Safely Navigating the Net with Dr. Carol Quade

Show Notes

In an era dominated by digital media, cultivating media literacy skills is essential to navigate the digital landscape safely and confidently.

Joining us to examine the importance or media literacy, the dangers of internet falsehoods, and the unique challenges that older adults face as they navigate web is Dr. Carol Quade, an adjunct professor at Northern Virginia Community College’s Annandale Campus, volunteer at the Lifetime Learning Institute of Northern Virginia, and expert in communications and media studies.

Episode Transcript

Lindsay Clarke:

In a world where technology evolves at breakneck speed, staying connected means navigating a matrix of digital platforms. For generations raised online, the web can be second nature, but for many older adults, the digital realm can feel like uncharted territory. With a constantly shifting landscape, it’s easy to fall for internet falsehoods.

Today, we’re delving into why media literacy matters. Joining us to help bridge the digital divide is Dr. Carol Quade, an adjunct professor at Northern Virginia Community College’s Annandale Campus, volunteer at the Lifetime Learning Institute of Northern Virginia, and expert in communications and media studies. Thank you, Carol, for coming onto the show.

Carol Quade:
No problem. Thanks for having me.

Lindsay Clarke:

It’s our pleasure. Let’s dive right in. Our first question is pretty big, but what is digital media literacy, and why is it so critical?

Carol Quade:

Absolutely. I think there are so many different definitions of media literacy and digital literacy out there, but the one that makes the most sense to me is this idea that digital media literacy includes all of the skills and knowledge that we need in order to live and learn and work in this society, where communication and access to information is increasingly done through digital technologies like internet platforms, social media, or digital devices.

I think we know what literacy looks like in terms of reading and writing, and how important those skills are, but nowadays, students and seniors alike also need to be media literate in order to navigate the onslaught of messages that we are receiving in this heavily media-saturated environment.

For seniors particularly, I think the landscape looks a little bit different. Seniors were not born into this technology, so there’s this learning curve, that I have seen some have embraced, some have tolerated, and some have flat out ignored. With global interconnectivity, older adults are expected to use online services just to do daily tasks nowadays, education, health, finance, and communication. They’re having to do this while at the same time, being vulnerable to sometimes manipulation and exploitation, targeted at their age groups. Media literacy is really important, I think.

Lindsay Clarke:

Absolutely. Talking about being targets, there’s a ton of misinformation out there. Why is it that older adults are particularly vulnerable to that online misinformation?

Carol Quade:

Again, so many different ways that we can talk about this, but I’ll highlight three reasons. One is that studies do show that older adults are more likely to share misinformation online compared to younger demographics. This could be for a number of reasons, like they just have a higher level of trust in their social networks. They might be prone to confirmation bias, and we all are, right?

Confirmation bias is that idea that we interpret new information as a confirmation of what we already believe. There is also a tendency for seniors to do that, and a desire to connect with others. I think as seniors, as they retire and their social networks become smaller, there’s that greater desire to connect with other people. We also have declining cognitive abilities like memory, processing speed, those could contribute to a difficulty in evaluating information.

Finally, there are emotional factors that can play a role in a senior’s ability to evaluate online sources. We’re talking about emotions like fear, anxiety, and sometimes even hope that can make individuals more susceptible to believing unreliable information. Older adults might be just particularly more vulnerable to emotionally charged content, especially regarding things like health and finance.

Lindsay Clarke:

Sure. We’re all vulnerable, right? We’re all being targeted and we’re all vulnerable. It sounds like older adults are sharing at higher rates, so the likelihood that they’re sharing misinformation just goes up. I know there’s also some disinformation that is typically targeting older adults. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Carol Quade:

Sure. Let’s start with what we’re all probably going to be facing this year, and that is political misinformation during a big election year. That’s going to include things like falsehoods about political figures, biased information or misinformation designed to manipulate our opinions and playing on our existing political beliefs.

There’s also health-related misinformation that targets typical concerns that seniors may on a fixed income might face, like false anti-aging products, how many times have I fallen for that, right? Miracle cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s, unproven supplements, and things like trying to sell medical alert devices that end up signing people up for expensive monthly services without fully disclosing that idea.

There’s also social security or pension scams, that’s false information about changes to social security benefits or pension plans, that again, exploit fears related to financial stability in retirement, and financial scams, fake investment opportunities get rich quick schemes.

Again, I think we’re all vulnerable to those kinds of things, but seniors in particular, because they are on that fixed income. Then interestingly, I came across in my research, the idea of nostalgic marketing that is targeted to seniors, which leads inevitably to nostalgic scams or hoaxes. These are just ideas like scams that introduce seniors to products that conjure fond memories of their life experiences.

