Having read Maha Bali’s post about fake news, I am beginning to think that her analysis is a good start, but it doesn’t go far enough. The real problem for me is how to perform an initial filter on information that is coming in. Doing this might include some of Maha’s suggestions, but a quick look at how much even her short post requires of the reader might indicate something else is the matter in Internetland.
Here is a link to a site where I gathered all the links from the original post. You, too, can be amazed at how much abides in a humble post and its links.
I used a Chrome browser extension called (LinkGrabber) to gather all of the ‘relevant’ links on her post and then I spidered out one level from the hyperlinks on her original post to gather even more links from those secondary level posts. LinkGrabber vacuums up every link on a page so I exercised my own judgement in deciding which ones to keep and which to leave. I got rid of at least as many or more than I kept.
Here is the page that has all of the links I kept .
From the moment I began reading her post I did not so much agree or disagree with her analysis as much as be convinced that there was a rhinoceros peeing in the room. What I refer to is our massive expectation for the reader, especially the naive one. Is it any wonder that folks rarely comment or annotate or otherwise reciprocate? What we are asking of our readers is unprecedented. Way before we even get to the issue of truth, post-truth, fakity, or truthiness, we have got to figure out how to source the signal.
For example, if you are a serious close reader there are over 200 calls to read in the primary source(Maha’s original post) as well as secondary ones posts she links to). In fact there is so much information in these links that getting to the content and whether it is accurate, persuasive, logically sound, and fair, (the whole panoply of crap-detecting wetware we apply to the post itself) is it any wonder that my students tend to filter out almost everything?
I was agog at the Amazon affiliate links. They have over 500 other links inside the Amazon page they point to. I know that no one reads those links. Most aren’t even aware that they exist, but how do we actually approach those pages in order to make sense of them? Do we use these same real life sense- making ‘functions’ and decision filtering trees as we read Maha’s post? I don’t think so. We approach that Amazon page with very clear purposes as reader. We ignore almost everything because we can safely ignore most of it. I want to teach my readers how to ignore almost everything that needs to be ignored. Or to put it like Elmore Leonard might have, “When you read, try to leave out all the parts the writers should have skipped.”
And this is just one, modest post trying to draw out a signal in the simoom of noise that we self-generate. The initial problem is not discerning fake facts, rather it is in deciding which is the signal and which the noise. I need more and better tools for parsing this sheep from those goats and this wheat from that chaff.
I am going to open my writing classes this semester with an exercise using LinkGrabber. I hope it opens my students’ eyes to the rising tide of information that stands to sweep them away. I am looking for other tools to help them do this in such a way that they are left with only the best information. Then we will work on whether it is fake or not. Perhaps there will be some initial parsing of essays that will involve standard vetting of texts like verifying the author’s cred, fact-checking, and doing an initial fairness scan.
Thanks to Maha for her original article. And to her sources as well. I am doing a lot of thinking out loud here, but I am really struck by the need to gather information in an intelligent, filtered way and then vetting it for any truth/Truth/Post-truth/truthiness I can wring out of it. Wish us luck. If my teaching is as “all-over-the-place” as my writing here, we are going to need it.
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Something is ringing alarm bells in my ears.
Difficult to put it into words.
Think it relates to power and myth.
A hunch: cut the arborescence – return to root, earth, folk.
Deconstruct “Information/Fact/Story/History”
Deconstruct “News”
Deconstruct “Browse.”
Deconstruct “Link”
Haven’t got a clue what this means.
Something about looking with different ears.
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I know whereof you speak, mon ami. I think it is the feeling you get when you are logging onto a passworded site and you go with the first one that comes to mind. In fact it’s not even front of mind. It just is.
My thought here is that living in this rising tide we have got to rely on these roots. Simple branching decisions with information before they even get above ground–gut, intuition, haptic feedback from hylae that are vibrating only barely. [wurd fail]. Love the synaesthesia of looking with different ears. I agree that when we are gathering info we have to have this habit, this element of non-discrimination. Underground movement that we trust not because we know but because we don’t.
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In a broad sense, I see you and Maha discussing two different problems. As she states, fake news is a norm where she lives (Egypt). I contend it is a norm to some level in every country, and has been for millennia. What has changed is the rate of proliferation and spread of information (fake or not).
I see Maha’s argument being that we need to critically analyze and respond to “T/true” news with empathy and a desire to understand other viewpoints. I see yours, Terry, being we need to learn how to plow through gazoodles of sources and choose/analyze only those that are “T/true” and relevant.
