Media Literacy, Scientific Literacy, and Science Videos on the Internet

Abstract

Although video is not a new format for communicating about science, video-sharing platforms have democratized the process. Individuals who wish to share information or ideas about science can use these platforms to connect with potentially large and diverse audiences. This has benefits and drawbacks. The benefits are related to increased access to scientific information and greater public engagement with science. The drawbacks are related to communication within echo chambers and the spread of misinformation. This mini-review presents these benefits and drawbacks with respect to the science video landscape and media and scientific literacies. It concludes with a brief synthesis of ideas and recommendations for future research avenues.

Influence of rapid COVID-19 vaccine development on vaccine hesitancy

“…In the same vein, there is a need to bolster media literacy in public [35] , which can be an effective tool to reduce selective exposure to media messages [55] . This is pertinent in the context of social media, where viewpoints both consistent and inconsistent with scientific consensus are unfiltered by the gatekeepers of traditional media [45] . It is true the media are an important source of risk-related information the public can use to make decisions about advocated risk response actions.…”

Audiovisual Science Communication on TV and YouTube. How Recipients Understand and Evaluate Science Videos

“…Although there is not a clear-cut distinction in any case, the videos in the corpus have to exhibit a kind of news value and journalistic features, whereas educational videos normally contain already well-known information. In contrast to ad-hoc typologies based on a bottom-up study of a special number of videos (for example: de Lara et al, 2017; García-Avilés and de Lara, 2020) or overall features of communication (Rosenthal, 2020), our approach is rooted in a theory of multimodal discourse (Bateman and Schmidt, 2012;Bateman, 2014;Bucher, 2017). YouTube science videos are seen as well-organized multimodal arrangements consisting of a variety of visual and verbal modes like stills, moving images, text, spoken language, sounds, animations, graphics, etc.…”

“…The most common approaches are case studies investigating, for example, participatory aspects of YouTube (Erviti and León, 2016;Dubovi and Tabak, 2020), the role of YouTube videos for internal science communication (Kousha et al, 2012), the coverage of controversial issues like climate change or vaccines (Shapiro and Park, 2015;Allgaier, 2016Allgaier, , 2019Donzelli et al, 2018;Erviti et al, 2020), the role of user comments for the scientific discourse of lay-persons (Heydari et al, 2019;Christ, 2020;Dubovi and Tabak, 2020), the motivations for watching science videos on YouTube (Rosenthal, 2018) or the differences between user-generated content and professionally generated content (de Lara et al, 2017). Besides these case studies, there are already some publications which put the single results in a nutshell by drawing some general conclusions for example on the benefits and drawback of this new media landscape (Rosenthal, 2020), on the danger of an erosion of the epistemic order of society (Neuberger and Jarren, 2017) or they discuss the impact of online videos on the transformation of science communication and the image of science and scientists (Bourk and León, 2020, p. 117-123). Particularly the publication of the international research project "Videonline" (León and Bourk, 2020) summarizes research results from different countries, giving an overview of investigations on several relevant aspects of online science videos including a classification of online science videos (Davis and León, 2020; García-Avilés and de Lara, 2020) or a discussion of criteria for the epistemic qualities of online videos (Francés and Peris, 2020).…”

“…Given these delimitations of science communication via social media, the fundamental question arises as to whether this newly created communication space represents a democratic transformation of science communication from a distribution model to a participation model (see Gibbons et al, 1994) or whether we are dealing with an erosion of a traditional epistemic order (Schäfer et al, 2020). Despite a growing number of publications on online science videos (see inter alia Allgaier, 2016;Erviti and Stengler, 2016;Geipel, 2018;León and Bourk, 2020;Rosenthal, 2020), there is hardly any research on the reception processes triggered by the audiovisual modality of these videos.…”

COVID-19 and Scientific Literacy

“…This situation is aggravated by the fact that many media consumers and users of digital networks are very uncritical and tend to believe in information that confirms their existing beliefs (Rothmund, Farkhari, Azevedo, & Ziemer, 2020;Rosenthal, 2020;Amit Aharon et al, 2020;Peters & Besley, 2020;Rosenthal, 2020;Abdulai et al, 2021;. However, Anwar et al (2020) maintain that "The role of media and public health communications must be understood and explored further as they will be an essential tool for combating COVID-19 and future outbreaks" (p. 1).…”