Think about things like commemorative coins or products that focus on memorabilia related to childhood experiences, or military service, and they use pressure tactics so that they end up paying a lot more than they might be worth. I think that may be just the tip of the iceberg, but you can see that out there.

Lindsay Clarke:

It sounds like it. As we all know, we click on one thing that interests us, and suddenly we have 10 versions of that. It’s easy to be bombarded. To that point, social media is playing a huge role in misinformation. We do know that platforms like X and TikTok and Facebook have become really valuable resources for news, for information, for educational content. We at the Alliance for Aging research use a lot of those platforms for educational content, but that also means there’s a flip side, right? It’s an incubator for disinformation.

Can you share some tips and tricks to help us sift through the noise of a lot of those platforms?

Carol Quade:

Sure. I’ll start broadly here by saying that education, education awareness, and I think conversations like the one we’re having right now, which is why I’m so excited that we’re taking this time to talk about this topic, this is how we can empower seniors to better understand what they are seeing and give them more agency in how they are choosing to spend their digital time and their money online.

I think it’s important to remember also that social media is a tool, just like any other medium. If we’re watching TV and we don’t like what we’re seeing on TV, we change the channel, or we turn it off entirely.

Social media is also a choice. Again, just being aware and being able to think critically about what we’re seeing, I think could be a really big first step. More specifically, there are courses and free resources online that seniors can go to that specifically teach them how to spot a scam, or use social media safely.

I just walked into a bank the other day, and they had all these pamphlets around the front desk and near the ATM machine that were like, “how to protect yourself from financial scams.” I think that there are resources all over the place, and we need to take advantage of those resources. They’re just out there to protect us.

Things like AARP, for example, has a lot of videos on their website, free videos that can keep you up to date on digital skills. Connectsafely.org is a website that offers a variety of resources on how to stay safe online. They have articles, infographics, and a lot of webinars that you can just listen to. Also, I think we can also, all of us can familiarize ourselves with critical thinking questions that … I will borrow from Mike Caulfield, who is one of the leading experts on media literacy, and he and his colleagues have introduced what’s known as SIFT.

Playing on that idea of sifting through all the noise that’s out there. SIFT is an acronym that stands for Stop, Investigate, Find and Trace. At each one of these points, we can stop and ask particular questions, critical thinking questions, and really think about what we’re looking at. I’ll just run through them very briefly here.

For example, and we’re not going to do this with every single media message that we see online, it’s just the ones that trigger us, right? It’s the thing that makes you go, is that real or is that fake news? Or something that, again, strikes a chord in you that you think, oh, I’ve immediately got to forward this on to my family or something like that. It’s those moments that Mike Caulfield recommends, just pause.

Just stop first and ask yourself, who is the source? Who is the person sending this message out? Do I know who that source is? Do I trust them? Do I know what their reputation is? If yes, then continue on, go forth, but if not, maybe we need to go to the next step, which is, I, investigate. That is the whole idea behind laterally researching something and trying to verify what we’re looking at and being exposed to by investigating the source.

You can do this by simply opening up another tab in browser and checking what other people are saying about this source. Really, what we’re doing here is trying to see if this person or if this organization is really who they claim to be. Yes, we can. If you’re still dubious, then go to F, which is Find. Find better sources, go to trusted sources. If it’s a big enough news story, people will be talking about it. Other people will be talking about it, or covering that news source.

In fact, there are entire fact-checking websites that are dedicated to making sure that we understand what is fake and what is real out there. Those are things like Snopes or PolitiFact.com, and you can just go to those websites again if you’re unsure.

Lindsay Clarke:

Right.

Carol Quade:

Right? Then finally, for ourselves, he recommends that we go to T, which is Trace. Trace the claim that’s being made to the original source. So much of what we are seeing on social media platforms like Instagram, X or Facebook are people forwarding or retweeting and sharing online, someone else’s research or something that they saw online. If possible, trace it back to the original source and go to that source, read it for yourself, and ask yourself, is this being taken out of context? Is this aligning with my own values, before, again, sharing that on.

Really, all of these kinds of critical thinking questions are just there to arm seniors with the knowledge so that they can confidently move through their digital day, knowing that they are in control of what they read and what they believe in the end.

Lindsay Clarke:

I think that’s fantastic information, and I want to underscore that there is that alarm bell that has to go off. You can verify everything, but that’s not probably realistic. You need a trigger. To your point of there are trainings, we’ve done trainings at the Alliance for Aging Research as employees on how to spot a scam, how to spot an email that is clickbait or that’s phishing, and you need it. It’s not something that’s necessarily going to come naturally.

I love that there’s those trainings, and thank you for sharing where to find them. Then, once those alarm bells go off, what do we do with that? Yeah, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve Googled something only to find that someone else is talking about how it’s a scam. People will be talking about it being real or false.

