THE EFFECT OF DIGITAL LITERACY IMPROVEMENT AS STUDENT’S

SURVIVAL SKILL TOWARDS FAKE NEWS/HOAX

I Gede Heri Sanjaya

herisanjaya14@gmail.com

Ganesha University of Education

ABSTRACT : This article are aimed to find out the effect of the improvement of student’s
digital literacy in term of making the student be more skeptics to any informations in the
internet. The information that the writer mean is such as news, article, photo, etc in order to
make them having the ability to determine which is a true or false information. The data was
collected by using library research method. The resul of the studyt shows that the
improvement of student’s digital literacy skill affect set of cognitives in student’s brain in
order to be able to process, eliminate and also re-create or re-mix the information to produce
something that never exist before.

Keywords : Digital Literacy, Hoax, Fake News, Development

INTRODUCTION
The user of digital tools are increasing year by year. For example : According to a
report from ‘We Are Social’ and ‘Hootsuite’ in 2018, The number of mobile phone users are
5.135 Billion users which is up 4 percent year-on year. The internet user in 2018 is up 7
percent year-on-year in the total of 4.021 billion users. According to APJJ (2016) (as cited in
Kurnia & Astuti, 2017) In the age point of view, the dominant internet users in Indonesia is
people with age within 35-44 years old which is (29.2) percent, folowed by poeple with age
range 25-34 years old (24.4%), 10-24 years old (18.4%), 45-54 years old (18%) and above 55
years old (10%). With this big number of user, it will be needed to develop their digital
literacy as the fake news spread widely on the internet. Until today, there are no effective
method to burn off the fake news out of the internet. But there is one way to overcome this
probem. In this case, the one that should be concerned is how well young generation’s digital
literacy is developed. Why it is important to have their digital literacy developed? It is for the
reason that digital literacy is all about processing information. As Belshaw, (2012) stated that
there are eight essential element of digital literacy and one of them is cognitive. Cognitive in
this case have an big role in deciding which is a fake news and real news as in digital literacy,
we are not only obtain an information but also decide wether the information is false or true.
There are also a statement by Visser (2012) said that digital literacy is simlply the ability in
order to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, and communicate
information, requiring both cognitive and technical skill. this is related to the phenomena of
false news. Hoax/fake news sometimes can also be dangerous. Acording to the data of
Mastels’ survey, 40.60% of the respondent are agree that false news are made to drive public
opinion and it could end up with a split among others. Knowing the fact that most of the false
news are spread on Social media (92.40%) chatting application (62.80%) and website
(34.90%) it is very important to us to develop students’ digital literacy as a young generation.
because a good digital literacy skill will make student be more sceptics towards the news that
they are get from the internet.

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

Literacy
Literacy has been defined in a lot of ways. (UNESCO, 2006) According to its hystory,
since 19th century in english language, ‘literate’ means the ability to read and write (well
educated /learned) the broader meaning is ‘being knowledgeable in a particular field(s)’ .
There are also different meaning of literacy from other language. For example, in french the
word literacy refers to the word ‘alphabétisme’ and ‘literacy learning’ refers to
‘alphabétisation’. According to OECD, 2007 (as cited in UNESCO, 2006) alphabétisme
means “broader learning and the mastery of information to work within the knowlegde
societies” from this view can be seen that literacy has a big role in world globalization. As an
addition, McMillan, (1996) defines literacy as “part, or all, of a broad spectrum of related
abilities”, and Kern (2000) Defines literacy as “the use of socially-, and historically-, and
culturally situated practices of creating and interpreting meaning through texts”

