Third International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

Social media literacy is regarded as a disruptive break from traditional media literacy studies and defined as citizens’ willingness to involve in social media activities and their abilities to critically analyze, evaluate, and create information on social media platforms. Compared with previous studies on social media literacy, this paper stresses its democratic potential by introducing “‘citizen’s participation in public affairs” into the evaluation system. This study argues that social media literacy has five building blocks: (1) social media knowledge (2) basic social media skill (3) social media criticalness (4) social media motivation and (5) citizens’ participation in public affairs on the social media platform. By operationalizing the five building blocks, an online survey was carried out among 208 sina weibo users to test the relationship among these five elements. Results show that China’s sina weibo users reach the acceptable qualified level in terms of social media literacy and they are especially familiar with social media jargon. Male users are more likely to participate in political issue discussion on social media platforms. The over-entertainment tendency for the use of sina weibo is also considered.