The Excuse For Diminished Critical Thinking Skills — Fake News
I’m tired of people continuing to blame fake news — it’s time to take some responsibility, especially in 2019
Imagine this for a quick second, it’s the year 20xx and we both, as individuals and a society, take responsibility for our own actions + subsequent nativity.
Well, rewind to, well…today. Our society has never needed to take responsibility more than now
I am constantly reading articles (literally if I read another one I will scream) that mention the things wrong with technology or social media and within this list is always “fake news.” It’s as if it is technology or social are the ones responsible for putting it there.
What we all forget is that technology is a vacuum and by itself is meaningless, frankly it’s useless, but it’s we, humans, that assign that importance and value.
As I sat in my room, I was struck with a realization. We blame this man-made entity called “fake news,” simply because we do not want to take ownership of our own nativity.
I was properly motivated to sit down and write because of an article that I read by one of my favorite content platforms Maekan.
In this article they described an incredibly pervasive problem, the lack of critical thinking from consumers in order to properly distinguish good, truly unique, content from that of the vast mediocrity.
Quite frankly, there is just too much content in both the physical and digital spaces — it is becoming increasingly more trendy to simply read headlines of an article instead of what the article actually says, or, within storefronts, only paying attention to the loud and bold colors advertised in a sale banner vs the fine print underneath it.
Both of these mistakes are unequivocal human errors. No digital platform forced us as a society to collectively throw our inquisition or critical thinking skills into the nearest recycling bin.
The solution in itself isn’t hard at all, take the effort to do the research and choose to not allow yourself to accept the mediocre content paraded around true fact.
No, no, no!
It’s time to take it upon ourselves to look at things from multiple angles instead of the silos that we have allowed ourselves to fall into.
One quote that I have carried with me for a number of years is this,
For we blame society, yet we are society
Since reading that quote it has always struck me as odd when I hear people complain about things, especially the prevalence of “fake news.”
They look to their left and then their right, pointing the finger at everyone else, yet they don’t realize the problem that they are fixated is propagated because of them, whether directly or indirectly.
We all have a part to play in society. “Fake news” has always been around, so this isn’t a problem of the modern era but to think that it is, is where the buffoonery begins.
The problem is in the common acceptance of blatant ignorance— that one can simply gain all the information needed to make educated decisions simply by reading a headline or pieces from the same think-tank organizations (publication, media outlets, tv shows) and have it all together.
Now, of course there are those that are truly educated but for a vast majority of people, myself included, we are all so engrained in our day-to-day lives that when we do manage to get our heads out of the sand we look for easy and stackable content packages that help us catch up to the speed of the world around us.
“Fake news” is created by us, and our lack of total understanding of the many moving pieces of topics at hand. Ignorance is the life juice of this sort of news, but the reality is, this juice has always existed.
What must it have been like to hear for the first time that the world was not flat, but round. Proponents of that idea, in their time, were the purveyors of “fake news” only because of the collective ignorance (warranted or not) of the masses.
This leads to truly understanding what this news is. There is always another side to a coin, but while evaluateing both sides of the coin, the bigger question often goes unanswered, who decides what is “fake” and what is not?
While “fake news” has always existed, what hasn’t is a lack of awareness, on such a large societal scale, of the truth, which can only be obtained with effort. An effort to discover for yourself by understanding the positions of the many sides and then coming to the singular conclusion of what and where the truth exists.
Too many times we settle for convenience, which leads to the opening for someone else to tell us what to do or how to think, oftentimes not blatantly, but, certainly indirectly.
And that, my friends is one of the greatest social wrongs, to give up ones own critical thinking in the pursuit of convenience — for it is in that exchange that the “fake news” we create or allow to be created can do its deadliest work.
Affect the minds of a society that will one day grow up to lead an entire society.
Charles Etoroma
