To examine Media Literacy, most specifically Social Media Literacy, we must first look at what literacy in the 21st century means.

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What is 21st-century literacy?

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According to the New Media Consortium (via the Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century paper), 21st-century literacy can be defined as:

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the set of abilities and skills where aural, visual, and digital literacy overlap. These include the ability to understand the power of images and sounds, to recognize and use that power, to manipulate and transform digital media, to distribute them pervasively, and to easily adapt them to new forms (p. 19).

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Similarly, new media literacy is also an important concept to know. The same article, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century paper, defines new media literacy as "a set of cultural competencies and social skills that young people need in the new media landscape" (p. 4).

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Furthermore, we must also be able to recognize what digital media literacy is. The American Library Association (via the Digital Literacy: An Evolving Definition article) defines digital literacy as: "the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information, requiring both cognitive and technical skills."

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In other words, digital literacy, new media literacy, and 21st-century literacy are broad terms that encompass the traditional concept of literacy–reading and writing–and adapting it to the ever-changing world of technology and digital media. It involves the ability to use technology to communicate and interact with online communities, while creating, sharing, and consuming content which creates an environment for peer-to-peer editing and collaboration helping the members of these communities to improve their skills and help others improve theirs as well. It also involves learning how to use technology in a safe and effective way that still allows us to have access to its expansive uses.

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So, now that we have a basic knowledge of literacy in today's world, what is Social Media Literacy?

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Social media literacy is essentially the idea that the skills we learn using social media today are the same skills that will eventually help us succeed later on in our careers and businesses. (Above is a brief summary from Dr. Howard Rheingold himself on why he believes these are important.)

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Dr. Howard Rheingold separates this broad term of Social Media Literacy into five categories:

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• Attention

There is a time and a place for multitasking and a time and a place for focused attention. Many of us practice multitasking almost every waking hour of the day. Dr. Rheingold suggests that we should be practicing more focused attention. Doing this would allow us to better understand and connect with the content with which we interact. Many people practice mindfulness through meditation. This is a great way to practice focused attention because it forces us to zero in on one thing, one time, one place. The more practice with meditation, the easier it becomes, just like focusing our attention.

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• Participation

Anytime we have our cell phone or laptop with data or wifi, we have an endless amount of information at our fingertips. This allows us to Google something we don't know or understand; it allows us to communicate with one another despite time differences and thousands of miles between us; it allows us to update the world on how and what we are doing. Every time we post a picture on Instagram or update our status on facebook, we are participating in online culture. We have always had some semblance of participatory culture. However, with social media, we are now able to create identities for ourselves for other people to see without being anywhere near each other. It seems as though if you aren't participating in online culture, you cease to exist at all. And while that obviously is not true, it is a serious side effect of our new online-centered culture. Despite how this may sound, online participatory culture is not all bad. People often use their online presence to show who they are, whom they want to be and to express themselves. Participating online is not the only time we can practice participation. Many teachers have restricted the use of technology in their classrooms. In this case, we can practice participation by interacting with the teacher and classmates answering questions and giving opinions on class topics.

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• Collaboration

Participating in online culture can often lead to collaborating with others. When we pull together our collective skills and knowledge, we are often able to do more than if we were to try to do something on our own. Using our shared and different experiences allow us to gain perspective and learn more about other people and how they work, while potentially educating others as well. Collaboration is made ever easier by technology. Many content creators on YouTube often collaborate with their friends or even other content creators that they had never met before the collaboration. In this case, collaboration allows for the potential for new subscribers and meeting new people along with potentially creating new connections and relationships. Collaborations offline could be as simple as participating in a group project for class. Collaborating, whether online or offline, is an important skill to learn.

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• Network Awareness

In the past, our networks were limited to the people around us. For the most part, we only had access to those similar to ourselves. The internet has broken down many of those previous network barriers. We now have the ability to transcend barriers of language, space, and even time. This opens us up to have much more diverse and expansive networks. The internet allows us to interact with and connect with people both alike and different from ourselves and the people we are around in our day to day lives. This concept is almost so ingrained into us at this point that it can be hard to understand. Simply put we are able to create larger networks with wider reaches via the internet. For example, when we send out a Tweet, someone from the other side of the world has the ability to see it and even have the website translate it into another language so they can understand and interact with it. Another example of this is LinkedIn. On LinkedIn, we are able to create a profile that essentially acts like an online resume that can be seen by many more potential job recruiters than we ever could have before. It also allows us to connect with others who may be able to attest to our skills or write recommendations for us such as past professors, employers, and/or classmates, which could possibly help us to create even larger networks later on.

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• Critical Consumption

Dr. Rheingold says that critical consumption is essentially the "ability to sift" through relevant and irrelevant information (Dr. Rheingold in the video above). This is probably the hardest of the five categories and it takes a lot of practice. All five of the literacy categories connect to and feed off of one another. Because of that, to "sift" through all of the information and content that we need to effectively, we must employ the other four literacies. Deciding what is relevant and what isn't depends on the situation. Being able to tell the difference between a credible source and a not-so-credible one is very important, especially when it comes to academic research, but also when we read news articles to stay informed. We want to make sure that we have the ability to decipher between what is a real, factual source and what may possibly be something meant to lead us in the wrong direction.

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