Def true in my experience teaching Gen Z. - ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

bookjockeyalex.bsky.social • 20 days ago

Def true in my experience teaching Gen Z.

“The issue with younger generations is deeper than media mistrust. It’s that no one knows what a journalist is.”

www.poynter.org/commentary/2...

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bookjockeyalex.bsky.social•20 days ago

A story I often tell was how I once used two tiktok videos about an upcoming state election to try and teach about misinfo and expertise. I showed LA Times journalists explaining an initiative, then a rando clearly talking out of his ass. Who did they trust? The rando.

bookjockeyalex.bsky.social•20 days ago

Why? Because the journalists were too Millennial and too news-y. The other guy was younger, had more followers, and sounded more relatable. He didn't sound like what they thought news sounded like. It was only after we dived into his profile that they reluctantly relented.

bookjockeyalex.bsky.social•20 days ago

I'm constantly having to gently push back on my Gen Z students who use the number of followers or the high view count on YouTube as a metric for determining expertise.

bookjockeyalex.bsky.social•20 days ago

Most of this I don't think is actually Gen Z's fault. Older generations dismantled and discredited journalism then turned around and established the content creator system, then turned around and exploited the shit out of that. Gen Z is working under parameters the rest of us set.

bookjockeyalex.bsky.social•20 days ago

But it is an increasing problem in terms of battling misinfo. You can't get all your news from content creators pretending to be journalists. How we fix this I have no idea. All I can do on my end is try to teach what I can and hope it clicks.

bookjockeyalex.bsky.social•20 days ago

Caveat that of course this happens in all generations, it's not exclusive to Gen Z. However the article is talking about Gen Z and that is the age of the kids I've taught since I got into schools. So my part of this conversation is very specific.

stolenbytigers.bsky.social•20 days ago

Doing research for an unrelated paper last year and came across a couple of studies in the late Obama years that suggested millennials themselves were also starting to turn away from traditional news media for being too traditional and therefore inauthentic and biased.

bookjockeyalex.bsky.social•20 days ago

For sure. I'm an elder Millennial and stopped reading the local paper and watching local news in high school for similar reasons. But we also didn't have social media to jump to.

stolenbytigers.bsky.social•20 days ago

Fellow elder millennial, when I was in college there was a huge listserv argument on how “good” blogs were outcompeting mainstream media, so mainstream media should die, and every time I think about it and what then happened to blogs I kinda gotta shake my head and laugh.

mbclinpath.bsky.social•19 days ago

One of the most important things is that people have no idea how to read and understand the statistics that are used (or not used) when providing proof to back up an assertion (especially in the field of medicine and medical care). They have no idea how to distinguish truth from fiction.

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