Lit Review 2: Teaching Responsible Citizenship in the Age of Digital Media

Modern media technologies, the Internet in particular, have the power to create a vast civic domain that fosters debate and discussion about critical social issues, and to be a source of new information that can allow individual citizens to developed informed opinions based upon electronically disseminated information. Using the internet, which is rife with bias and inaccuracies, to gather information can be a challenge, and requires sophisticated critical thinking skills. Moreover, as Vincent Gozalvez points out in his paper Education for Democratic Citizenship in a Digital Culture, published in the January 2011 issue of the "Scientific Journal of Media Literacy", there is a danger that technologies that allow individuals to filter and customize the news they receive through electronic media will create "inbred" or myopic digital citizens who do not open themselves to new ideas or alternate opinions that are necessary to informed and responsible democratic citizenship. Gozalvez cites a study done with 60 participants from a variety of US states. These participates, placed in groups of 5 or 6 like-minded individuals based on political affiliation, engaged in a blog based discussion group on several controversial topics. The trend was that the more extreme views came to dominate the discussion with little compromise, and real debate ended within 15 minutes. The study suggests that when individuals engage exclusively with individuals of a similar ideology,opinions are galvanized without any real critical assessment of the issue or the dominant viewpoint. Although electronic media and communication has the power to expand democratic citizenship, Gozalvez suggests that if users simply filter out any novel or potentially contradictory information, modern forms of media may serve to restrict responsible, informed citizenship rather than promote it.
        To avoid this potetial pitfall, Gozalvez 
argues that education, specifically k-12 education, needs to impart the skills and mindset in students that allows them to assess all information on an issue to develop an informed option that is not blinkered by individual or group bias. Gozalvez suggests some approaches that educators can use to help students become independent minded, critical, and civically responsible democratic citizens in a digital culture. These suggestions include using the internet to explore diverse civic issues, taking into account all available information that comes from credible sources; that is, making them active, critical participants in civic research. This should be done not only using text media, such as blogs and news groups, but video and audio sources as well. In short, students need to learn not only how to use technology, but also how to use it responsibly and critically. Educators need to be aware of the dangers electronic media has to produce a myopic and bias citizenry if the new generation of citizens is not well informed about how to use technology as an aid to responsible, democratic social engagement.