COM Research Seminar: Can Media Literacy Save Us?
09 Apr 2026 (Thu)
On 23 March 2026, Professor Cuihua (Cindy) Shen from the University of California, Davis, delivered a seminar entitled “
Can Media Literacy Save Us?” in the Department of Media and Communication (COM) at City University of Hong Kong.
In the seminar, Professor Shen challenged the prevailing “silver bullet” narrative surrounding media literacy as the ultimate defense against multimodal and synthetic misinformation. She argued that as generative AI continues to mature, the technical sophistication of deception is rapidly outpacing traditional educational frameworks. Drawing on a complex spectrum of empirical findings from multiple studies, she examined both the efficacy and inherent limitations of media literacy interventions. Professor Shen further questioned whether media literacy places a disproportionate burden on individual cognition in addressing what is fundamentally a systemic crisis. The seminar concluded with a discussion of future research directions and policy recommendations aimed at preserving the integrity of the shared information ecosystem.
Around 50 faculty members and doctoral students from the Department of Media and Communication attended the session and engaged in a lively and intellectually stimulating discussion. Professor Shen responded to questions from the audience with insightful reflections drawn from her extensive research experience and the evolutionary trajectory of her sequential research projects, sparking highly thought-provoking academic conversations.
Cuihua (Cindy) Shen is a professor of communication at the University of California, Davis and the co-founder of the Computational and Multimodal Communication (CMMC) Lab. She is a Fellow of the International Communication Association and the past chair of the Computational Methods Division of ICA. Her research focuses broadly on computational social science and multimodal (mis)information in AI-mediated environments.
(From left) COM Head and Chair Professor Yi-Hui Christine Huang, Prof Cuihua (Cindy) Shen and COM Chair Professor Jonathan Zhu
