danah boyd on the Dangers of Weaponized Critical Thinking

Entertainingly, there was a minute when people argued that the democratization of access to media would *automatically* result in a space for rational discourse, where people would be persuaded by the best arguments and we would eventually all grow together toward the good. It turns out, of course, we live in a world where corrective information often hardens one’s position.

At SXSWedu, danah boyd summarized a lot of her research into the ways in which social media can often turn the habits of critical thinking against itself, paradoxically driving belief in conspiracy theories. Even though a lot of what she says is familiar to anyone who follows her on Twitter, it still is vaguely terrifying assembled all in one place:

(If you’re interested, you can see the other SXSWedu keynotes here.)

As you can tell near the end of the presentation, danah boyd is pretty skeptical about media literacy alone being all that effective in reducing the persuasiveness of ‘fake news,’ or as she suggests, the weaponization of epistemological differences on different social media platforms.

As Lee has written before, Mike Caulfield has been doing yeoman’s work in finding practical strategies to improve media literacy. As it happens, while boyd was speaking yesterday, Twitter was very excited about a new column by Bari Weiss at the New York Times, which based an argument about campus political correctness on a . . . troll Twitter account. Caufield has an excellent run-down of what happened, along with a demonstration of just how little effort is required to be more media literate. (Unfortunately, the dark implication of Caulfield’s post is that if it really is all that easy--and it is!--then the problem isn’t really about literacy, but about good will.)

Photo “Chemtrail” by Flickr user Rool Paap / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0