Social Media Information Literacy – What Does It Mean and How Can We Measure It?

Part 6: Social Media and Analytics; International audience; In times of increasing importance of social media services, we have to rethink information literacy. One of the key assumptions of existing information literacy constructs is “static” information, meaning that information does not change. But compared to traditional and mostly unidirectional media services such as printed newspapers or television, this does not reflect the reality of a social media context. Here, information can be characterized as “dynamic”, meaning that, for example, every user can easily modify information before sharing it (again). A measurement construct covering these novel aspects of information literacy is missing, so far. Thus, the main objective of this paper is to develop a rigor and updated construct to measure and quantify social media information literacy of an individual social media user. We selected a comprehensive construct development framework that guided us through the investigation, and which includes qualitative as well as quantitative analyses. The outcome is a theoretically grounded and empirically derived social media information literacy (SMIL) construct. The paper ends with a discussion of potential future research directions.