Information Literacy In Real Life (IL IRL)

Evaluating Images/Memes (Visual Literacy)

Today's world is increasingly visual. More and more often, images are used as a way to convey information. Human can process images significantly faster than we can process words. This is why memes can be an effective, and fast, way to convey information. Memes are designed to grab your attention.

They aim to be shocking, emotional, or funny. By evoking this gut emotional response from us, they bypass our logical brain, making us respond without thinking, usually in outrage, disbelief, or hilarity. We are driven to share our feelings with others, which is how things go viral and information (both bad and good) spreads. This means it takes special effort to train your brain to to pause before you share a meme, take a moment to step back from the issue and logically assess both the information in the meme and how the images or words might be designed to stir up your emotions.

Often, memes do not include dates or citations for the information included in them, so it is important when you find a meme, to think about where the information in the meme came from, and whether it is accurate. 

Let's take a look at this example:

When you look at this meme, you might immediately have a reaction based on the statistics that are provided. However, look closer at the statistics. There is no date to show when this information was found and there is no citation to back up where the creator found the information. You would need to do some additional research to determine whether or not these statistics are accurate. You might try Googling some of these statistics to figure out if they are accurate.

You might also notice that final line of the meme reads "Number of Leeches Grant Had Put on His Body In Order To Make $500: Too Many." and the note "To learn, laugh, and cry about student loan debt, check out Total Forgiveness." Googling "Total Forgiveness" will bring you to a webseries about two people who will complete ridiculous tasks in order to pay off their student loan debt. This means that the purpose of this image is to promote the webseries and not to share information about the student loan debt crisis. Every time this meme gets shared, it is acting as free promotion for their webseries. 

Remember, just like you would need to evaluate any source that you find, you would need to evaluate any information you find in an image. You can learn more about evaluating sources by checking out the SCC library's evaluating sources guide.