Assessing the Role of Ethical Digital Media Literacy in the Post Covid-19 Digital Era

The digital era has brought about disruptions which have revolutionized communication. Digitization, the Internet and its inherent innovations have drastically transformed the dissemination of information making it cheaper, faster and easily accessible. However, inadequate content regulation on the Internet has birthed the practice of citizen journalism in the 21st century society, where consumers can easily create and share content online without proper verification. Such content could sometimes be misleading, a trend that has introduced the concept of “fake news” which became more prevalent during the recent Covid-19 pandemic, and has continued to pose a problem to journalism practices in the post-covid era. Using the positivist theoretical perspective, the Refracted Publics and Networked Public theories, this study adopts quantitative methods to assess the ethical digital media literacy of Nigerian consumers. The findings provide insights for improving the journalism pedagogy, whilst ensuring that the core ethical groundings of journalism are not compromised.

数字时代带来了诸多颠覆性变革，彻底重塑了传播形态。数字化进程、互联网及其内生创新极大地革新了信息传播模式，令信息传播成本降低、速度提升且获取更为便捷。然而，互联网内容监管的缺失催生了21世纪的公民新闻实践——普通用户可在未经适当核验的情况下，轻松在线创作并分享内容。此类内容有时会存在误导性，这一趋势催生了“假新闻”的概念；该概念在近期新冠疫情期间愈发泛滥，并在后新冠时代仍持续对新闻业实践构成严峻挑战。本研究依托实证主义理论视角、折射公众理论（Refracted Publics）与网络化公众理论（Networked Public），采用定量研究方法评估尼日利亚媒体受众的伦理数字媒体素养。研究结果可为优化新闻教育教学提供实践参考，同时确保新闻业的核心伦理根基不被动摇。