Conference & Journal Paper
Practicing Information Sensibility: How Gen Z Engages with Online Information
Amelia Hassoun, Ian Beacock, Sunny Consolvo, Beth Goldberg, Patrick Gage Kelley, Daniel M. Russell
Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '23), 662:1–662:17, 2023
April 2023
CHI Honorable Mention Award.
Abstract
Assessing the trustworthiness of information online is complicated. Literacy-based paradigms are both widely used to help and widely critiqued. We conducted a study with 35 Gen Zers from across the U.S. to understand how they assess information online. We found that they tended to encounter—rather than search for—information, and that those encounters were shaped more by social motivations than by truth-seeking queries. For them, information processing is fundamentally a social practice. Gen Zers interpreted online information together, as aspirational members of social groups. Our participants sought information sensibility: a socially-informed awareness of the value of information encountered online. We outline key challenges they faced and practices they used to make sense of information. Our findings suggest that like their information sensibility practices, solutions and strategies to address misinformation should be embedded in social contexts online.
- information literacy
- information sensibility
- teens
- youth
- gen z
- search
- social media
- misinformation
- disinformation
- rumors
Cite this paper
@inproceedings{hassoun2023practicing,
title = {Practicing Information Sensibility: How Gen Z Engages with Online Information},
author = {Hassoun, Amelia and Beacock, Ian and Consolvo, Sunny and Goldberg, Beth and Kelley, Patrick Gage and Russell, Daniel M.},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.1145/3544548.3581328},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581328},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '23), 662:1–662:17, 2023},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
}