An Orgy of Utter Chaos: Connecting Media Literacy and Information Literacy with the Feeling of Knowing

Abstract

This article argues that educators need to better understand current neuroscience and psychology in order to teach students in our current information and media environment. Specifically, the article focuses on the Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education from the Association of College and Research Libraries and the Core Principles of Media Literacy Education from the The National Association for Media Literacy Education. This article outlines concepts around the feeling of knowing such as the role of consciousness, the modular nature of the brain and reasoning as a social process. The article closes by exploring implications and new directions that educators may be able to take when considering information literacy and media literacy.

Keywords

Information Literacy, Media Literacy, Psychology, Neuroscience, Feeling of Knowing

In January of 2023, media scholar, David Buckingham, wrote a post that garnered some attention in different corners of the internet. Buckingham critiqued the concept of information literacy while building an argument as to why media literacy was a better framework to use in addressing misinformation and disinformation. He makes many valid and interesting points but his central point seems to be that, from his perspective, those who advocate for information literacy treat information as a kind of neutral substance “like water.” He claims that information literacy supporters seek out “good information” which will address the problems of our current media landscape. He believes that the oversimplification of “good” vs “bad” information makes information literacy faulty and ultimately problematic, especially in education settings.

As a librarian, I have come out of the information-literacy-side of this discussion, but I have also spent time reading about media literacy. These concepts represent two disciplinary approaches struggling with similar ideas. Information literacy is grounded in information science and librarianship. Media literacy emerges from communications, journalism, and related fields. To me, Buckingham’s discussion, and similar academic debates, are fine as mental exercises crossing disciplinary boundaries. There is a value in outlining similarities and shortcomings of both media literacy and information literacy formulations. But, in the end, both of these areas as currently formulated fall short of their larger goals. If theoreticians and practitioners are to apply these frameworks to address the needs of students and, more generally, a broader public, then these bodies of knowledge and ways of thinking need to do more to account for how the brain processes and makes sense of the world around it. One significant commonality shared by information literacy and media literacy is that they are clearly out of touch with findings and current lines of thinking in psychology and neuroscience. They treat the brain as a rationally-driven, processing machine absorbing messages and carefully weighing them. The neuroscientists are challenging us to recognize the modularity of the brain and the multidimensional aspects of knowing. The brain’s modules interact with each other producing a feeling about the world around it. This is the feeling of knowing, an idea that is noticeably unaccounted for by both media literacy and information literacy.

Context and Background

Education practitioners advancing media literacy and information literacy largely think about similar issues but they do so from different disciplinary traditions. Media literacy arises out of communications, journalism, and media studies.  The National Association for Media Literacy Education issued an updated version of their Core Principles of Media Literacy Education in 2023. These Core Principles are just one example of several similar documents such as the framework outlined by the Center for Media Literacy (2008) in their Literacy for the 21st Century.

Information literacy has arisen from a different lens. Its origins can be traced to information science and librarianship. It is especially connected to higher education led by academic librarians developing research skills in partnership with faculty across disciplines, although it has been adapted to all levels of education. The Association of College and Research Libraries’ Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education is probably the leading document outlining current thinking within information literacy (especially within higher education).

To the chagrin of media literacy advocates and information literacy advocates, several noteworthy outside agencies have lumped the concepts together as media and information literacy. Noteworthy examples of this include UNESCO’s Media and Information Literate Citizens: Think critically, Click Wisel and the Council of Europe’s (2023) “Media and Information Literacy” with its Digital Citizenship Education program.

Ultimately, the various definitions and educational frameworks around these two concepts have a largely similar focus. They center on building the skills necessary to find, interpret, and utilize sources and messages within the information/media ecosystem. They hope to give educators the perspective and pedagogical tools to guide students to be more effective participants within educational settings and society as a whole.

Example Frameworks

We can examine two frameworks, one from media literacy and one from information literacy, to better define these areas of thought. These are the National Association for Media Literacy Education’s  Core Principles of Media Literacy Education and the Association of College & Research Libraries’ Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.

