Pictures are often used to offer
entertainment and make a comment at the same time - sometimes with deliciously
stinging irony. This was in a Facebook
post after the storm Ciara hit the north. It claimed to depict ‘Glasgow minutes
ago ‘- an orca splashing about by the roadside. Killer!
In such images, the humour lies in their absurdity – conditions clearly
agin the truth.
In weather
broadcasts, when the first snow of the season is being forecast, we often see
scenes of drifting snow mounds, of snow ploughs clearing tracks. One could easily believe that this is reality
and it was – last winter! So its reality
is time-related – it is currently fake. You
get the weather real-feel when some poor rookie reporter has been sent out to
stand in appalling weather conditions just to show ….. how appalling they are!
As I’ve said previously, our ‘truth’ is a fragile mosaic of a plethora
of perceptions which we continually adapt to maintain some sense of cohesion.
Issues are things we care about mind how we respond to them is related to our
personal mosaic. One of my pet issues is the use of sloppy thinking: being
ready to shout one’s mouth off or give a knee-jerk response without giving due
consideration to the matter in hand.
One Facebook issue was about the film ’The Theory of Everything’ about the
life of Stephen Hawking. Some people
took issue (!) with the fact that Eddie Redmayne had the lead role, rather than
a disabled actor. My bone of contention here is that do-good back-patters will
happily throw a plethora of likes at such a post without thinking things
through. In promoting this view, they’re placing the focus on Hawking’s
physical hardship and not on his unique, brilliant mind. If they redress their
focus but use their same pattern of ‘reasoning’ then casting for that
protagonist should have been done by IQ rating – and I fear Equity would view
that suggestion in a dim light!
I have mentioned the phenomenon
of polarization, where there is a tendency for people’s attitudes to move
towards the extreme positions – ably abetted by, for instance, advertisers and
politicians with their jingles and campaign slogans which ram home a position
or an opinion by repetition to contrive loyalty or group affiliation. Everyone remembers that ‘Things go better
with Coca-Cola’ and it is a source of amusement to me that grown men at
international football venues are actually chanting the ‘Hoover beats as it
sweeps as it cleans’ jingle!
Polarization
can lead to reductionism: if not white, then black. Here in Greece, the issue of the naming of
North Macedonia generated great polarization as did – and still does - the
issue of Brexit where buzz words of questionable semantic value, such as fascist, traitor, nationalis, were
bandied about regularly.
Recently, during a chat with a neighbour, a
plane passed high above, its jet engines leaving a clear trail in the blue sky.
His immediate response was: ‘You see, they’re spraying us again!’ Any attempt
on my part to explain that the phenomenon was caused by the hot, humid
jet-engine fumes condensing in the high-altitude, low temperature atmosphere
was rejected. No, the undisclosed ‘they’ were set on spraying us for mind
control purposes. And this conspiracy theory has ‘them’ wastefully flying high,
apparently missing direct target hit and squandering spray ….in order to avoid
detection !?!
The above, then, are examples of knee-jerk responses or sloppy thinking.
I contend that
inadequate
information ………. gives rise to rumour
inadequate
thinking processes………… generate conspiracy theories
inadequate vocabulary /powers of
expression ……….resort to buzz
words.
In
this rapidly-changing world where screen has overtaken the page, and where the
screen can easily deceive - what should we do to equip students with skills to
help them discern reality, what is fact, what is the truth?
Here
Finland offers us a really good model and for a good reason! She believes she has
been on the front-line of an information war since 2014: the target of fake news distributed by the
Russian authorities – often of an anti-EU nature, or trying to influence debate
on Finland’s NATO membership. And this ’war’ in itself is not fake news – it
has been verified by Sergei Pugachev who once had Putin as his protégé and
helped him acquire the presidency. Sergei asserts that Russia has billions of
dollars at her disposal to strengthen her influence ‘to undermine and corrupt
the institutions and democracies of the West’.
Meanwhile,
back in Finland, dealing with this onslaught is seen as a civil defence issue
and for their own security, everyone – from primary school pupils to
politicians – is trained to detect suspect information. Always highly regarded
for its education system, Finland runs far-reaching programs designed by
multi-disciplinary specialists whereby thousands of civil servants,
journalists, teachers and librarians are trained for awareness-raising.
In
secondary schools there is a core, cross-subject component to develop
multi-platform information literacy and strong critical thinking.
For example, in Maths, students are shown how
statistics can lie.
In Art, they focus on how an image can manipulate
meaning.
In
Language, students look for information clarity and classification. They are
taught to distinguish among three information categories:
Misinformation: mistakes
Disinformation:
deliberate falsehoods spread to deceive
and
Malinformation:
gossip or even true information but spread to somehow cause harm.
In our world
of fake news, this could be a very significant and necessary skill or awareness
development area for all of us!
No comments:
Post a Comment