Cloaked website - Check out a white supremacist website featuring information on Dr. Martin Luther King
Coming into my teaching assistantship at BGSU, there was a series of of talks meant to acquaint us with the millenial students. Frequently, the potency of their digital literacy came to the fore of the discussion and people's experiences revealed that regardless of millenials' submersion in a more digitized environment, their skills at discerning quality sources from less qualified sources was low, their ability to do in-depth research on the internet was lacking, and despite their experience on the web, the scope of their digital geography was shallow. This is Considering the prevalence of mimicry in the fast-paced, rapidly evolving cultural zeitgeist, it becomes more and more important to be aware of inauthentic wolves in sheep's clothing. Given my interest in media literacy for the K-12 students here in America, I found myself drawn to Daniels's chapter "Searching for Civil Rights, Finding White Supremacy: Adolescents Making Sense of Cloaked Websites." This also required dabbling in the previous chapter and then I was just so interested I kept reading. That alone marks a well-done writing job!
The interesting distinction Daniels makes regarding the damage beyond misinformation that cloaked websites bring is that they also threaten the cultural value of racial equality (140). Considering the questionably free space of the internet and America's protection of free speech in website content, now more than ever we need a combination of digital literacy and critical race consciousness. This thesis is backed up by the ethnography conducted on a small group of teenagers where they used whatever search engines to conduct a faux research project on MLK or civil rights. Students were swayed by official sounding URLs, visual cues like professionally crafted websites versus homespun, the presence of images, and their discernment (correct or otherwise) of what they considered to be bias. These things are easily mimicked and without a background of critical race theory, none of the digital literacy training (which is what taught them to be aware of those four things) will help them critique information sources. Additionally, in a system that breaks things down to simple binaries, the spectrum of racism and its tenuous methods of disseminating white supremacist information. You have to consider both form and content to fully explore this kind of communication.
What is key to this chapter and possibly the theme of the class is the notion of uncertainty. Not so much the unexamined life or anything like that, but it's cloaked websites' "attempt at the discursive production of uncertainty about racial equality" that has to be shutdown. How do we do that, though? How can we dispel uncertainty while embracing that which we can't know (kind of how I've been considering affect)? And I want it to be an answer that doesn't start at the elementary school level....so get on that world!
Coming into my teaching assistantship at BGSU, there was a series of of talks meant to acquaint us with the millenial students. Frequently, the potency of their digital literacy came to the fore of the discussion and people's experiences revealed that regardless of millenials' submersion in a more digitized environment, their skills at discerning quality sources from less qualified sources was low, their ability to do in-depth research on the internet was lacking, and despite their experience on the web, the scope of their digital geography was shallow. This is Considering the prevalence of mimicry in the fast-paced, rapidly evolving cultural zeitgeist, it becomes more and more important to be aware of inauthentic wolves in sheep's clothing. Given my interest in media literacy for the K-12 students here in America, I found myself drawn to Daniels's chapter "Searching for Civil Rights, Finding White Supremacy: Adolescents Making Sense of Cloaked Websites." This also required dabbling in the previous chapter and then I was just so interested I kept reading. That alone marks a well-done writing job!
The interesting distinction Daniels makes regarding the damage beyond misinformation that cloaked websites bring is that they also threaten the cultural value of racial equality (140). Considering the questionably free space of the internet and America's protection of free speech in website content, now more than ever we need a combination of digital literacy and critical race consciousness. This thesis is backed up by the ethnography conducted on a small group of teenagers where they used whatever search engines to conduct a faux research project on MLK or civil rights. Students were swayed by official sounding URLs, visual cues like professionally crafted websites versus homespun, the presence of images, and their discernment (correct or otherwise) of what they considered to be bias. These things are easily mimicked and without a background of critical race theory, none of the digital literacy training (which is what taught them to be aware of those four things) will help them critique information sources. Additionally, in a system that breaks things down to simple binaries, the spectrum of racism and its tenuous methods of disseminating white supremacist information. You have to consider both form and content to fully explore this kind of communication.
What is key to this chapter and possibly the theme of the class is the notion of uncertainty. Not so much the unexamined life or anything like that, but it's cloaked websites' "attempt at the discursive production of uncertainty about racial equality" that has to be shutdown. How do we do that, though? How can we dispel uncertainty while embracing that which we can't know (kind of how I've been considering affect)? And I want it to be an answer that doesn't start at the elementary school level....so get on that world!
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