Digital Literacy
One type of literacy is digital literacy. There are lots of definitions of digital literacy
in past decades (as cited in Kirchoff, 2017) for example Gainer (2012), defines digital literacy
broadly as “integral to the organization, support, and maintenance of democratic movements”
(p. 15), and Eshet-Alkalai (2004) described it as “survival skill in the digital era” (p. 102). In
additions, Visser (2012) defined digital literacy as “the ability in order to use information and
communication technologies to find, evaluate, and communicate information, requiring both
cognitive and technical skills” (para. 2). And beginning to note the layers and complexity
involved, Ng (2012) offered, “the multiplicity of literacy associated with the use of digital
technologies” (p. 1006). From those definitions it can be concluded that digital literacy is a
essential skill in the digital era to use information and communication to process and
communicate an information. Like the name say, digital reality is focused of student’s skill in
proccessing digital information using digital tools. McKee-Waddell, 2015, (as cited in
Kirchoff, 2017) stated that the adantages of digital tools is having the ability to engage
students motivation, stimulate their critical thinking and lifelong learning, and also be able to
open a new opportunity to publish student texts.
Potter, 2014:14 (as cited in Kurnia & Astuti, 2017) stated that it is important to
‘develop media literacy as a set of perspective that we actively use to expose ourselves to the
media and interpret the meaning of the messages we encounter. It is multidimentional, and a
continuum’. The concept of digital literacy are the first seenin Gilsters’ book which also
entitled Digital literacy. Gilster simply defines it as ‘literacy in the digital age’ basically it is
more than an ability in order to operate a digital device or an ability to use digital software. It
is the ability to understand and to use the information obtained from many digital sources
(Lankshear & Knobel, 2008: 18) According to (Eshet-Alkalai, 2004) it’s also includes
complex cognitive and technical skills such as a large variety of motor, sociological, and
emonitonal skills, so that the students can functions effectively in digital environtments. In
digital literacy, students are expected to have the ability to “read” informations in user
interfaces from digital/graphical displays and reproduce it into meaningful new materials
from the original one, evaluate the quality and also validity of a source and information, and
having a mature awareness and understanding about cyberspace’s rules.
According to Belshaw, (2012) there are 8 (eight) essential elements of digital literacy,
which are (1) Cultural (2) Cognitive (3) Constructive (4) Communicatvie (5) Confident (6)
Creative (7) Critical (8) Civic. The first elements is cultural. According to (Belshaw, 2012b)
cultural element of digital literacy is “a need to understand the various digital contexts which
an individual may experience” for the example, students need to understand that VLE or
learning platform is different semiotic domain to games or social networking. Basically this
element of digital literacy is about finding cerain ways to give people a new point of view to
see the world. The second element is cognitive which is also essential. Johnson, 2008 (as
cited in Belshaw, 2012) explains that cognitive elements of digital literature is not only about
the ability to use certain digital technology but rather it is the ability to use a set of cognitive
(p.42) here, Jhonson emphasize that the use of cognitive skill is more important that the skill
to operate digital technology in light of the fact that the main function of digital literacy is
knowing how to process the information that obtained from digital tools. The third of the
essential element is the Constructive element. Constructive reffers to the ability to create or
remixing content to create something original or something that never exist before. This is
similar to DigEuLit project’s definitions of literacy (as cited in Belshaw, 2012) the theory
stated that digital literacy is the awareness, attitude and ability of individuals to appropriately
use digital tools...in order to enable constructive social action (p.135-6). The next element is
Communicative. in digital literacy are also involving communications . it is obvious that
communications should be inolved in any form of literacy. (Belshaw, 2012) This element is
slightly similar to Constructive and Cultural element. It is about understanding how
communications media work in digital networked invirontments. The next essential element
of digital literacy is Confident. What Belshaw means by ‘confidence’ here, is having the
ability to understand that digital environtment can be more forgiving. OECD, 2001. (as cited
in Belshaw, 2012) stated that ‘modern society is increasingly looking to [people] who can
confidently solve problem and manage their own learning throughout their lies,the very
qualities which ICT supremely is able to promote.’ Next is the sixth essential element of
digital literacy is which is creative. According to Sethy, (2009) the most valuable ant
prominent act in humans mind is creativity. What Belshaw means by creative here, is that
‘doing new things in new way. For example instead of using blackboard or whiteboard which
are motionless the other solution is to use Microsoft Power Point as the technological way to
make the presentation more attractive. Sethy, (2009) defines creativity as an act that found in
product form wich resulted from processes. The seventh one which is essential in digital
literacy is Critical and Civic which are particularly closely-linked together. Here, Belshaw
allied the critical element to the communicative element. In a like manner, Civic element is
linked with Confident element in the light of fact that it is all about participation, social
justice and civic responsibility.

