The Challenge for Consumers
Lesson 1:7
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Challenge 3: Disintermediation & a Blurring of the Lines
Challenge 3: Disintermediation & a Blurring of the Lines
A significant number of Americans get their news from non traditional outlets, such as social media or comedy shows similar to The Daily Show. What does this do to the definition of journalism? Does that matter? Who is a Journalist?
On social media, most of the information is, by design, made to look the same, creating issues for consumers. If in scrolling through your Facebook, could you just by glance, tell the differences between these two posts?
What's highlighted here, is something called "disintermediation" - which generally means the loss of a middleman during a transaction.
In the context of news and media, it means affording a direct connection between the creators of media messages (photos, text, video), and the recipients of them.
Think of YouTube as an example. The largest type of filtering (or mediation) comes from a computer program (or an algorithm), which can work faster, but does not have the same reasoning skill as a human editor would. While this lowers the barrier for creators to post content, it also leaves consumers with a wide variety of content, both in quality and source.
These are both are simple examples of a big problem: If you don’t think critically about the sources of the information you use, your information diet will be full sneaky ads and marketing tricks instead of a healthy mix of facts.
Challenge 4: Overcoming Your Own Biases
Challenge 4: Overcoming Your Own Biases
Scientists of all types are documenting more and more ways in which our perceptions and memories are unreliable.
If we’re not careful, we cave to a cluster of psychological effects known as Cognitive Dissonance, which is the human animal’s deep discomfort with new information that contradicts long standing beliefs.
There are certainly times when we find our beliefs challenged, but our current information ecosystem makes it difficult for us to continually exercise how to reason from multiple points of view.
More times than not, we find ourselves only presented with information that aligns with our existing points of view, leaving us to have even stronger reactions to information that does not. We talk more about this in a future lesson, but keep it in mind as one of the challenges that we tell students to be adamant about fighting.
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