Eva Aladro-Vico

PhD. Eva Aladro-Vico, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (España)

Professor Aladro works in the Department of Journalism and New Media, at the Faculty of Information Sciences in Complutense University, Madrid (Spain). She is specialised in Information and Communication Theories. Coordinator of the Academic Journal CIC Cuadernos de Información y Comunicación, she is director of the consolidated research group “Communicative Structures and Interactions between the Different Levels of Interpersonal Communication” (Group Number 940820) at Complutense University. Award of Excellence in Teaching 2015-2016, 2017-2020 and 2020-2023 at Complutense University of Madrid, she has written a variety of books such as Handbook on Academic Freedom (2023), The Ten Laws of Information Theory (2015), Communication and Feed Back (1998), or The Determining Information (2009). She has published dozens of articles in top-indexed academic journals in Spanish and some contributions have been also published in English. Main Researcher in multiple research projects and innovative educational projects, she has been Visiting Scholar at the Universities of Melbourne, Frankfurt, Thessaloniki, Athens, Crete, Sardegna and Monterrey, in Mexico. As a polyglot writer and translator (8 tongues) she has achieved a huge amount of Spanish translations of reference authors in the area of Communication and Information. She is also a cultural activist, acting as the leader of the Platform to Save the Albeniz Theatre in Madrid, or the Platform for the Re-structuring of Complutense University. She is a writer of a blog and of poetry, with six books of poems edited until now. She publishes articles about Ecology and Information Theory in the Spanish digital newspapers eldiario.es, CTXT and ElSalto and divulgative essays at The Conversation. She was Main Researcher in UE Erasmus + K Project “Artivism” from 2016 to 2018.

Media literacy, Disinformation and Higher Education. A critical triangle connected by social media.

Abstact

This lecture will discuss some of the recent phenomena that connect disinformation with young users of social networks, focusing on possible lines of action to fight against the present disinformation phenomena: Polarization, sectarianism, social isolation or emotional distress that characterize partially the youth population in Higher Education systems.

We will describe the processes and mechanisms of disinformation suffered from youngsters in social networks: echo chambers, group-thinking with hyper-leadership, informational closures due to information overload, infoxication, aberrant decoding and cognitive dissonances, Overton windows and emotionalization processes. We will indicate what the effects of these processes imply at a communicative, educational, and socio-political level.

We will show the possibilities of Media Literacy countering these phenomena through the context of Higher Education: the capacity of classrooms to counteract the misinformation effects through face-to-face communication in presential activities, participatory strategies and flipped learning, through creative innovations connected with social movements, and access to meaningful communication through crystallising experiences in the classroom.

Finally, we will propose ways to integrate Social Media universe into classroom literacy strategies through guided classroom discussion structures, participatory and integrative strategies with digital language, proposing a general frame of uses of creativity to fight against disinformation and unhealthy communication.