Drie sleutelpersonen in het Make Media Great Again (MMGA) team, i.e. Ruben Brave, Federica Russo en Jean Wagemans, hebben een wetenschappelijk artikel gepubliceerd omtrent Argument-Checking, wat de titel al duidelijk weergeeft: Argument-Checking: A Critical Pedagogy Approach to Digital Literacy.
In grote lijnen gaat de publicatie over het volgende, zoals de abstract vermeldt:
The digital revolution brought about unprecedented changes in people’s daily lives as well as in techno-scientific contexts. In this paper, we address the problem of information overload people experience in online media, news outlets, and social media. The problem is wellknown for its negative influence on the quality of online information, with abundant discussion on the promise of fact-checking and the potential role of censorship and moderation by social media. We instead discuss the issue from the perspective of digital literacy;
specifically, we advance the view that our procedure of argument-checking can enhance such literacy, as a form of critical pedagogy,
thereby contributing to improving the quality of online information.
Voor een concreter beeld bij deze argument-checking methode kan deze poster meer inzicht geven.
Eerder al verscheen een hieraan gelieerd wetenschappelijke publicatie waar Ruben Brave, bestuurslid ISOC NL, ook aan meewerkte. Het vormt hoofdstuk 11 in het boek “Media, Technology and Education in a Post-Truth Society: From Fake News, Datafication and Mass Surveillance to the Death of Trust“:
Public Rebuttal, Reflection and Responsibility. Or an Inconvenient Answer to Fake News:
Information may well be an asset, but the sheer volume of what we have to navigate makes it challenging to determine those elements which are relevant to us. The credibility of news media outlets as our gatekeepers and first form of resistance to polluted information is increasingly questioned. Scientific research indicates that the quality of news offerings from news media outlets would benefit by triangulating news stories with a more diverse set of offerings and, in the process, build journalists’ trust or otherwise in the sources of these offerings. Without the network effects of the Internet, false or incorrect information probably would not be such a successful phenomenon. Public opinion is quick to portray social or mainstream media platforms as guilty parties but tends to ignore the equally detrimental ramifications of their exploitation of social capital. A more reflective approach is required. This essay suggests that it is in our interest to reboot our societal consciousness and explore the underlying cybernetical dimensions, even if these appear to be confrontational for interested stakeholders in our current misinformation crisis.