Media Education & Information Literacy Reflection

 

February 15th, 2023

Today, The Humanities and Social Sciences Cluster had celebrated their first ever HUMSS Week. 
The celebration started at 8:00 am with a mass, and finished within the times of 9:00-9:20 am. 

After this, the first talk, which was the Media Education & Information Literacy Reflection,
started after a 15 minute break. The first speaker was one of our profs sir Geoffrey Ting. He also asked us to take selfies for attendance this morning. 

 

His talk was my favorite. Besides his great engagement with students and how he made the topic relatable, I believe that he also made his chosen topic to teach, as very effective. Within the talk, I found myself questioning my behavior and relationship with social media. Especially with how I consume information gathered from it. I reflected on how much I used it and how much time it took away from me.

In some ways I feel guilty, however, I found it quite stressful because even when I actively avoid it, I still have to come back to it because of my job. As much as I wish to be consistent with my avoidance and obsession with social media, it's a bit impossible nowadays because it is often linked and used with school and work.

If anything, that reflection actually saddened me. Because I'm sure everyone can agree when we say that media consumption has a lot of benefits, we learn faster and in much more efficient ways. However, we become easily manipulated and controlled and we often get stuck in an illusion with the algorithm that the media places us in. 

That was one of the things I reflected on during the talk. But the heavy thoughts were then replaced when Sir Ting continued his gentle ways of teaching the students. On how we must be careful and smart with media education and how we handle what we consume. The next professor that spoke, was more on the technical side as she spoke about Information Literacy. In all honesty, I wasn't able to hear much of her talk because of the difficulty in understanding her words because of the mic and sound quality. So I continued to ponder on my previous thoughts with media consumption. 

The only hope I have for the future is that we become less reliant on the internet, media, and completely living in the digital world. It makes us feel less humane and the pandemic had amplified and exaggerated that to the point where everyone felt the heaviness that came with the lack of human connection. Hopefully we come back to the time where we become less obsessed with social media and focus more on human connections and the experiences these teach us instead of just learning them from the media.