Obviously, social media has so much to offer. It’s a powerful virtual hub, and we saw that especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, so much great information, and it’s allowing us to connect, but is it possible to overconsume?

Carol Quade:

I think I am probably, yes, the perfect example of overconsuming. I just was looking, listening to another podcast that was saying that the average American spends more than 10 hours a day on media, receiving media messages. You can imagine, due to COVID-19, when we were all socially isolating ourselves, we were probably spending at least 10 hours a day online.

Definitely, recent research by Stanford and the Pew Research Center, just to name two studies, show that senior citizens in particular may turn to both traditional media sources and digital media sources now tremendously, because of factors like loneliness, grief, and social isolation. Again, I think all of us can now empathize with that after the pandemic. I think we were all feeling a little bit of that anxiety as well.

Social media is a form of entertainment, and it’s a way to pass the time after retirement, and sometimes, even out of familiarity and habit. For example, when I was growing up, we traditionally had the TV on in the background all the time, or the radio was playing all the time. Seniors might just shift their consumption habits from traditional media to digital media.

We can see that being another reason why it’s possible to overconsume. Frankly, it provides some cognitive stimulation. It’s not all bad. We’re not always just passively watching things, we’re also engaging. It’s cognitive stimulation and it’s a wonderful way for us to connect with people. I think for those reasons, absolutely, it’s really easy to overconsume media these days.

Lindsay Clarke:

Sure. There’s so much educational content, there’s so many good aspects. To your point about SIFT, as we see AI advancing, it’s getting harder and harder to sift, to verify the photo, the video, the voices, the speech. It’s really getting so much harder. What risk does this pose to older adults who might not be familiar? I’m not even familiar with how quickly AI is changing everything. How is this a particular risk for older adults?

Carol Quade:

Absolutely. We have recently seen, just in this year, AI-generated robocalls. I think that happened in February, that were sent out to … I don’t even think they still know who sent those out, but these robocalls reached out into … I think it was the New England area, and the phone calls were AI-generated, and sounded eerily like President Biden’s voice, talking about a political malarkey, and you should not go and

vote. Not he, but this AI-generated voice was telling people not to go and vote.

You can imagine, it sounds so real. I think the risks with AI-generated information, when it’s coming from disreputable or dishonest sources is that it can really, really manipulate you to think, to feel and believe, and sometimes even act on things that feel so real. You’re seeing it with your own eyes, how can this not be real?

I am just as easily duped as anyone. Like you said, I will also Google things all the time and say, is this real? Only because I study this, and I talk about it all the time, but it’s really tough. Keeping up with media literacy, I think is, and talking about media literacy with friends and family can, I think, really be helpful in priming the critical thinking skills that we need to be more vigilant with AI.

Mike Caulfield again recommends that, if you discover that a source is promoting AI-generated content in a way that feels dishonest to you, or doesn’t really align with your values of what is true and authentic, you have also the power to block that source from your social media feed. Again, I feel like rather than being scared of AI and what harm it can do, hopefully, we can leverage AI in a positive way, and also say, look, I am in control of what I’m seeing, or maybe not what I’m seeing, but how I react to that, and what I can believe.

Again, if you come across something that tricks you or tries to trick you, just block them, get them out of your purview.

Lindsay Clarke:

You can take another step. You can report them. When you get that block option, it asks why, you can report them. It seems to me that a risk of being a healthy skeptic, of assuming anything that seems off might be off, is that you don’t know what to trust anymore. I think that there is a role for us when we see something that makes us uncomfortable, it raises those red flags, it really seems to be false, we can not just curate what we see, but have a role in maybe having everybody see less of that. Because I worry about this, you can’t trust anything anymore, attitude.

Carol Quade:

Absolutely. I think it also speaks to this ever-evolving feeling of what it means to be part of a democracy, where there is protected speech. Maybe we’re not going to be able to totally weed out every message that comes to us. It’s protected, and yet we have a voice as well. Let’s, like you said, report … The FCC outlawed those AI-generated robocalls, because people said something about it, because they reported it, and now they’re not going to be able to use those AI-generated voice impersonations during an election year, close to an election.

That was a direct result of people reporting it. Excellent point there.

Lindsay Clarke:

Before we get to our final two questions that we ask of everyone, I want to do one more substantive question and be on a high note, because media literacy can be really liberating. I know you’ve talked a little bit about it already, but can you touch on some of the pros of learning how to navigate digital media as an older adult?

Carol Quade:

Absolutely. I have seen the benefits of learning digital literacy firsthand, as I have been helping my own parents navigate a cross-country move. They had to leave everything that was really familiar to them, and practiced, and change their healthcare, their banking, all of these things. A lot of it was done online.

