Bridging digital divides

Earlier in November, I attended UNESCO’s Regional Meeting on “Bridging digital divides and empowering youth and educators with digital competencies in the Asia-Pacific”, jointly organised by UNESCO’s Communication and Information Unit and Education Unit in Bangkok. Participants from Australia, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Philippines, Bhutan, Nepal and Thailand, and from a variety of professional backgrounds including journalists, educators, entrepreneurs, government representatives and even venture capitalists, discussed how to better digital citizenship and media literacy education in the region. 

I presented our approach to researching and monitoring mis- and disinformation, focusing on pre-emptive and community-based interventions, in a panel session on youth engagement in media literacy education. Other panellists were young people involved in various media literacy projects in the region, including Wikimedia Thailand and Philippines information literacy non-profit YABONG. 

The meeting highlighted the urgent need to equip teachers and educators in the Southeast Asia region with skills to bridge existing digital skills gaps and train students to become critical media and information consumers. We discussed the primary challenges of achieving digital literacy across the region, focusing on issues around discrimination and misleading content. The key challenges are firstly, the language and geographical barriers that mean resources are not evenly distributed, and secondly, that our ability to fact check or otherwise address the spread of misinformation can be highly dependent on the dominant influence in the specific social context. Lastly, we concluded that there are conflicting tensions between the need for highly targeted, specific skills training that take into account social, political and legal contexts, and the lack of resources in the media and digital literacy education sector. 

Stevie Zhang, CMT researcher