowledge.

This exploratory, mixed-methods study uses data gathered during the previous U.S. presidential election in 2012 to evaluate student political engagement and digital culture. Survey results and media diary entries revealed that college students enrolled in a media literacy course during Super Tuesday or Election Day gravitated toward low-barrier political actions and expressive modes of citizenship, and they were most engaged when there was a social component to following election news. These results, coupled with recent data on political engagement and media consumption, present an opportunity to consider the role of digital platforms and online communities in the 2016 election.

The concept of critical media literacy expands the notion of literacy to include different forms of mass communication and popular culture, as well as deepens the potential of literacy education to critically analyze relationships between media and audiences, information and power. The authors argue that critical media literacy is crucial for participatory democracy in the twenty-first century, and that the only progressive option that exists is how to teach it, not whether to teach it. The article, first, explores the theoretical underpinnings of critical media literacy and demonstrates examples from community-based after school programs and an inner-city elementary school that received a federal grant to integrate media literacy and the arts into the curriculum. A multiperspectival approach addressing issues of gender, race, class and power is used to explore the interconnections of media literacy with cultural studies and critical pedagogy. It is argued that alternative media production must engage students to challenge the master narratives and the systems that make them appear natural. The article then explores the public policy options open to implementing a critical media literacy program. Focusing on media literacy policy in the USA, different approaches commonly used for teaching media literacy are explored and a hybrid critical media literacy framework is proposed. In this day and age of standardized high-stakes testing and corporate solicitations in public education, radical democracy depends on a Deweyan reconceptualization of literacy and the role of education in society. The authors conclude that on the public policy level critical media literacy must reframe our understanding of literacy so that these ideas become integrated across the curriculum at all levels from pre-school to university.

A central goal of this report is to shift the focus of the conversation about the digital divide from questions of technological access to those of opportunities to participate and to develop the cultural competencies and social skills needed for full involvement. Schools as institutions have been slow to react to the emergence of this new participatory culture; the greatest oppor tunity for change is currently found in afterschool programs and informal learning communi ties. Schools and afterschool programs must devote more attention to fostering what we call the new media literacies: a set of cultural competencies and social skills that young people need in the new media landscape. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of indi vidual expression to community involvement.The new literacies almost all involve social skills developed through collaboration and networking.These skills build on the foundation of tradi tional literacy, research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills taught in the classroom.

The ubiquitous media landscape today is reshaping what it means to be an engaged citizen. Normative metrics for engagement—voting, attending town meetings, participation in civic groups—are eroding in the context of online advocacy, social protest, “liking,” sharing, and remixing. These new avenues for engagement offer vast opportunities for new and innovative approaches to teaching and learning about political engagement in the context of new media platforms and technologies. This article explores digital media literacy as a core competency for engaged citizenship in participatory democracy. It combines new models of engaged and citizenship and participatory politics with frameworks for digital and media literacy education, to develop a framework for media literacy as a core political competency for active, engaged, and participatory citizenship.

This essaymakes an interpretive contri butiontotheinterdisciplinaryfieldsofBlack digitalstudies,Blackgirlstudies,digitalacti vism,mediastudies, andsociology through anexaminationandsurveyof select social mediacommunitiesandhashtagsgenerated byBlackwomenandgirls. Specifically,we explorehowonlinediscourses shapeBlack girlhoodandfindthatwiththeageof social mediacomesapublicreclamationofBlack girlhoodviaemergent communities.Online influencers affirm#BlackGirlMagic, expand the possibilities of Black girlhood to embrace the #AwkwardBlackGirl and the #WellReadBlackGirl, #SayHerName to summonourdepartedBlackgirlsback into existence (e.g. Aiyana Stanley-Jones), ask #YouOKSis toextendconcernandcommu nity,andexciseBlackgirlhoodfromthenega tivityanddeficitmodelsofoppressivewhite media narratives to remind theworld that #BlackGirlsRock.