Example 1: The National Association for Media Literacy Education

The National Association for Media Literacy Education defines its goal to  “make media literacy highly valued and widely practiced as an essential life skill” (NAMLE, 2023). They outline the following skills and habits:

1. Expands the concept of literacy to include all forms of media and integrates multiple literacies in developing mindful media consumers and creators.
2. Envisions all individuals as capable learners who use their background, knowledge, skills, and beliefs to create meaning from media experiences.
3. Promotes teaching practices that prioritize curious, open-minded, and self-reflective inquiry while emphasizing reason, logic, and evidence.
4. Encourages learners to practice active inquiry, reflection, and critical thinking about the messages they experience, create, and share across the ever-evolving media landscape.
5. Necessitates ongoing skill-building opportunities for learners that are integrated, cross-curricular, interactive, and appropriate for age and developmental stage.
6. Supports the development of a participatory media culture in which individuals navigate myriad ethical responsibilities as they create and share media.
7. Recognizes that media institutions are cultural and commercial entities that function as agents of socialization, commerce, and change.
8. Affirms that a healthy media landscape for the public good is a shared responsibility among media and technology companies, governments, and citizens.
9. Emphasizes critical inquiry about media industries’ roles in society, including how these industries influence, and are influenced by, systems of power, with implications for equity, inclusion, social justice, and sustainability.
10. Empowers individuals to be informed, reflective, engaged, and socially responsible participants in a democratic society.

Example 2: The Framework for Information Literacy

The Association of College & Research Libraries’ Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (2015) is built upon Jan Meyer and Ray Land’s threshold concepts. A threshold concept is an  intellectual boundary that must be crossed in order to grasp a concept within a discipline. In using threshold concepts to examine disciplinary knowing, we can set a trajectory from novice to expert. Meyer and Land define threshold concepts as transformative, integrative, irreversible, bounded, and troublesome. Once a threshold is crossed, it is difficult for the learner to go back (Meyer & Land, 2003; Land & Meyer, 2006).

The Framework for Information LIteracy (2015) takes information literacy and applies to the higher education context. This document outlines six information literacy thresholds.

1. Authority Is Constructed and Contextual: Information users give authority to the author of an information source based upon the context for which the information is needed.
2. Information Creation as a Process: Experts often recognize the utility of an information source based on the way the source is made. We can attribute meaning to source when we understand the various methods behind the sources we utilize.
3. Information Has Value: Experts attribute different kinds of value to information sources including monetary value, the value of influence, and as a means of understanding the world.
4. Research as Inquiry: The scholarly endeavor is a process of identifying and exploring various questions around knowing.
5. Scholarship as Conversation: Experts recognize that knowledge forms within communities of knowers and that scholarly communities have histories methodologies at the foundation of their exchange of ideas.
6. Searching as Strategic Exploration: Experts recognize that searching for information is a process of learning. It is not just a process of finding sources but a deeper process of thinking.

The Framework for Information LIteracy and the Core Principles of Media Literacy Education both make a similar underlying assumption which is that minds are generally rational. Both of these statements take pains to address context and nuance. They recognize that individuals are influenced by various forces such as social factors, information needs, and media influence. While this recognition is important, neither statement attempts to account for the ways that the mind comes to a state of knowing based on the world it knows. Neither statement–and by extension, neither discipline– incorporates the findings of psychology and neuroscience.

The Feeling of Knowing

A first step in understanding how the brain processes information and comes to knowing is to recognize that the brain does not directly interact with the world. The brain is essentially locked away in a black box. Actually, it is locked away in the skull. The only way that it knows the world is through the limited and incomplete inputs it receives. Through our senses, the mind constructs the world around it. It does this in several ways. First, it builds representations for how the world operates. These representations are built upon memories of specific things or situations and generalizations–or schemas–that represent those things or situations. The mind carries all kinds of schemas, schemas for cat, apple, money, love, work, family, the self, and much more. We take multiple experiences and use them to build expectations for the next time we encounter something similar. The evolutionary goal of the memories and schemas is not to document the past but, instead, to prepare for the future (Barrett, 2017; LeDoux, 2019; Rippon, 2019; Sapolsky, 2017; Zull, 2011).

The second way that the mind constructs the world goes beyond just building representations. It is actively anticipating the world around it. To gain a fitness advantage in evolutionary terms, it is not enough to waste the milliseconds it takes for the brain to process visual, auditory, and sensory inputs. The brain takes what it knows based on past situations and actually applies this to the current moment. As neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) states,

…and so, trapped in the skull, with only past experiences as a guide, your brain makes predictions. We usually think of predictions as statements about the future, like “it’s going to rain tomorrow” or “the Red Sox will win the World Series” or “you will meet a tall, dark stranger.” But here, I’m focusing on predictions at a microscopic scale as millions of neurons talk to one another. These neural conversations try to anticipate every fragment of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch that you will experience, and every action that you will make. These predictions are your brain’s best guesses of what’s going on in the world around you, and how to deal with it to keep you alive and well (p 59).

So, the mind is constantly predicting, comparing the actual inputs it receives to the predictions, and then updating its schemas based on these results. In this way, the mind continually updates its understanding and expectations of how the world works. The mind is constantly running a self-correcting simulation in all aspects of our lives. It turns out that we are, in fact, living in the Matrix, but it is a matrix of our own creation  (Barrett, 2017; LeDoux, 2019; Rippon, 2019; Sapolsky, 2017; Zull, 2011).

