250276 Social Media Literacy: What it is and what it should be (BS) (SoSe 2020)

Social Media has connected the world, is giving people a voice who did not have the opportunity to share their opinions before and is a lucrative advertising platform for businesses and entrepreneurs. Social media have changed us fundamentally and we encounter them constantly in our daily life. We communicate through social media, it is a place where we connect with friends and family, where we find our romantic partners, where we educate ourselves politically and become social activists. Additionally, social Media has changed our behavior and our expectations and perceptions of privacy in a radical way.
Although social media play a major role in our lives, the International Computer and Information Literacy Study from 2018 showed that pupils in Germany are performing poorly when it comes to digital skills (social Media was not even specifically examined).
Issues surrounding social media, such as data breach scandals (Cambridge Analytica), election manipulation (US elections 2016), Fake News, Hate Speech, and Cyberbullying, the streaming of terror attacks, suicides, murders and rapes (to just name a few) have been addressed slowly by the platforms themselves. In contrast to the urgency to tackle those problems, reactions from governments, non-governmental organizations, universities, and schools seem to lack sufficiency. While terms like digital literacy and digital citizenship mostly teach how to create social media profiles and what possibilities they offer, social media literacy usually describes strategies to use the platforms to increase business. The ability to understand the functions of social media in order to be able to use them safely, has almost no relevance at all.

In our seminar, we will first look at how social media functions (algorithm-driven newsfeed, use of data, micro-targeting ads, social bots), to understand their issues and benefits.
We will then contrast this with existing approaches to social media literacy to find differences and gaps. Finally, we will create our own social media literacy project and put it to test.

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