This was another session from day 2 of the ECIL conference that Pam attended: Gretel Juhansoo from the Baltic Engagement Centre for Combating Information Disorders, University of Tartu, Estonia spoke about an intervention called "TikTok House" to advance Media and information literacy in the general public. In 2022, Gretel was a second-year bachelor's student, and as a final assessment, Gretel had to design and carry out a media literacy intervention. Tartu has an annual Christmas village consisting of glass houses containing food, animals, and exhibitions. So Gretel and her team booked one of the houses for their media literacy intervention. They had to define a goal: this was driven by their own experiences, and they knew that they hadn't had any media literacy education at high school; there was a gap in school education. At the time, there was a lot of discussion about who owned TikTok, he safety of TikTok, and how algorithms drive TikTok use. So they wanted to talk about TikTok and the TikTok algorithm. It was important to have a physical space for this intervention, because online campaigns tend to reach fewer people without financial amplification because of platforms' profit models.
Their goal was to make the glass house mirror the colour scheme and "look" of TikTok. It contained pieces of information to inform people about the TikTok algorithm and how to influence one's own algorithm. A large mirror was included to encourage selfie posing, which then exposed people to the information in the intervention. The information was provided in a very brief format, so that it was easily digestible. They also had some "fun facts" on the wall that expressed guidance from the government, but they tried not to just scare people away from TikTok. In the summer of 2023 they created a second TikTok house for an Estonian festival.
They linked in with a government initiative; if people made a video of themselves in the TikTok house and shared it online, they could be entered into a prize draw. The Christmas village had 80,000 visitors, and over 70 videos were submitted under the hashtag. They had 1.5 million views of all of these videos.
Lessons learned: need to involve your audience, as they will know how to get the attention of the target audience. The target for this was young people: 53% of TikTok users in Estonia are 15-24 year olds, so the intervention needs to be oriented to them. The key to the successful physical intervention was the design - it needed to "scream TikTok", all the paper had to be laminated to protect from the weather and to be robust so that people could touch it. It is necessary to think about how to measure the impact of the intervention. Gretel got an A grade for the project and now works with the professor- a very impressive outcome!
No comments:
Post a Comment