Our simulations of the world have some pertinent implications for how we process information. The mind makes predictions based on past expectations. This means that our past experiences influence future experiences and in here lies the seeds of the biases that we carry with us. Our senses are constantly bombarded with a cacophony of inputs much of which is ignored. In order to move forward, we must filter out much of the inputs we received and focus on those things that are the most important. How do we know what is important? We build predictions based on the past. When we talk about the cognitive biases, heuristics, and other shortcuts that our mind utilizes, we must recognize that these are sometimes features and not bugs (Barrett, 2017; LeDoux, 2019; Rippon, 2019; Sapolsky, 2017; Zull, 2011).

It is important for us to note that we are not aware of most of what the brain does. Its most important functions are to process resources such as glucose and salts, manage wastes, and regulate survival processes. Most of these functions happen outside of our awareness. If we consciously had to manage our life support systems, we would not have enough attention for much else.  When we think about our mind, we really should not think of a unified whole. We should think about a series of overlapping networks. We sometimes oversimplify the brain’s regions acting as if there is a one-to-one relationship between regions and functions. This is the area for sight, this is the area for emotion, this is the area for memory, etc. Yes, there are areas of specialization but the mind’s networks build combinations together to produce the multitude of functions that we experience. The reality is that the brain is modular. Its networks become de facto modules. Modules for social situations, modules driving us for calories, modules driving us into relationships, modules for navigating our surroundings, and modules for so much more (Barrett, 2017; LeDoux, 2019; Rippon, 2019; Sapolsky, 2017; Zull, 2011).

The modular nature of the brain is a vital piece in discussing how we process everything about our lives, including the information and media that we encounter. When we encounter a new idea, make a decision based on what we learn, or come to a conclusion based on “the facts,” multiple modules within the brain are working to process and wrestle with the problems before us. Reasoning is only one of many modules at work. Other modules may include our social allegiances and affiliations, our personal experiences for how the world works, or our fears and excitement about potential outcomes to just name a few.

As theorist Robert Burton puts it,

To get an idea of the magnitude of this process, imagine billions of committee members, each with at least 10,000 hands reaching out to shake hands, prod, poke, seduce, or fend off the other members. Miraculously, this orgy of utter chaos is transformed into a relatively seamless and focused stream of consciousness. Even given the amount of potential information incoming at any instant, we can focus on a single aspect of consciousness and either not notice or ignore the enormous subconscious din (Burton, 2014, P. 51).

It may be apparent, but I want to be clear that many of these modules exist outside of consciousness. Some processing happens consciously, and other processing happens unconsciously. This leads us to the difficult and divisive question, what is consciousness? The origins and purpose of consciousness is hotly debated in the neuroscience and psychology literature. Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux calls consciousness the “perception of meaning“ (Le Doux, 2019). There are two ways that researchers talk about consciousness. The first is consciousness as a waking state–as in, you are conscious. This would be conscious in contrast to being asleep or in a coma. The second way that the term is used is to refer to the experience of awareness. This is often referred to as phenomenal consciousness. This is a sense of control, direction, or even agency.

In evolutionary terms, consciousness provides the individual with a unique advantage. Through consciousness, automatic processes can be interrupted. Modules build up through experience or through conditioning can be paused. Situations can be analyzed and novel solutions can be tested through imagination. Here’s the challenging thing for us. A great deal of our mental processes operate outside of consciousness, but it doesn’t feel that way. Consciousness feels like a flow of existence. It’s like an internal narrative, and we are the protagonists of our stories. We are in control. We are consciously choosing, but, at some level, our conscious control is an illusion since so many of our decisions result from unconscious processes.

How does this happen? How does this “orgy of utter chaos”–to use Burton’s phrase– become the decisions that direct our lives? The answer is that we do not exactly know but the result of the chaos is the feeling of knowing. When the various modules of our conscious and unconscious processing work through their processes and they push and pull us toward a decision, the result is a feeling. The results of unconscious processing enter into consciousness as feelings. This is a type of mental sensation that exists withinthe mind. This is the major step that our standard view of decision making misses. Our decisions and our ideas come to us encased in feelings. We can think of the feeling of knowing as a feeling of rightness or of being correct. If I ask you to name the capital of Illinois, to think of the name of your 4th grade teacher, or the name of the US president in 1837, the answers come to your mind. But, not just the answer.  The answer is accompanied by a feeling that tells you something about what you know. I would guess that most people–or at least most Americans who are reading this article–will know the capital of Illinois, and most people will know their 4th grade teacher. But, the president in 1837 is probably more tricky. What does your feeling tell you about this?

