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Studying Contemporary Media Change: A Psychosocial Framework

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EXPLAINER @jorgebscomm for @empowervmedia Photo: Nigel Foote via Pexels · Pexels License Media environments influence what becomes visible, how information is interpreted and which meanings circulate. Understanding these processes requires examining psychological judgement alongside social relationships, culture and institutional power. I magine a public issue receiving attention through a newspaper report, a short social-media video and a conversation between friends. The underlying event may be the same, but each encounter offers different information, emphasises different details and invites different interpretations. The report reflects editorial decisions. The video reaches people through a distribution system. The conversation introduces personal experiences, relationships and expectations. If the issue becomes publicly prominent, institutions may also respond to the attention it receives. This raises a broader ques...
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How Sure Should We Be? Understanding Confidence Calibration

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EXPLAINER @jorgebscomm for @empowervmedia Photo: Anna Keibalo via Pexels · Pexels License A confident judgement may be accurate, mistaken or somewhere between the two. Calibration asks whether our degree of certainty is justified by how reliably our judgements turn out to be correct. A commentator confidently announces that a proposed policy will succeed. Another thinks it will fail but expresses considerable uncertainty. Both predictions sound different. Yet neither person's confidence tells us, by itself, who is more likely to be correct. To assess their judgement, we would need to know what each predicted, the evidence available at the time and what eventually happened. More importantly, we would need to look beyond a single prediction. This is where confidence calibration becomes useful. The question is not whether someone sounds sufficiently doubtful, but whether their expressed certainty corresponds to their a...
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Location: Australia
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When Expectations Shape What We Think We See

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EXPLAINER @jorgebscomm for @empowervmedia Photo: Jane T D. via Pexels · Pexels License Two people can encounter the same evidence and construct different explanations. Understanding that difference requires attention to what they saw, what they expected and what the material actually established. I magine watching a short interview after being told that the speaker is highly experienced. A hesitant answer might seem thoughtful. Now imagine encountering the same footage after being told that the person is poorly prepared. The hesitation might appear to confirm a lack of competence. Neither interpretation necessarily follows from the pause alone. Yet the information supplied before a recording can influence which details seem important afterwards. This raises a question central to media and communication: when we believe a recording confirms an explanation, how much of that explanation did we bring to the recording ourselve...
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Location: Australia
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Beyond the Headline: How We Decide What to Believe

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EXPLAINER @jorgebscomm for @empowervmedia Photo: Lisa Fotios via Pexels · Pexels License Seeing, sharing and believing are different activities. Understanding their relationship helps explain why information can circulate widely without becoming reliable knowledge. S omeone shares a sensational headline on social media. It receives hundreds of reactions, travels through several group chats and eventually appears in a discussion about public policy. What does this tell us? We know the message circulated. We cannot conclude that everyone who shared it believed it, understood its evidence or intended to persuade others. A person may forward an article to question it, express concern, entertain friends or signal membership of a group. Communication behaviour does not have a single meaning. This is where epistemic communication becomes useful as an analytical perspective: it asks how claims move between people, what gives them...
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Location: Australia
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Understanding Literacy in a Connected Information World

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EXPLAINER @jorgebscomm for @empowervmedia Photo: Beyzanur K. via Pexels · Pexels License Media literacy, information literacy and digital literacy illuminate different aspects of the same activity. Their boundaries overlap, especially when information becomes communication between people, within relationships and across institutions. A news article appears in a group chat. Someone questions its headline, another searches for the original data, and a third explains how to adjust the privacy settings before sharing a screenshot. Are they practising media literacy, information literacy or digital literacy? All three, probably. The distinction is useful, provided we treat the terms as perspectives rather than competing territories. Their origins and frameworks differ, but modern communication rarely arrives neatly divided into separate categories. An article is a message, evidence is something to examine, and a platform is an environment in which people interact. Three...
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Location: Australia
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Media Literacy Is Not a Fact-Checking Trick

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EXPLAINER @jorgebscomm for @empowervmedia Photo: Plann via Pexels · Pexels License Media literacy helps us judge questionable information, but it does not begin or end with detecting falsehoods. It also concerns how we gain access, evaluate what we encounter, use it responsibly, create our own content and communicate with others. A suspicious headline appears in a social feed. Checking the source, opening the article and looking for evidence are useful media-literacy moves. But what happened before that moment? Could the person access better information? What will they do with what they learn? What happens if they repost, remix or explain it to someone else? Those questions widen the frame. UNESCO describes media and information literacy (MIL) as a set of knowledge, skills and attitudes that includes access, evaluation or assessment, use, production and communication . The Australian ...
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Location: Australia
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