I use the internet a fair amount for practical reasons like schoolwork, research, and communicating with friends and family, but the place I spend the most time is usually social media like Reddit and Twitter. In most contexts, online and off, I generally default to believing information unless I have a specific reason to do otherwise—which is not a useful approach on the internet.
From Robin Cangie’s article “How to spot fake news, propaganda and deceptive social media posts,” I learned—as the title would suggest—some specific details to look for in a social media post or other internet source to identify it as potentially manipulative. “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet” is a common refrain, but also an abstract one. Cangie’s article provides practical, concrete steps to take in my everyday life to follow through on advice to think critically about information. The article is relevant today because the algorithmic design of social media creates ideological bubbles, losing what Phillips and Milner in You Are Here called “a shared sense of reality” (4). Outrage is a big part of that—and it’s one of the things Cangie highlights in the article. Being more aware of propaganda techniques like provoking angry, polarizing reactions lets you notice when information is trying to manipulate you, which can give you more control over how you react to that information. For example, I sometimes see a post or comment where someone is one-sidedly outraged about an issue and, without thinking, I have what Cangie calls “a visceral, knee-jerk reaction,” only to scroll further down and see different perspectives adding nuance and/or pointing out logical holes in the original argument. I read the Washington Post article “The very different media universes in which Americans live, visualized” by national columnist Philip Bump, which was an analysis of data on what news sources Americans use and find trustworthy, separated by age, vaccination status, and party affiliation. The most striking difference was in political party affiliation (and vaccination status, which followed a similar but less extreme pattern). The only news source over 50% of Republicans saw as trustworthy was Fox News, while eight separate sources, including CNN and PBS, were seen as trustworthy by over 50% of Democrats. Independents trusted the same eight sources as Democrats, but only around 30% of them. A detail I found particularly interesting was in the conclusion, where Bump pointed out how this data suggests Fox News gets high ratings “not because Americans trust it (it trails most other national outlets); it’s because Republicans often rely on it to the exclusion of other sources.” This has many implications, one being that information bubbles are profitable. Making yourself the only trusted source constructs a dedicated audience who are less likely to go to your competitors—ie, other information sources, offering other perspectives—which means there is a systemic incentive to create and maintain information bubbles. That is, obviously, quite bad for the information ecosystem. It also shows that while the internet has exacerbated the issue, the root causes exist at a deeper, structural level in society.
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1. I would like future generations to experience a less polarized world. More specifically, I would not want what Martin Luther King Jr. in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” called “a negative peace which is the absence of tension” where racism and other negative forces are present but unacknowledged, but rather “a positive peace which is the presence of justice” where the underlying sources of tension have been rooted out.
2a. The authors of You Are Here—Whitney Phillips, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University, and Ryan M. Milner, Associate Professor and Department Chair of Communication at the College of Charleston—use the metaphor of swamp thing, and the environment more broadly, to discuss the state of information on the internet. They liken dis-, mis-, and malinformation to pollution that is damaging the digital environment and its denizens. I see relevance to my own experience in how social media encourages snap judgements and instant emotional reactions in response to information, which can be difficult to push through to reach a more cautious, well-reasoned understanding. 2b. The last paragraph offers readers an invitation to engage in deep reflection about their “responsibilities to [their] neighbors and [their] neighbors’ neighbors” (12) and their place as a single participant in the context of a collective digital environment . The excerpt we read of this book was unsettling—it left me with a sort of thalassophobia for the internet, the feeling I get when I look at deep ocean. I’ve never been afraid to swim in the ocean, whether floating on the surface or going under the waves. However, it’s easy to forget that the ocean is vast beyond any one person’s ability to comprehend, full of things that move and live and might want to eat me, and could kill me and any other person if we get careless and/or unlucky—not out of malevolence, but simply because that’s its nature. It’s intimidating. It’s also an opportunity. Understanding this type of systemic-level issue is what I want to do in this class (and beyond), so I’m answering the invitation by putting on scuba equipment and getting ready to dive. 4. I read “From memes to race war: How extremists use popular culture to lure recruits” in The Washington Post by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Marc Fisher. I selected this piece because I was interested in how memes, which are mostly thought of as frivolous entertainment, were connected to such a serious subject. This article suggests memes are contributing to the rise of extremist movements, but they are not widely studied in scholarly contexts. This gap intrigues me. I believe this article is relevant now because it describes one of the ways the political spectrum is fracturing into what You Are Here describes as “ideological silos” (3), where people withdraw into their own communities and lose a shared understanding of reality. Understanding how that happens is a good step toward returning to a more stable, healthy information ecosystem. 1. One of my favorite memes recently has been “If I had a nickel for every time _____, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.” My roommate and I say it a lot to each other, and I enjoy it because it points out the happy little weirdness of coincidences. I also like trying to come up with incredibly specific scenarios—for example, having a CS teacher from UC Berkeley in a class where the main coding language is Java who rides a funny bike.
