I can’t imagine trying to grow up today. Our generation… and by “our” I mean the median age of ilyAIMY… which I guess is mid-to-late 30s… was raised with a certain amount of informational confidence. School taught us a particular framework of history and then in high school a rebellious teacher or a rebellious student would slowly start to fill in not-so-widely-known facts that were contrary to “doctrine” – but it would all fit together. Part of growing up was learning that the Establishment had established some incorrect factoids in that overall framework to whitewash history, to satisfy the big money, or because it’d been rewritten by the winners – whatever. But information came to us and because we had a framework into which we tried to make it fit, I feel like a moderately smart human could see what made sense, what didn’t make sense, what to believe, what not to believe. Not that we haven’t been caught up in government lies, corporate misdeeds and delicious conspiracies – but it’s different now – and I’m not sure that our generation (or previous generations – with a key point that Old White Men are included here) – I’m not sure that the teachers and government of today can grasp a truly fundamental piece of *growing up* today….
There’s NO informational confidence anymore. Every single fact that’s given in the classroom or at home – this magical box that I’m typing into or the magical box that Lives in our pocket, through the wonder that is Google or Bing or Yahoo, (or increasingly Facebook and Amazon) – within moments it can provide pages and pages of permutations and refutations. Everything from physics to history to medicine to pet care – any question you’d care to shout out into the ether gets a massive, unfettered response to which our natural predilections, interpretations and predispositions provides its own reflexive filter to. With this deluge – I worry that it’s useless to teach anything with that level of background noise.
“Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children” no longer. Now it’s Google, or Mom-forbid, Facebook. I feel like when WE were growing up, your first source of information is a parent. Apparently. You’d ask Mom why the sky was blue and you’d ask Dad where to dogs come from and you got answers. Sometimes you realized that it was better to ask one parent or the other… and part of the growing up process was realizing which parent would give you the better answer. Part of the BIGGER growing up process was understanding WHY this was. You ask something, they say “Go to sleep” – not literally because they want you to go to sleep, but because she wants to be left alone. Fundamental, but you learn at a very basic level that answers are sometimes not answers, but indicators of motive. “Why eat the broccoli” – well, I would’ve grown up with either “because it’s good for you”, “because I told you to” or “because starving kids in Africa*”…
Nowadays – let’s google “Is broccoli good for you”. The first three of over 19 million results :
The bad news about broccoli | Daily Mail Online
“You thought you’d been good eating your broccoli all these years but scientists have some bad news for you – you could have been munching the wrong kind of …”
*Note that googling “are there starving children in Africa” what you get are self-righteous incriminations more than anything else. You get the impression that a) those Africans should quit whining because we’ve got problems HERE, b) Bill Gates should get off his ass and solve the problem and c) my favourite front page answer courtesy of Yahoo Answers : “They keep reproducing, so extra people keep dying from hunger. “ QED. Thanks internet. – actually – at this point I have` NO idea where this askterisk was from – but I’m sure you’ll figure it out dear readers!
Could Cruciferous Vegetables Be Bad For You? – Medical …
“Jan 25, 2014 – Broccoli is probably the healthiest food out there, right? … as kale, cabbage, and Brussels sprouts — unless you’re eating far too much of them, …”
Why Is Broccoli Bad For Thyroid? | Healthy Eating | SF Gate
“Broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables like cauliflower, kale and cabbage are … You may want to avoid eating huge quantities of raw broccoli if you have a …”
Oh god! Instantly! Are my parents making me eat the right KIND of broccoli?! Has it been cooked enough?!? How much is TOO MUCH?!?!?! How can you even exist with this informational overload? Are we teaching kids not just to read the headlines? Or not to just listen to the soundbite?!
