Lies, damned lies and the Internet

Increasingly, students need to acquire the important skill of critical thinking. Content is growing exponentially on the web, and students are exposed to increasing amounts of erroneous material, misleading, biased or opinionated accounts and false research. During the last week I have been thinking about how teachers can address this issue. One of the new digital literacies students need to acquire is the ability to distinguish the good from the bad content. How do we instill these critical skills in our learners? In his Pelecon 2012 keynote, Alec Couros showed some examples of how history has been airbrushed. He cited Henry Jenkins: "In hunting culture, children play with bows and arrows. In an information society, they play with information". Couros gave several examples, but the most impressive was the following example of information manipulation. This picture of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald is iconic for a certain generation, but for those who are younger and know little about the political history of the United States of America can easily be fooled.

This second version of the Oswald assassination photo has been skillfully manipulated to represent an entirely different meaning to that of the original image. The political message that accompanies the altered image is clearly satirical, but never the less resonates with the views of a large proportion of American citizens and others around the globe - that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in assassinating President John F. Kennedy, but was a part of a larger conspiracy. Whether or not this JFK assassination theory is true or even partially true, it remains one of the most trenchant conspiracy theories of modern history, and was even portrayed in an Oliver Stone movie. A whole host of websites have grown up around it, to sustain the argument further. The Internet is peppered with other similar conspiracy websites, some for example claiming that US astronauts never set foot on the moon, that the Apollo moon missions were a hoax and the entire mission was instead filmed on a movie set. Despite a number of expert rebuttals, this conspiracy theory persists. The alleged murder of Diana, Princess of Wales in Paris in 1997; Elvis Presley faked his own death, and is still alive; Area 51, a crashed UFO in Roswell, and an Alien/US Government conspiracy; The existence of the Illuminati; a Freemason led conspiracy to instigate a new World Order; and a whole host of other so called 'lunatic fringe' conspiracy theories are propagated through internet websites. Many are attracted to read such content because these alternative explanations appeal to the more fanciful corners of our imaginations. But some websites, such as those offering alternative medical advice, can be extremely dangerous.

What is today's student to make of all this? Deliberately misleading websites are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to bad content on the web. Let's take this a little further. How do students discern the difference between a website that hosts good, empirical, well established content, and one that doesn't? And how do they detect when a website is not based on established fact, but is merely a collection of opinions and conjectures? This is a more subtle distinction than determining if a conspiracy theory actually has any real credibility. Students are often left floating adrift in a sea of content, with the onerous task of deciding what is good content and what is not. The ultimate test is to decide what to include and what to leave out of their assessments to actually gain a good grade.

I regularly ask my own students to challenge what is being said in the classroom. I advise them to question everything they hear, read or see, to help develop their critical thinking abilities, to practice defending or attacking a theory, to exercise their evaluative skills. I read recently of one professor who deliberately lied once each lesson, and challenged his students to detect the lie. As the lies became more subtle, the students began to struggle to detect the falsehood, until eventually they were at the point where they were deeply scrutinising everything that was presented in the lesson, and going beyond the content to make sure they had discovered the lie. They had to discuss extensively to put themselves in a position where they knew what was correct and what was incorrect. The web is a very fertile place to learn, but we all need to develop our critical awareness of what content is good and what is to be avoided.

Image source


Lies, damned lies and the Internet by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.