This week's readings on information overload and overabundance put me in a time machine and transported me all the way back to 2012 when I was actively concerned with a issues of awareness and commitment online and the ways in which hyperbole helps promote the former over the latter. I even wrote a paper about it for Kim Knight's Viral Media class. Here's a link to it.
It's been interesting the past couple of weeks for me to notice just how much my views on social media interaction has changed over the years and how much they've stayed the same. Way, way back in the fall of 2010, I entered the EMAC program with views that very much mirrored the views espoused by Sherry Turkle - that social media was fine and all but it did very poorly in replicating physical human interaction. Gradually I began to form a more nuanced take on what made computer-mediated communication unique and different from offline communication. Soon, I identified one characteristic that I felt allowed certain types of information to gain traction in the flood of content we are inundated with daily. Hyperbole.
As highlighted in the "Faking Cultural Literacy" article, it has become very easy to pretend to know things thanks to the network of "friends" and "follows" we keep on social media. This is also because surface-level awareness of things like plot developments in an episode of Game of Thrones can now very easily be passed off as commitment to watching an entire season of the show. My argument was and still is that because complex and nuanced engagement of all the information we are constantly bombarded with takes a lot of time and energy, information that is presented in a hyperbolic manner that rewards surface-level engagement (clickbaity headlines, trending hashtags, etc) has become more pervasive and now more reliable in helping us pretend to know things we actually don't know. For example, if we wanted to, we can now all feign deep knowledge of the 1994 crime bill and that is very much thanks to the hyperbolic ways thoughts and think pieces about it have populated our twitter timelines and Facebook feeds.
Something else I appreciated from the "Faking Cultural Literacy" article is the idea put forth that we have become obsessed with keeping up the appearance that we've read every important thing written each week and formed opinions accordingly. I've always been okay with simply saying "I don't know" in conversation whenever I find that I don't know things. Here's an article that elaborates on the virtues of saying "I don't know" more often. So much of the confusion and the glut of (mis)information we are flooded with daily will be curtailed if a lot of people would be able to admit to themselves that they simply don't know a thing about what it is they're writing about.
I like that the second article we had to read this week was an article on medium, which has a reputation of enabling people to write their heads off about things they don't know enough about. Articles on Medium are often accompanied by hyperbolic headlines like "what this random thing thought me about this totally unrelated thing" and even "7 things you need to stop doing to be more productive." Reading through the article wasn't very pleasant, to be quite honest because I got the sense from the extensive quotes included that I was reading the author read something else to me and not contributing much of their own thoughts to it - at least nothing that wasn't common knowledge already about habits of productive people (work smarter, not harder, delegate, etc). As an alternative, one of my favorite things I've ever read on medium was a parody of articles like that titled "These 12 Habits are Absolutely Slaugtering Your Productivity." Here's a link to the article.
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