Major European challenge – Why you need to know more about it!
Bonjour and welcome!
The whole of Europe is facing a multitude of challenges nowadays. We, Nike, Heidi and Léa, were able to choose one challenge, Low Literacy. But what does it entail?
In 2014, 55 millions of adults showed literacy difficulties in Europe (ELINET, 2014). This number got our attention and create an interest in knowing more about this. Being illiterate means you lack the basic skills to read, write, evaluate and understand information. How can we understand other major European challenges such as climate change or the pandemic of Covid-19 while being illiterate? If we want everybody by our side to tackle the other challenges, we first need to address the challenge of illiteracy.
A more specific part of this challenge we were curious about is media health literacy. Media health illiteracy means that a person does not have the ability to be critical towards the health information they get in media. The actions resulting from the evaluation of the health-related information can have dangerous effects if the person has not the ability to deal with these.
Media literacy is literacy in the 21st century
Gerhard Bisovsky
This quote summarizes well: media technologies take a huge place in our lives nowadays.
It is not surprising to see health-related information in this new environment. Open your instagram or Facebook, and it will not take you long to see these kind of information. Moreover, 325,000 was the number of health apps available in 2017. Health is being digitalized.
In these times of covid it is even a bigger challenge, that everybody needs to be aware of. The number of fake news released on media technologies has increased, as it will be discussed, fake news have real danger on the media consumers’ health.
Negative effects are multiple (we will discuss this more extensively in the first blogpost). Yet, some see great potential in this relatively new phenomenon. There are different perspectives that we were interested to know more about.
We hope to help you become more fluent in this domain and that this knowledge will become useful in your daily life.
Our working language is English because of the urgency of this challenge, the blog needs the broadest audience possible. The choice of less formality has also been agreed on by the three of us in order to raise awareness among the whole society even the less literate. And to try to shed light on this complex issue, we wanted to bring our contribution to the discussion.
So what can you expect from our blog?
The first post, made by Léa, will settle the basis to understand the topic of media health literacy. This necessitates an entire blogpost since understanding rightly the information is the main goal of our blog. She will also make you aware of the dangers illiteracy in this domain creates.
The second will address the various impacts it has on the different groups of our society. Do older people are at the same risk to become a victim of media health illiteracy as students? Or can they both benefit from the use of media? Heidi will answer this question in detail.
Finally, Nike will explain what potential media has for literacy and what possible challenges there are. In the end, the most important thing is to tackle the problem of media health illiteracy in order to keep the dangers away. How can we do it? Have some strategies already been a success?
Who are we?
We, Heidi, Nike, and Léa, are second year students at Maastricht University, studying European Studies at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Nike and Heidi from Germany and Léa from Belgium. The three of us already did research on this challenge. Our common interest brought us together to create this platform.
Every recommendation, feedback about the posts, the perspective on media health literacy you would be interested to learn more about or the blog in general are welcomed! We encourage you to take part in the discussion through the comments section.