Sometimes the feeling of knowing hits us like a ton of bricks. We have that “ah ha” moment when we have a feeling of absolute certainty. Sometimes the feeling of knowing is absent. We may have an answer, but we know that it is wrong. Or, at least we do not have the feeling that we are right. Other times, we know that we have a correct answer in our mind somewhere but we cannot bring it forward. We have a feeling that we know it, and the answer is right on the tip of the tongue but we cannot come up with an answer. These are just a few examples around the feeling of knowing. The feelings that we have come to us as a result of our unconscious processing pushing forwards into consciousness.

We know the nature and quality of our thoughts via feelings, not reason. Feelings such as certainty, conviction, rightness and wrongness, clarity, and faith arise out of involuntary mental sensory systems that are integral and separable components of the thoughts that they qualify (Burton, 2014, p. 139).

Often, the modular nature of our minds become apparent to us in moments of conflict between modules. These are the times when we struggle to make a decision. When the feeling of knowing evades us, we face indecision. As a simple but common example, we may decide that we need to lose weight so we skip the afternoon frappuccino. But, by the end of the day when we are driving home and we are tired from the long day of work, the modules in our brain craving calories start to get louder. The logical, reasonable modules from early in the day start to fade. These are the moments when we feel the conflict. Or, when we face a tough decision, and we need to deliberate internally, this is when the modules in our mind are in fierce debate.

The feeling of knowing offers an entry way into reflective judgments. The mental sensations that accompany our ideas are a first metacognitive step. We are making a judgment. When we feel that we are certain, that is a judgment. When we feel that we are not certain, that is also a judgment. Most of the time, we do not pause enough to understand that knowing requires feeling. When we think about knowing, we can think about two things. We can think of the content that is to be known, but we also must think about the feelings that accompany that content. For example, the content that is to be known: the president in 1837. The feeling accompanying it: a lack of certainty. As neuroscientist James Zull (2011) writes,

For metacognition we need to know what we think and how we feel about it; inversely, we must know what we feel and what we think about that. Metacognition is inherently an integrative process, blending thought and emotion into a unique combination for each of us (p. 274).

To summarize, we can see a unique picture of the mind emerging thanks to neuroscientists and psychologists. This gives us a different picture for how we process information. We must start by recognizing that the brain builds a simulation of the world based on what it has experienced in the past. These past expectations make us favor some expectations over others. We must also see the modular nature of the brain as different networks push and pull our decision making. Reason is only one of many modules at work in the mind. Finally, knowing is a feeling that is generated at the interface between consciousness and unconscious processing. This feeling is a potential starting point for metacognitive reflection (Burton, 2008; Burton, 2014; Sapolsky, 2019; Zull, 2011).

This reflection has important implications for teaching and learning. This makes knowing not only a highly personal exercise but also begs us to examine the things that make it so. When we interact with information or media, we must do so as a reflective endeavor. When we come across an article, watch a news clip, or listen to a podcast, we should start by noticing the reactions we have whether the reaction is certainty, confusion, or lack of certainty. In fact, we should especially note the times when we are certain because these are the cases when a strong feeling of knowing may lead us astray. Certainty should be treated with the same care as confusion (Zull, 2011; Caulfield, 2017).

Additionally, we should notice when rationality is pushed aside. Even though we can acknowledge that no one is purely rational, we can all make attempts to recognize the possibilities that other modules within the mind may be at work. We can attempt to see when political, religious, or other affiliations may push aside reason–to just name one example. When we take a stand on an issue, we can try to consider the kinds of experiences that may influence our perspectives. To put it another way, we are called to explore the things that influence us to reach the conclusions that we will make.

Connections to Educational Frameworks

If we return to the media literacy and information literacy frameworks, we can see that they do not deeply consider how the mind processes information. They both just taken for granted that the mind does so. As I have noted, these two statements need to better incorporate the feeling of knowing and related ideas. In an effort to move forward in positive directions, we can note ideas within the existing statements that may open up these avenues.

If we take the Core Principles of Media Literacy (The National Association for Media Literacy Education, 2023), we can pull out and emphasize two principles that open the door to interesting possibilities. The first is:

Envisions all individuals as capable learners who use their background, knowledge, skills, and beliefs to create meaning from media experiences.

This has clear connections to the ways that the mind constructs the world but it does not address how it makes meaning, nor does it explicitly address the need for reflection. This is a great opportunity for the feeling of knowing to expand the conversation and broaden learning. If learners use their “background, knowledge, skills, and beliefs,” what do they do with them? This seems like an invitation for reflection. And, if the goal is to “create meaning,” we can consider how this happens. 