I also find it interesting that the focus (by the education world at large) is on students and teaching them how to analyze/empathize/understand. My observation is that many well-established, well-educated adults are just as inept at it as students are.
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I am the luckiest of ducks to have clear minds like yours approach this rough thatch of turf that is this post. I was desperate to get it out before I lost the thread so it has the feel of working/thinking out loud…with lots of gaps.
This (choose ur metaphor: tsunami, firehose, frogstrangler) of information is a new new thing. It is something that has been coming for awhile. I remember being overwhelmed the first time I confronted a real university library and a real research class: periodicals and print databases and journals and all the newness of the Library of Congress. And I already knew about a lot of this because I was a page in our local library throughout all of my high school career.
I am glad you looked through the links. I spent hours gathering and culling and doing some proto-curating of the links. I am not complaining. This close work of running in and out of the connections is compelling to me. I get a feel for the ideas and connections in the same way I suspect that coders get when they drape towel over the monitors and climb into the blue phosphor of the monitor to write and debug programs.
That empathy and passion to understand are probably part of what I am asking that we do when we face the ….well, is there a word for it? Maybe the noosphere? How could the incurious and bored deal with that fat mass of information? They wouldn’t. They shut it all out as a protective measure. I am thinking that the evolutionary part of ourselves, the deep old part that attends in order to survive, that part of the brain is in constant filter mode. I am looking at some research now where some are suggesting that the next big evolutionary leap is going to be made by those who can actually open up their filtering even a wee bit to the pattern viewing prowess of our great four pound parallel processor. That little bit (perhaps they are the true multitaskers or they have the “feature and not the bug” of ADD or certain varieties of autism) might be enough to give an evolutionary advantage. It is an intriguing possibility.
If so then I want to be on the learning edge that helps others do just that. How hilarious–teachers and not Silicon Valley moguls bringing about the singularity.
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Using that tool exposes a lot of what we don’t even notice — the raft of associative information and links and products, and how our web viewing is often narrowed as much as expanded by this. I agree that this is different from Maha’s analysis, and agree, too, that how to filter signals is critical to reading comprehension of the world.
Kevin
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Hi Terry. I found this today as I skimmed my Inoreader list of blogs. Thank you.
I read Maha’s article, but did not dig into the hundreds of links it points to. One theme stands out which she aluded to when she said “It’s not something we switch on. It takes years to build, especially with so much going against us.”
The habits of learning that need to be adopted across the 7 billion people on this planet, need to be learned over a lifetime. A seemingly impossible task.
Charlene ended her comment saying “My observation is that many well-established, well-educated adults are just as inept at it as students are.”
You and I talked about the “quicksand” of links and how they draw a reader further and further away from other duties and priorities. Your article illustrates how deep this goes.
I met with an older gentleman in Chicago yesterday, who first contacted me in Nov. 2015 after seeing a story about my mapping in the Chicago Tribune. He’s shown interest in applying the ideas I share, and of trying to help me find resources to sustain my efforts in future years.
However, as we talked yesterday I saw how difficult it is for him to make the time to dig deeply, or follow the links, in my articles, and how much more difficult it has been for him to convince any of his supporters to do the same.
On Facebook the other day I posted a link to the annotation of the John Dewey article and a follower posted “tldr”. I had to ask what that meant. He said “To long: Didn’t read”.
I responded, “That’s part of the problem. Complex problems require more than 140 character reading to find solutions.”
Thus, the massive amount of information in almost every blog post is a “tldr” problem. The only solution is to start the learning process, as Kevin and others are doing, in elementary or middle school….
in millions of locations.
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Yes. The wheat from chaff problem. How do we decide what needs attending and what doesn’t? We need filters to do this initial pass at the noise. Questions are a way to do that. I teach my students that research questions are their only hope if they want to carry on in the face of the digital world. Other filters include personal interest or what used to be called curiosity. Passion might be another. Categories would be another of these filters. Creating filters is job one for anyone hoping to help others learn the knowledge biz. So, as much as we hate the dismissal, tl;dr is a legitimate filter. A more interesting observation, I think, is the one you make: the massive amounts of information flowing from the simplest of possibilia, a tweet or a blog post with links or… I would love to know the decision-making process behind your Facebook friend’s tl;dr. Was it a gut decision or a conscious and rational decision tree at work? How do we decide what to attend to and what not to attend to? Thanks for helping me come up with this intriguing question, Dan.