Op-Ed: Critical Minds for Critical Times

In this digitalized world, everything is accessible. Learning how to analyse it is more important now than ever.

On April 19^th just last week, the widely famed Jakarta’s Christian, ethnically Chinese incumbent governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama finally concedes defeat to his opponents, former education minister Anies Baswedan. A figures from a recent research by SMRC shows that most people votes for Basuki-Djarot because of their proven works, while the majority of Anies Baswedan-Sandiaga Uno’s voters choose them because of religious reasons. Here is the exact numbers: 41% for Basuki’s perceived “proven works” and 32.4% for religious sameness with Anies. Now, this does not make any sense. People of Jakarta were supported Basuki because of his merit and yet they won’t vote for him? They even choose a (supposedly) liberal ex-minister based on religious similarities? Well, for me, this can only be explained as a phenomenon caused by low rate of media literacy. One research by UNESCO underline Indonesia’s poor average reading habit, with only 1 person read per every 1,000, which makes the ratio 0.0001. It puts Indonesia in the second bottom position within the global literacy ranking. In stark contrast with literacy rates, Indonesia’s internet users continue to grow, with today’s population numbering more than 50 million people – that’s more than 20% of Indonesian. This is very apparent among my generation: those who were born in the 90s or better known as milennials. I am used to see a lot of hoaxes roaming around my timelines, rapidly multiplying. From what I gather, a lot friends my age like to share posts without any slight fact-checking. Some even don’t read the article at all – they just catch the appealing title, which is also problematic because a lot of medias nowadays like to ‘clickbait’, and then share it. This shows how bad our youth’s analytical competence towards the media.

The milennials are a zealous social media users. They cannot be separated from their gadgets and any attempt to do so is futile. Young people nowadays spent on average 6 hours 19 minutes on their smartphone, according to a Nielsen research. They talk a lot on social media about everything from school stuff, shopping, infotainment, and of course, electoral politics. The recent Gubernatorial Election 2017 in Jakarta make this point very apparent. My timeline on Facebook and LINE, a popular all-in-one chatting platform, were full of politically-charged posts made by young people who supports each of their favorite candidates. I was surprised to see that even this friend of mine who is usually apolitical participates in an online debates – even make some posts herself. Those illustrations above are, for me, perfect justification for the urgency to implement media literacy studies in formal educational institutions such as school and university.

Technological advancement is an inevitability. Interconnectivity, like it or not, will always pull us together into this whirlwind of global societies. This is the information age, where knowledge – digital data, that is – is more valued now more than ever. Powered by social media usage, data gathering can be done better and faster with Facebook and the likes rather than national census. The gathered data will then be exchanged to those who needed it the most: marketers, pollsters, politicians. Wondering why you always get advertisings that always seems to know you better than yourself? How about partisan google search query? Worry not, it’s the work of the magical wonder of coding alghorithms! With our taste analyzed and our privacy breached, it’s up to us to what extent that our minds can be controlled.

Current measures in place to face the globalized world are far from sufficient. There are not a single subject on media literacy in today’s schooling process, aside from sporadic seminars held by the ministry of education once in a while. Not only that our curriculum ill-equipped, inadequate infrastructure is also became a problem. We can see for ourselves how bad the libraries in public schools are – not that there are many library outside schools either. It does not come as a surprise for me when I found out how rock-bottom our literacy rates are.

A firm stance from the administrators is what needed to combat illiteracy. Political participation and internet usage are both an interconnected inevitability in this day and age. Thus, a thorough implementation of media literacy in formal educational institutions are becoming more and more crucial. If we want our younger generations be able to think for themselves and be critical towards any publicity from the media, then we have to give them the tools they require. Media literacy education can help them build their citizenship skills needed to participate in politics and specifically, contributes to the public debate.