When reading articles online, always ask: Is this outlet trying harder to inform the audience or promote a point of view? In the following example, most of the evidence supports “promote a point of view…”
If you use social media, this one’s a must: check out The Noisy Room, an interactive essay on the quiet social media majority from Tobias Rose-Stockwell, an author whose book, The Outrage Machine—How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy―And What We Can Do About It, is featured multiple times in our course on Media Literacy.
Note the expression, pay attention. You should take this pretty literally. The cost of taking in new information is the attention you have to pay to process that information.
Like paying three dollars for a caffeinated drink, you’re paying three seconds or three minutes or three hours for some bit of information. So the question you have to ask yourself is this: Is it worth it? Since attention is finite—the class will end, the day will end, the year will end, even life will end—is the thing you’re paying attention to worth the time you’re giving it?
Socrates famously worried about the invention of writing for the way it would change what it means to know something. If Socrates was worried about moving from an oral culture to a literary culture, an analogous concern today might be about moving from a literary culture to a culture of image and video.
“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.” E.O. Wilson, sociobiologist The embedded claim is that our emotional and psychological lives are not keeping pace with our technological development; our psychologies are still climbing out of an ancient period of human development, but our tech is not.
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