Fake News
Dronic Hoand, 2006 (As cited in Rosenzweig, 2017) Stated that fake news is probably
the most destructive form of post-truth. He defines fake news as a ‘made up stuff masterfully
manipulated to look like credible journal alistic reports that are easily spread online to large
audiences willing to believe the fictions and spread the word’ (para. 2) PolitiFact point out
that fake news is ‘the boldest sign of a post-truth society’. Rosenzweig, (2017) stated that
there are three elements that diffetentiate fake news from real news which are Fabrication
(The fake news tend to be conjured than reported.) deception (rather than to inform
something, fake news are tend to persuade something) and virality. (the main point of fake
news is getting escalation or to be viral in the internet with superficial information rather than
deep and moderate information) According to a survey done by Mastel (Masyarakat
Telematika Indonesia, 2017) the most recieved type of false news in the internet are text
which are 62.10% followed by picture (37.50%) and video which are 0.40% the most spread
are happened throughsocial media (92.40%) which are most of the user is the teenager.beside
of that, 62.80% of false news spreaded on chat application such as whatsapp, blackberry
messenger, etc. 34.90% are on websites. There are a lot types of false information which are
recieved by people including politics, racism, health, foods, sad news, jokes, natural disaster,
and traffic.

RESEARCH METHOD
The method that used in this research is library method. It is a research which is done
by collecting related literature for example like book or journal from previous research that
are related to the topic that are going to be disscussed in this article. This method is not
directly intended to a research but through documents. The documents can be a private letter,
a report, a special note and also other documents wich contains needed information according
to the topic. The data will be collected by doing an identification from books, journal, paper,
web (internet) or any other suitable information to find out some variable in form of a
transcript, books, newspaper. For that, these steps are done : (1) Collecting data from books,
documents, or website (2) Analyzing those data in order to make a conclusions. In this step,
the data will be analyzed by doing descriptive analisis. Descriptive analysis is an action to
analyze data which the end result is in the form of words and numbers.

RESULT AND DISCUSSION

As stated by Dronic Hoand, 2006 (As cited in Rosenzweig, 2017) fake news is an
information wich are manipulated in certain way to look like a credible information.
hoax/fake news can be formed into many things such as video, text, picture, etc. (Mastel,
2017) this means that hoax or fake news are made in certain technique in order to make fake
information sounds real, looks credible, and believable. This means that there are certain
amount of layer of deceptions that people needs to go through by grasping, analyzing,
evaluating and et cetera. That is why determining wheter an information is fake or not,
student’s needs to functioning their cognitive more intensively and correctly so that they can
evaluate the information themself. This will be explained further in the next pharagraph
 Related to above’s information, According to Visser (2012) digital literacy is simlply
the ability in order to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, and
communicate information, requiring both cognitive and technical skill. From here, can be
understood that; there are a cycle of scepticism which are happened in the mind of student
whom having a good digital literacy skill, which means that not all of the information
obtained is considered to be true and believable.
First step of the cycle is the student will find (or found) an information. In this case
they obtain an information from the internet or digital device in detail and will be proccesed
first before the information are decided to be believable or not. The next process is evaluating.
Student’s with a high level of digital literacy tend to be more selective towards the variety of
informations in digital form for this case. In evaluating, they tend to grasp the detail of the
founded information and match it with their logic, and also their knowlegde. Once there is a
part of that information that doesn’t match with their logic of science and knowlegde, it will
not be concidered as believable and also will be evaluated.
If the information are concidered as believable, it will go to the next proccess which
are ‘communicate’. This is tied to the first elements of belshaw’s eight essential elements of
digital literacy theory (2012), The first elements is cultural. According to (Belshaw, 2012)
cultural element of digital literacy is “a need to understand the various digital contexts which
an individual may experience” means that when they are try to be more understand to the
information to be able to communicate or share the information that they get. From that, it
can be learned that the student will get a huge and continiouing advantages when their
literacy skill in terms of technology is improved to the appropriate level. Digital literacy can
be an invicible shield for many students. This will protect them from being manipulated by a
certain group for political purposes or just another negative purposes which most of the time
are very dangerous if not dealt correctly.

CONCLUSION
From the disscussion above, the conclutions that ca be drawn is : it is important to
take digital literacy seriously. We are living in a digitalized era where most of people uses
smatrphones, computer, smartwatch or any other digital devices. Why developing digital
literacy among the student as a young generation is so important? From the data that shown
above, We know that nowadays the number of internet and digital tool user is constantly
increasing so do the number of false news which are spread widely over the internet. Fake
news are dangerous. Data from MASTEL shows that most of the fake news are spread mostly
over social media. The platform where most of the user is a teenanger or a young generations.
For some cases it could be used by some ocnum to drive public opinion according to the
survey that MASTEL did. That is the reason why digital literacy should be developed during
young age. There are already some theories that prove some media such as comic and digital
storytelling can help in developing digital literacy for example Chan & Chiu, (2017)
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