5.2.1. Objective Social Media Competences
Knowledge
Before going into the different aspects of social media skills, we discuss ‘knowledge’ as a foundation needed to execute these skills. Turning information, through cognitive abilities, into knowledge is a fundamental part of social media competences and consequently also of social media literacy (Potter, 2011). Knowledge makes it possible to evaluate media contents, different types and sources of media messages. As a result one can decide on the accuracy and usefulness of the messages, and making informed decisions. Knowledge is a ‘cognitive ability’ being an internal process of the mind (Bloom, Engelhardt, Furst, Hill, & Krathwohl, 1956), that includes reasoning, assessing, concluding, analysing and evaluating the available information. This way, it forms the basis of people’s media skills as the tools to retrieve knowledge from the memory and translate into behaviour.