Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens – article by Anastasia Kozyreva, Sam Wineburg, Stephan Lewandowsky and Ralph Hertwig in Current Directions in Psychological Science, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoring—choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities. We review three types of cognitive strategies for implementing critical ignoring: self-nudging, in which one ignores temptations by removing them from one’s digital environments; lateral reading, in which one vets information by leaving the source and verifying its credibility elsewhere online; and the do-not-feed-the-trolls heuristic, which advises one to not reward malicious actors with attention. We argue that these strategies implementing critical ignoring should be part of school curricula on digital information literacy. Teaching the competence of critical ignoring requires a paradigm shift in educators’ thinking, from a sole focus on the power and promise of paying close attention to an additional emphasis on the power of ignoring. Encouraging students and other online users to embrace critical ignoring can empower them to shield themselves from the excesses, traps, and information disorders of today’s attention economy.”
Young, Black and Right-Wing: you’ll never believe who their heroes are – TV review by Leila Latif in The Guardian. “There is a quote attributed to journalism professor Jonathan Foster …: ‘If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out of the ******* window and find out which is true.’ We now live in a world of unprecedented misinformation, which puts programmes such as this in a more tricky position. It’s not enough to simply share a plethora of views with detached voyeurism and frame them all as equally valid; a TV documentary cannot hold that it is raining and dry at the same time.”
‘Who remembers proper binmen?’ The nostalgia memes that help explain Britain today – article by Dan Hancox in The Guardian. “At 7.59pm on Christmas Day 2019, a meme was posted to a Facebook page called Memory Lane UK…. In no fewer than three different fonts, and adorned with two union jack flags and a Facebook logo, it read as follows: ‘Memory lane UK WHO REMEMBERS proper binmen’… The proper binmen memes are a potent distillation of a sentiment common to contemporary British politics and culture, where politicians have all but given up offering a positive vision of the future, and where the idea of what constitutes progress is bitterly contested.… Binmenism, as this worldview could be called, is distinct from the common type of nostalgia we are all prone to as we get older – that things were ‘better in my day’. In fact, the memory lane memes and comment threads make clear that in terms of physical comfort, convenience, domestic labour, work, consumer goods and leisure choice, things used to be worse. But that is not the endpoint of the philosophy. If Binmenism had a motto to stitch on to its itchy old Boy Scout uniform, it would be: things were worse, therefore they were better. And once you see this, you can’t stop seeing it everywhere.”
‘It’s complicated, but you can’t shy away from it’: everything you wanted to know about pronouns (but were afraid to ask) – article by Claire Armistead in The Guardian. “As a writer, reader and feminist who is also the parent of a transgender child, I come at this subject from several directions. Like many journalists, I’ve struggled to wrestle the singular pronouns ‘they/them’ into a sentence. As a mother, I sometimes feel like an explorer who has wandered off the edge of the map. The leg from ‘her’ to ‘him’ lost me some longstanding feminist friends, who have found the whole subject too hard to broach face to face, but was otherwise relatively straightforward. My ‘she’ was now ‘he’: those hard, binary pronouns signalled an altered reality and gave me the chance to avoid the subject if I didn’t want to explain it to everyone I met at the bus stop who wasn’t familiar with my family setup. The next leg, to ‘they/them’, was more exposing, and I still sometimes find myself floundering.”
Why is my baby crying? I used to Google for hours, then discovered the real answer – article by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett in The Guardian. “Having a baby who can’t tell you what’s going on with it means having to solve a mystery every single day. Say the baby is whingeing. First, you run through the usual checklist. Is the baby hungry? Is his nappy full? Is he sleepy? Does he have wind? Once you’ve ascertained which one it is, you go back to the start, because it’s probably something else by now…. It’s when you bring the whole internet into it that it becomes problematic, as I learned during one of my late-night Google sessions when the baby went through a phase of waking 45 minutes after being put down at bedtime… Not a single one of the reasons listed was wind. So, even though each time I picked the baby up he would do [an] almighty burp … I did not trust my instincts…. There is simply too much information out there. Too many people with agendas and opinions. Why would a thread of Mumsnet users know the reason for your baby’s rash?… The internet is also killing parental instinct. Millennials are so used to being able to instantly receive the answer to any minuscule bit of trivia that when we can’t solve a mystery such as why our baby is crying, it drives us insane.”
The age of social media is ending – article by Ian Bogost in The Atlantic, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “As the original name suggested, social networking involved connecting, not publishing. By connecting your personal network of trusted contacts ... you could surface a larger network of trusted contacts.... The whole idea of social networks was networking: building or deepening relationships, mostly with people you knew. How and why that deepening happened was largely left to the users to decide. That changed when social networking became social media around 2009, ... [offering] platforms through which people could publish content as widely as possible, well beyond their networks of immediate contacts. Social media turned you, me, and everyone into broadcasters (if aspirational ones). ... The ensuing disaster was multipart. For one, social-media operators discovered that the more emotionally charged the content, the better it spread across its users’ networks. Polarizing, offensive, or just plain fraudulent information was optimized for distribution. By the time the platforms realized and the public revolted, it was too late to turn off these feedback loops. [For another,] social media showed that everyone has the potential to reach a massive audience at low cost and high gain—and that potential gave many people the impression that they deserve such an audience.... When network connections become activated for any reason or no reason, then every connection seems worthy of traversing. That was a terrible idea. As I’ve written before on this subject, people just aren’t meant to talk to one another this much. ... If change is possible, carrying it out will be difficult, because we have adapted our lives to conform to social media’s pleasures and torments. It’s seemingly as hard to give up on social media as it was to give up smoking en masse, like Americans did in the 20th century. Quitting that habit took decades of regulatory intervention, public-relations campaigning, social shaming, and aesthetic shifts.... Something may yet survive the fire that would burn it down: social networks, the services’ overlooked, molten core. It was never a terrible idea, at least, to use computers to connect to one another on occasion, for justified reasons, and in moderation .... The problem came from doing so all the time, as a lifestyle, an aspiration, an obsession. The offer was always too good to be true, but it’s taken us two decades to realize the Faustian nature of the bargain. Someday, eventually, perhaps its web will unwind. But not soon, and not easily.”
