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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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From Individuals to Media Systems: How Communication Really Works

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EXPLAINER @jorgebscomm for @empowervmedia Photo: Caleb Oquendo via Pexels · Pexels License A communication outcome can begin in a person, travel through a group, be shaped by an institution and be amplified by a media system. M essages rarely move from sender to audience in a straight line. A short video may be noticed because one person finds it striking, shared because friends are discussing it, packaged according to an organisation's priorities, and amplified by a platform whose recommendation system makes it more visible. Looking only at the person, group, institution or system would capture something real. None would capture the whole process. That is the value of levels of analysis . A 2026 review identified 287 articles using multilevel modelling in communication journals between 1990 and 2024, with studies spanning increasingly diverse subfields. There is no single...
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Location: Australia
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Why the Same Message Can Mean Different Things

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EXPLAINER @jorgebscomm for @empowervmedia Image: Ian Remsen via Wikimedia Commons · CC0 1.0 Messages do not enter empty minds. They arrive with wording, images, sources and context, then meet audiences carrying knowledge of their own. A headline can contain exactly the same factual sentence and still be encountered differently depending on what surrounds it. Pair it with a frightening photograph, attribute it to a trusted institution, place it inside a sceptical social-media post, or remove the surrounding context altogether, and the audience is no longer encountering words alone. It is interpreting a package of cues. That gap between message and interpretation is the focus of mediated meaning . The term brings several established lines of research into one question: how does a communication environment become meaning for an audience? More than words Framing research provides one p...
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Location: Australia
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What Do We Gain and Lose When Therapy Language Becomes Everyday Language?

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ANALYSIS @jorgebscomm for @empowervmedia [Image: Thriveworks] P sychology has escaped the consulting room. A difficult ex is “narcissistic”. A disagreement becomes “gaslighting”. Needing time alone is “setting a boundary”. A painful experience is “trauma”, and discomfort can be “triggering”. None of these words is automatically wrong outside therapy. Their migration into everyday speech tells us something encouraging: people have more language for experiences that were once difficult to name. But language rarely travels unchanged. When psychological concepts move through TikTok clips, podcasts, dating advice and workplace conversations, technical meanings can stretch, flatten or acquire meanings clinicians never intended. We gain a vocabulary for understanding ourselves. We may also lose some of the precision that made the vocabulary useful. What we gain Mental-health literacy includes recognising psychological difficulties, knowing where to find re...
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Location: Australia
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Behind the Headlines: The Hidden Psychology of News

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@jorgebscomm for @empowervmedia [Image credit: flickr ] T hink about the last time you walked into a supermarket. The fresh produce is positioned near the entrance not because it is easiest to stock there, but because the smell of fresh food puts you in a generous, open-handed mood before you reach the expensive aisles. The sweets are at the checkout, where your willpower is lowest. Every element of the store's layout has been designed to produce specific behaviours.  Modern news works on exactly the same principle. The format you encounter (the sequence, hierarchy, and emphasis of its structural elements) has been constructed to produce specific responses. The difference is that most people know supermarkets are designed to make them spend. Almost nobody applies the same scrutiny to a news website. Every news story is a structured environment, never a neutral record of events. The sequence in which information is presented, the words chosen for headlines, the photographs...
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Location: Australia
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When Democracy Breaks: A Critical Media Psychology Analysis of January 6 and January 8

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@jorgebscomm for @empowervmedia T wo acts of political violence. Two of the world's largest democracies. Two years and two days apart . On January 6, 2021 , supporters of Donald Trump stormed the United States Capitol. On January 8, 2023 , supporters of Jair Bolsonaro stormed the Presidential Palace, the National Congress, and the Supreme Federal Court in Brasília — simultaneously, and live on social media. These were not coincidences of the calendar. A new paper from EMPOWERVERSE  titled Democratic Rupture and Media Psychology: A Critical Comparative Analysis of the January 6, 2021 US Capitol Insurrection and the January 8, 2023 Brazilian Federal Buildings Attack , argues that they were locally embedded expressions of the same structural moment: one in which social media affordances , political disinformation, and authoritarian populist leadership converge to make anti-democratic collective violence not just possible, but psychologically foreseeable. "Democrac...
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Location: Australia
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