3a. Limor Shifman is a professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as the Vice Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences. She wrote the non-fiction book Memes in Digital Culture to “[bridge] the yawning gap between (skeptic) academic and (enthusiastic) popular discourse about memes” (4) because they are deeply relevant to new methods of communication and information sharing in the digital age. This book likely includes illustrations, mostly examples of memes, to give readers a specific reference if they are unfamiliar with the subjects being discussed and because, in many cases, the visual element is an important component of memes that would be lost by describing them in text only. The “Future Directions” section is likely intended to provide a starting point for future research inquiries; of the four sections, memes and political change is the most intriguing to me as an avenue for potential research since it seems particularly relevant in light of how conspiracy theories and radicalizing hate speech has impacted the current political climate. Memes matter because they are not just reflections of a culture, they are culture. They carry ideas that spread from person to person, and they do so in a way unique to the modern internet era. 3b. I read the introduction of On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space by Soraya Murray, an associate professor of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz. This section of the book is important to me because it clearly establishes video games as a form of culture worthy of meaningful academic study. Murray sets out to investigate “how particular types of culture (in this case, games as a complex form of visual culture) create and uphold the value systems and hierarchies of one constituency, often at the expense of another” (46), which is a fascinatingly multifaceted phenomenon. I find the willingness—and indeed enthusiasm—to engage with video games as sites of complex, culturally significant meaning to be significant considering that popular perception of video games, particularly from academia and other historically elitist institutions, is generally somewhere between mindless fun and mindless depictions of violence. Video games are a fascinating medium still in its early stages, and, as Murray argues, they are an important site of culture in the digital age. I have done three main research essays as part of the AP Seminar and Research classes I took in high school. How I approached them depended on the type of research; my first two essays were focused on synthesizing existing research, so most of the work was gathering and interpreting sources. My third essay was about a research project I designed and executed, so I still dealt with a considerable amount of sources but focused much more on my own research and analysis. I definitely recognized congruence between my research process for those papers and Fister’s description of how students perform surface-level research to cope with an overwhelming amount of potential sources. Especially when dealing with large workloads, skimming a paper or only reading the abstract is an appealing short-term solution when my main concern is finishing the assignment. Of course, the trade-off is losing a deeper understanding of both the source and the overall topic. When I have the chance, being able to thoroughly dig into a source is far more satisfying and usually leaves me feeling more confident about the subject. To borrow Burke’s metaphor, it’s like sitting down for a nice dinner while I listen to the academic conversation instead of running into the room, scribbling down the first few sentences I hear, and running back out.
I am planning to use OneNote to keep track of notes this semester because the hierarchical structure fits well with how I like to take notes and the flexible space will hopefully keep my notes from becoming too disorganized when I inevitably wander down some interesting tangents. The excerpt from neuropsychiatrist Dilip V. Jeste's book Wiser discusses some common cognitive biases - "thinking patterns based on observations and generalizations that may lead to memory errors, inaccurate judgements, and faulty logic" (147). Considering information is a skill that can be improved, so understanding the ways we think - especially the ways we might think badly - helps us become more responsible participants in an information ecosystem saturated with misinformation. "How to deal with regret and forgive yourself for making imperfect decisions" by Jelena Kecmanovic, founding director of the Arlington/DC Behavior Therapy Institute and adjunct professor of psychology at Georgetown University, is an article about regret: how it hurts us and how we can deal with it. As Kecmanovic points out, the pandemic's conditions have been well-suited to creating regret, so it's more vital than ever to find self-compassionate strategies to maintain our mental and emotional health.
I definitely recognized some familiar patterns in Jeste's description of hoarding tendencies on page 147. I keep a lot of items because there's a chance I'll use them someday, even if that chance is miniscule, and I have an aversion to replacing worn-out but technically functional items because I hate the thought of wasting even a slight bit of potential use. When evaluating information, this manifests as a tendency to have a certain amount of emotional attachment to my ideas. This is unhelpful because it means my first impulse is to defend my ideas instead of open-mindedly considering new information, especially when that information challenges what I already believe, but being aware of this bias can help me catch myself and make an active effort to consider new perspectives. Reporter and author Miles Klee argues in “Ever After” that the pursuit of technology to extend or eternally preserve life is a form of “manifest destiny” that is fundamentally entwined with capitalism, and he critiques that pursuit on the same basis he critiques capitalism—namely, that “it doesn’t obey any rational limits” (Klee). This piece is relevant because it draws a line between our technology and the socioeconomic systems that inevitably shape and are shaped by it. It can be difficult to notice these systems when they are so dominant in our lives, so explicitly pointing out their influence like Klee does can help us find and critically examine structures we assumed were just “the way things are.”
“Speak, Memory” by Casey Newton is about the chatbot Eugenia Kuyda built to mimic her friend Roman Mazurenko after he died unexpectedly, and more broadly about the thorny moral, ethical, and metaphysical questions raised by advancing AI technology and the massive digital troves of data people leave behind. Newton takes a more nuanced stance on technological progress than Klee, but agrees with him that these are fundamentally human issues; they will certainly be impacted by technology, but as a friend of Mazurenko said in an interview, “‘The question wasn’t about the technical possibility. It was: how it it going to feel emotionally?’” (Newton). I think of “research” as a multi-step, cyclical process that begins with defining a question and aims to reach an answer supported by reasoning and credible evidence—although the process doesn’t necessarily end there. I have taken several research classes in both high school and college.
I read “Dismantling the Evaluation Framework” by Alaina C. Bull, Margy MacMillan and Alison Head, members of the Project Information Literacy, in the In the Library with the Lead Pipe journal because it seemed like it would discuss strategies for dealing with misinformation, an extremely relevant skill for both academic contexts—this class especially—and everyday life. The authors argue for a shift from currently taught methods for evaluating information (ie CRAAP, SIFT), where information is considered in isolation and is seen as passive, to the new approach of what they call “proactive evaluation,” where “the user considers the source while evaluating information contextually, through its relationships to other sources and to the user” (Bull et al., 2021) and sees information as having agency to act on the user. I learned that best practices for research are much more in flux than I realized. The internet—particularly the algorithms that underlie social media and other advertising-based platforms, which “track and shape content that users see on their screens” (Bull et al., 2021)—have fundamentally changed the way people interact with information, and adapting to this new paradigm is a complex, ongoing challenge. |
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