Being able to do a lot of that online and teaching them how to do that, I think has been a real benefit to them. Healthcare, for example, can be done through telehealth services now, that save time and allow patients and providers the ability to meet virtually, or they can even have their questions answered through chats, and think about how much time that can save, and anxiety. It can quickly alleviate stress and anxiety about health issues, if they can do that more directly online.

I’m going to give a shout-out to the group that I volunteer for, the Lifetime Learning Institute of Northern Virginia. They offer a lot of Zoom classes, as I’m sure you do as well, and these online classes and social networks can provide amazing connections and a sense of belonging when older adults become a little less mobile, and maybe start to feel a little isolated at home. Our group offers a lot of Zoom classes that are in real-time, and synchronous, so that they can socialize and interact with other people without that added burden of having to drive somewhere and find a physical location.

Sometimes, that is enough to keep people from going to classes and learning things. I think that is an excellent option, and I’ve heard that many people are preferring this Zoom option now, which is great. Of course, navigating digital media can keep us connected with our family and friends across space and time now. We don’t have to be geographically together. We can use, again, things like, I think we used to call it Skype and now it’s Google Meets or Zoom, in order to talk with our family members and get together with friends.

It can also be asynchronous and sending texts and messages. I think being able to send those quickly, saying “I love you” to your grandchildren, while that is not as satisfying as having a face-to-face conversation in front of a roaring fire, I think it’s still an example of what we in communication call relational maintenance. I know that having to adjust to … I’m recently an empty nester, and of course, I miss having my children in the house, but I love that we continue to touch base through chats and things like that, and texts every day. I think that is another way that seniors can feel connected to people.

Lindsay Clarke:

Yeah. I think that’s so true, no matter your age, I always talk about my daughter’s best friend who moved years ago to Colorado, and they’re closer than ever, because they can text and do FaceTime. To have those connections to the people that we just can’t see every day is so incredibly valuable, no matter your age.

Carol Quade:

Absolutely.

Lindsay Clarke:

Oh, I love it. There’s so much to learn, and obviously we need to be cautious. We need to have those red flags. We need to sift through the information, but there’s so much value, so much to learn.

Carol Quade:

Absolutely. I’ll also say that I learn new things every single day. I also think that media literacy is going to be a wonderful, if not already, a wonderful opportunity for intergenerational communication. We can learn so much from younger people who are … They were born into social media, they were born into this technology, and I think it is going to be a really great opportunity for us to show respect to them, for teaching us, and teaching them patience as they’re telling us things, but my students teach me every day about new scams that are out there, and how to identify what’s real and what’s not.

I really do, I learn things every single day, and I’m grateful for that.

Speaker 1:
I love that. I’m going to turn to that point, to our final two questions that we like to ask of all of our

guests. First was, when you were a kid, what did you imagine growing older would be like?

Carol Quade:

It’s so funny, because I have not thought about that in so long. It was a great question, and it reminded me, I have this memory of a kid’s book. It was a children’s book, an illustrated one in the library that I used to see, and I think it was an illustrated take on Jenny Joseph’s poem, When I Grow Old, I Shall Wear Purple. It had all these wonderful illustrations of these older women wearing purple dresses and dressing fancy.

I think from that book, I thought that growing older meant that you didn’t have to care what other people thought of you, and you could just do whatever you want. Yeah, I thought it was going to be really exciting to be able to do that.

Lindsay Clarke:
Yeah. You’re not wearing purple for those that, I can’t see you.

Carol Quade:
I don’t own a single purple thing, but I am on it.

Lindsay Clarke:

I love it. Now, what do you look forward to? That’s what you thought it would be, what do you look forward to the most now about growing older?

Carol Quade:

Oh boy, absolutely. I am really looking forward to this idea of reclaiming my time. I’m doing a little bit of that now. I feel like I spent my 30s wanting to say no to things, but not feeling like I could. I spent my 40s starting to learn how to say no. Now in my 50s, I’m like, oh yeah, saying no has become so much easier, but what I didn’t realize is that when you say no to things, it means you can have time to say yes to things.

I’m really looking forward to being able to choose more of who I want to spend time with, what I want to spend time doing because I want to, and not because I have to anymore. There’s so many books out there that I haven’t read yet, and so many wonderful conversations like this one that I haven’t had yet, and I’m really looking forward to that.

Lindsay Clarke:
We’re so grateful that you came on and had this conversation with us.

Carol Quade:

Thank you.

Lindsay Clarke:

Thank you for joining us. This is Growing Old. For everyone who’s listening and watching, if you’re interested in more of our podcasts, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts, as well as on the Alliance for Aging Research YouTube channel.

Thank you, Carol.

Carol Quade:
Thank you so much. It was great.