Keep Thy Internet with All Diligence

The internet has problems a Pollyanna couldn’t miss, but the trouble with human nature is when a problem is embedded into something we like, we have a hard time knowing where to stop. But hope is a virtue—which means we should have it—so I am trying to find a way to be hopeful for our sanity. I think I can.

Recently I read (online) about some older men talking (predictably) about the state of information in the twenty-first century. A young man asked, “Do you think you are entitled to truthful information?” The old men said “Absolutely.” And the young man said, “That’s interesting. My generation has accepted the fact of misinformation and do not see themselves as entitled to truth.”

There’s a piece of reversal to think about.

It might seem postmodern, even nihilistic, to accept that our sources of information cannot be trusted, yet I think that conversation captures perfectly the reality we must face. Newspapers have opinion columns, and we know to be wary of these, but with the equivalent of 250,000 Libraries of Congress being uploaded globally onto the web every day, some of it legitimate, some of it not as much, we have our jobs cut out for us. Much of this information is uncategorized or of dubious origin so we do not know how to set our expectations in order to properly assimilate the information we encounter. Approaching the internet with barely functioning poppycock meters is proving a bad survival strategy.

Here are three options. Maybe there is another I have not thought of. 1) Avoid the internet altogether, or 2) Be willingly ignorant and use it however it suits you, or 3) Develop a mental toolbox to disable the pernicious parts and engage the useful functions.

First, avoiding the internet is fine, maybe wise. But as Presidents communicate via Twitter, Facebook stands before Congress, and the rest of the world spends an average of eleven hours per day behind screens, our metaphors, thought processes, and views of the world will be formed by these modes of communication. Soon we will say scrolling through life in an attempt to update an old metaphor. I am not suggesting that if you cannot beat them then you should join them, only that you will be faced with internet culture regardless. Marshall Mcluhan and Neil Postman would concur: You will walk into the hardware store and encounter the internet.

If you vote for the second option, you may stop reading here.

The third option is what I find to be closest to a solution. I am not speaking of achieving basic mastery over a digital device; we are talking here about an education in thinking about thinking—metacognition is the word. It is a combination of mindfulness, critical thinking, and engagement with the material, with a side of discipline. Enter David Foster Wallace’s famous Kenyon commencement speech:

“I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you to how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”

So, what we need is a kind of literacy that gives us the tools to take something formless as thought and hammer it together into a frame, to identify patterns, to feel out the earmarks of conspiracy or misinformation, to control the flow of information. If we cannot learn to handle and understand the information we encounter, we will be (with apologies to David Foster Wallace) totally hosed.

We do not teach children to sight read, that is, memorize words as units; we teach them the alphabet, then the sounds the combinations of these make, then the meanings of root words and the meaning of combinations of these. As an adult approaches a piece of writing, he is subconsciously reaching back to the elemental knowledge of letters and how they fit together to form an idea, how each word morphs into a phrase, phrase into a sentence, sentence into paragraph, paragraph into chapter, and chapter into book. It is a mark of a mature reader to assemble the granular knowledge of grammar into the idea that is glued together to form the narrative arc of a long-form work. The better reader he is, the more subconscious these details become, until he can achieve a kind of flow mental state, and he can devote almost all his mental energy to internalizing the idea or proposition being advanced in the text.

Digital Media Literacy is something like this, and it will be like going through first grade all over again. The majority have learned the equivalent of sight reading: We can buy subscriptions and sell products and upload selfies, but we do not know or care how it works to produce the effect it has on our minds.

To achieve literacy, we would begin by listening to the critics. I can hear you whining already, “I don’t want to hear what is wrong with the world. I want solutions.” That’s fair, and I am glad you want solutions. But how will we formulate good solutions until we understand the problem? The critics identify the problem; the next step is up to us.

After listening to the critics, we would learn how the internet operates. How content is subjugated to accommodate the marketing strategies, which monetize your click and not the information. How the internet’s rhetorical philosophy exploits natural chinks in the human mind, appealing to emotion, biases, and curiosity. We would learn details that seem irrelevant (Teacher, when am I ever going to use this when I grow up?) but which would form the base of our operations. Sometimes, irrelevancy becomes relevant at unexpected times, details surfacing to give us unexpected footholds to leverage for advantage.

We would learn terms like filter-bubbles, echo-chambers, post-truth, misinformation, and disinformation. We would have a working knowledge of logical fallacies. We could learn terms like Label to Disable, which is a beautiful little exercise of metacognition. What is privacy, and does it matter? We could even learn to use basic fact-checking tools such as Reverse Image Search. And at graduation from this Digital Media Literacy course, we would have a shock-proof, but sensitive, nonsense radar.

How can we integrate Digital Media Literacy into our culture? Seminars? Required courses in High School? As I see it, either we will learn to love God with our minds, seeking out truth, or we will slowly slip further and further into the insanity that denial brings.

It may feel like a concession to accept the internet as a force to be reckoned with, but I think it willing ignorance to pretend otherwise. Digital Media Literacy is the difference between knowing how to drive and knowing what is under the hood, the difference between knowing how to eat and how to fix wholesome food. We can get by without being a mechanic or a cook because we can hire these jobs done. We cannot hire someone to do our thinking for us.