Ms Ashley Chadamoyo Makombe:

On the first question about media, there is space for going round the back of mainstream media. I believe the future of journalism lives on YouTube and TikTok currently. I want to be an arts and culture journalist. I get the majority of my information about music and things that are happening within Irish culture not from radio or the newspapers but from the Internet, from word of mouth and other people sharing what they think is really cool. I think, like anything in the world, traditional media is always threatened by the new thing that comes in. First we had newspapers but then radio came in and people freaked out, and then television came in and people freaked out. This is not a new thing we are in. It is just that we are experiencing it for the first time so people are a bit spooked. There is absolutely a place to empower young people to create platforms for themselves. I guess the worry traditional publications have is about losing the market because people are going somewhere else. Maybe it is that thing of traditional publications, which have a long-standing relationship with their audience, engaging with these new publications that are coming in and giving them a platform to create a space within their own platforms, so they are not being lost completely but young people are being allowed to take the wheel a bit.

The media literacy question is a fascinating one. I have been thinking about this a lot. I do not think it is something that is completely isolated to just young people or just Ireland. I think the world is having this issue with media literacy. There is a space on the leaving certificate course, specifically with English, to have a discussion about what the content being consumed means. I did the leaving certificate in 2019 so maybe things have changed since then. We did the comparative part and were looking at the three texts, looking at the common themes and what they mean. Even within poetry there is the space for teachers to be, or for the curriculum to be changed ever so slightly so it is, more welcoming of media literacy. For example, where someone is watching a superhero movie, what is it telling them about war? Is it pro-war or anti-war? A lot of what we consume is entertainment, and while I do not think there is anything wrong with taking in everything as entertainment, teaching young people that not everything they take in is just entertainment, that there is always an underlying meaning to everything they consume on the Internet, in theatre or on television, and to have a baseline awareness of it, means when they go out into the world or they go on the Internet and they read something that is incorrect, they are quicker in being able to find out it is incorrect rather than falling for this propaganda that is going on. We saw a lot of that happening during Covid especially, where people found spaces of disinformation on the Internet. Getting secondary school students, specifically in English, to do a bit of media literacy would help a lot.