Literacy in the age of social media

In September, I spoke at the 2018 National Literacy Awards for local government units, organized by DepEd’s Literacy Coordinating Council in Baguio City.

Literacy is an important matter in a developing country; a key indicator of the level of progress our country has attained in a fast-changing world. Thus, this has always been an advocacy for us government communicators and seeing local governments and the education sector continuously investing in it raises my hopes for the next generations who will lead the country.

Based on the Education for All Global Monitoring Report of UNESCO in 2006, being “literate” is defined as being able to read and write text. Adding the ability to understand a simple message in any language or dialect, the concept of “basic literacy” comes in. If a person has these abilities with the further addition of numeracy skills, then one has attained a significantly higher level of literacy called “functional literacy.”

In the case of the Philippines, we definitely have shown great progress. Per Literacy Statistics, Functional Literacy, Education and Mass Media Survey (FLEMMS) of 2013, 96.5 percent of Filipinos were literate, an improvement from 95.6 percent in 2008. But as we may all know, we are in an era of rapid change. The age of Web 2.0 continues to thrive and Filipinos have embraced it wholeheartedly. We know that we have been once called the social media capital of the world, with every study on the matter ranking the Philippines as among the top countries spending the most hours on social media platforms.

As these advancements widen their reach on our soil, the dangers they entail also spread like wildfire, and their worst target is the youth. According to the DQ Institute, an average Filipino child now spends 34 hours in front of digital screens every week, two hours higher than the global average of 32 hours. While this happens, 73 percent of our children are exposed to cyber-bullying, inappropriate active searches, gaming addiction, meeting strangers online, online sexual content, inappropriate adult images and inappropriate sexual talking. Filipino children have become increasingly vulnerable online and such problem requires us to know more about what we’re dealing with. There is a need to spread a new kind of literacy.

Coincidentally, the Philippine Information Agency (PIA) has been tapped by the Government of Japan through the Japan-ASEAN Integration Fund ( JAIF) this year to develop and implement a media and information literacy (MIL) campaign that is focused on cyberwellness for the youth.

Further, the ASEAN Ministers Responsible for Information (AMRI) had adopted a framework to combat one other threat to communication

“Verifying what we share and reading carefully before we comment will be easy for everyone if we all keep in mind that our Facebook accounts are not different personas—they reflect who we are, online and offline.”

HAROLD E. CLAVITE, PIA DirectorGeneral