Who Cares How Information Feels? A Call for Digital Influence Literacy

This article introduces digital influence literacy, arguing for its inclusion in programs devoted to lessening the spread of health misinformation online. Influence literacy can be roughly understood as the capacity to recognise, analyse, navigate, and emotionally regulate feeling as it is generated, circulated and monetized over digital platforms, alternately experienced by social media users as mood, movement, sentiment, or environmental vibe. Combining insights from communications, social and behavioural psychology, digital design, and trauma studies, influence literacy can be used to better understand events like #FilmYourHospital, where a single rumour on Twitter wound up feeding into a global conspiracy. It can also be used to better appreciate how trends, memes, challenges, and calls for justice move from online spaces to offline ones. After arguing that traditional media literacy’s assumptions about the value of emotional communication require substantial re-thinking in the age of platforms, this article lays the groundwork for topics that might be included in discussions on influence, moving from psycho-social theories of feeling to techno-social operations like emotion recognition, sentiment mining, persuasive computing and emotion optimization on platforms. To assist those looking to add influence literacy to classrooms, a teaching framework called the Influence Ecosphere is offered, with discussion topics suggested to help supplement media literacy’s traditional focus on rights with a feeling-based ethics of care.