The second principle that we can can examine is,

Promotes teaching practices that prioritize curious, open-minded, and self-reflective inquiry while emphasizing reason, logic, and evidence.

Clearly, this principle is a direct call for reflection. This is a clear opening to consider the feeling of knowing. But, this principle does not go far enough. We can try to emphasize reason but, in being reflective, we must seek the sources of our beliefs while identifying bias and error. If we are going to be reflective, we must use reflection must move to recognize the modularity of the mind.

Similarly, we can look at the Framework for Information Literacy (Association of College and Research Libraries, 2015) for connections to the feeling of knowing. There are two frames that have particular potential.  The first is,  

Authority Is Constructed and Contextual: Information users give authority to the author of an information source based upon the context for which the information is needed.

The idea of constructing authority within a context makes sense within the context of the feeling of knowing. We should think about this frame within the modules that the mind uses to do this construction. Often, we think of knowledge construction as a process of combining information sources to come up with stronger ideas. This may be the case some of the time, but we also must recognize that our unconscious processing is at work within the construction process. Our experiences and our ways of knowing the world will push our concepts of authority in different directions. Again, we can account for some of this through reflections.

A second frame that has potential is,

Information Has Value: Experts attribute different kinds of value to information sources including monetary value, the value of influence, and as a means of understanding the world.

The concept of value is similar in some ways to construction. Value can have many different meanings in many different situations. The value that we give is connected to the feelings that we have around information sources. We generate the feelings of value based on the interactions between our conscious and unconscious processing. In other ways, our judgments of value rest firmly around the feeling of knowing.

Clearly, the ideas of media literacy and information literacy–and how these concepts are adapted to learning situations–must better account to what we are learning from the neuroscientists and the psychologists. Specifically, they both need to better incorporate the feeling of knowing. Both of these areas of thought present strong possibilities for reflective practice and to account for the nature of knowing.

Closing

We can return to David Buckingham’s argument over the merits of media literacy and information literacy for addressing mis/disinformation. Which framework is more useful? To me, the answer is that both fall short, because they do not actually incorporate the ways that the mind actually comes to knowing. They do not account for the feeling of knowing. If we are to really do better as instructors and to build learning frameworks that allow us to meet the challenges, then we must reach out across disciplinary boundaries and utilize the lessons from science.

References

Association of College & Research Libraries, “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education,” American Library Association 2015,  https://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework.

Barrett, Lisa Feldman (2017). How emotions are made: the secret life of the brain. Mariner Books, Boston.

Buckingham, David (2023). The trouble with ‘information literacy’ https://davidbuckingham.net/2023/01/04/the-trouble-with-information-literacy/

Burton, Robert. A. (2008). On being certain: believing you were right even when you’re not. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.

Burton, Robert. A. (2014). A skeptic’s guide to the mind: What neuroscience can and cannot tell us about ourselves. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.

Caulfield, Mike (2017). “Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers.” 2017. https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/chapter/four-strategies/ (12 Jan 2023).

Center for Media Literacy (2008). Literacy for the 21st Century, https://www.medialit.org/sites/default/files/01a_mlkorientation_rev2_0.pdf

Council of Europe (2023) Media and Information Literacy  https://www.coe.int/en/web/digital-citizenship-education/media-and-information-literacy

Land, Ray, and Jan H. F. Meyer, “Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge: Dynamics of Assessment,” in Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge, in Jan H.F. Meyer & Ray Land (London: Routledge, 2006): 61-79.

LeDoux, Joseph (2019). The deep history of ourselves: the four-billion-year story of how we got conscious brains. New York City: Viking, 2019

Meyer, J. and Land, R. (2003) Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: Linkages to ways of thinking and practicing within the disciplines. Enhancing Teaching-Learning Environments in Undergraduate Courses. Accessed at http://www.etl.tla.ed.ac.uk//docs/ETLreport4.pdf

The National Association for Media Literacy Education (2023). Core Principles of Media Literacy Education https://namle.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/NAMLE-Principles-Final-2.1.pdf

Rippon, Gina (2019) Gender and our brains: how neuroscience explodes the myths of the male and female minds. New York: Pantheon Books, 2019

UNESCO’s Media and Information Literate Citizens: Think critically, Click Wisely (2021) https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000377068

Sapolsky, Robert M. (2017). Behave: the biology of Humans at our best and worst. New York: Penguin books

Zull, James E. (2011). From brain to mind: using neuroscience to change in education. Stylus Publishing, Sterling, Virginia, 2011.