Let’s not even discuss “did we land on the Moon” (four entries before “How do we know the Moon landing wasn’t faked”), “is the Earth flat” (first sentence “In 1881, English writer Samuel Rowbotham published Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe, a 430-page book in which he affirmed that Earth is flat.”), or whether or not Obama is a space lizard (a page full of responses saying HELL YEAH!). I guess an important filter in our minds can come into play when we see how many people are asking that question (or responding with an answer) – over 19 million responses re: broccoli with the first page answering effectively “yeah, but…” – 49 million results for the moon landing with most of the second half of the first page talking about why it’s dumb to think we faked it – 186 million responses about the flat earth with only the first response giving any credence to the idea (interesting that they seem to be arranged in reverse skeptical order) – “is Obama a space lizard” gives you less than 500,000 results, which may seem like a lot… if you can’t contextualize numbers effectively…
So what the Hell do you do as a parent if EVERY TIME you give a piece of empirical information a kid can come up with a thousand refutations in the space of 0.35 seconds? Even worse, what about being the kid? How do you filter your world if whenEVER anyone tells you a “fact” about the world you can do that? And again – let’s not even discuss the social media side of things. Facebook becomes the lowest common denominator mob, with an intelligence only equal to its dumbest member… how do you TEACH in this environment – especially when “this environment” is completely new?!
Teachers entering the workforce today are perhaps the first generation of educators that actually grew up with Wikipedia and the internet as a whole, but they still grew up with some level of informational confidence…
I think it’d take a pretty impressive logical leap for even the first wave of Millenials to truly grasp the instability of the information that a child growing up today has access to. (and what I guess I REALLY mean is the…. Er… “Aughters” who reached adult-hood in the last decade and are entering the workforce THIS decade…
IF we can overcome people’s natural skepticism on topics like “rumour control” and “fact checking” (vs CENSORSHIP and COMMUNISM), things like this : http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/03/02/google-has-developed-a-technology-to-tell-whether-facts-on-the-internet-are-true/ (where early this month it was reported that Google has published a theory for fact checking the internet and ranking results by the likelihood of their veracity) and this : http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/01/21/did-facebook-just-kill-the-webs-burgeoning-fake-news-industry/ (in which back in January Facebook reported “Starting this week, the site will cut down on the number of fake news stories that circulate in its News Feed — and add a warning on hoax stories indicating that they’re fake.” – interestingly I hadn’t noticed this meaning either a) it’s not working or b) I’d cut out that bullshit on my own by religiously unfollowing people who shared stuff like that) – well, things like that might just save our minds.
Right now, disinformation spreads like a virus, and it’s only because the educated majority (or at least the empowered majority) know better that the anti-vaxxers and Flat Earthers haven’t done truly permanent damage (other than killing a couple of children with measles, of course… but imagine Flat Earthers managing to convince people that GPS is a conspiracy, or…) But the next generation doesn’t have the defense of a baseline education – and in the case of disinformation that truly has a massive financial incentive (oil industry, global warming, religious extremism, big pharma, big data, big Monsanto) it’s only possible to glean facts against the background information if the gatekeepers of that information have some level of altruism to them…
But isn’t Google just another corporation? Don’t the financial interests outweigh the
possibility of their being trust-worthy?
Actually – the ONE thing that makes me optimistic about this is that for Google and
Facebook and Amazon and Bing, to a certain extent trust IS a commodity. In an age where everything can say “come to me, I’ll have an answer for you FAST”, I’m hoping
that it’s HUGE that someone can say “come to me, I’ll have the RIGHT answer for you”. “Google Skeptic” could be the best thing that’s ever happened to the internet since… well…. Google.
Of course, I’ve had hope before…
Also Loving that while typing “are there starving children in Africa” Google’s auto-complete provided me with “are there stargates” – never one to resist a good conspiracy theory I of COURSE opened THAT in a new tab and have really enjoyed the first result’s tale of time travel, Tesla-quantum teleportation, and the fact that these are both used primarily to hide the presence of the United States Military’s Mars bases where people serve 20 year tours of duty but nobody knows because they’re teleported there and back again, then age-regressed and have their memories wiped. And then my GOD why do I read the comments?!?! A principle concern of course being people who are angry that the government is spending money on THAT when they COULD be curing measles… sigh.
