"White Bread for the Mind"
Katherine Mangu-Ward | January 14, 2008, 4:04pm
The latest in the "the Internet is ruining kids today" genre:
Google is “white bread for the mind”, and the internet is producing a generation of students who survive on a diet of unreliable information, a professor of media studies will claim this week....
Her own students are banned from using Wikipedia or Google as research tools in their first year of study, but instead are provided with 200 extracts from peer-reviewed printed texts at the beginning of the year, supplemented by printed extracts from eight to nine texts for individual pieces of work.
Peer-reviewed papers (on paper!) have a place, of course. And in an educational environment, they probably even deserve a privileged place. But if Google is the white bread of the mind, then pass the peanut butter and jelly. Googling myself and others makes me hungry, and I suspect the 18-year-olds in this prof's classes won't really be giving up their white bread diet, either.
Professor Brabazon’s concerns echo the author Andrew Keen’s criticisms of online amateurism. In his book The Cult of the Amateur, Keen says: “To-day’s media is shattering the world into a billion personalised truths, each seemingly equally valid and worthwhile.”
We here at reason just love and respect Andrew Keen, of course.
GILMORE | January 14, 2008, 5:48pm | #
dhex | January 14, 2008, 5:03pm | #
the issue seems to be, at least in part, is how do you teach people to build a good bullshit detector?
Mikey gets a cookie. :)
This is basically the point as far as i see it. Bullshit detection is a declining skill.
I've spent the last 11 years as a research analyst, and i can observe that people trained for this kind of job pre-internet and those post-internet differ in this respect.
People who grew up with a more 'paper based' source-identification training tend to be better when it comes to evaluating the utility or relevance of any given piece of information. Those who grew up with an internet-based research approach tend to be more 'flat' as far as how they evaluate information. Whatever they find tends to be included. Or, they'll weight information inappropriately based on misperception of significance.
It's more like trolling vs. fishing. Volume or 'availability' often equates to significance. They have a lot of trouble seeing the gaps in information and understanding how to go after them or see between them. They have a lack of appreciation of the difference between regurgitating 'existing consensus' vs. analysis, where you are connecting dots between related pieces of information.
I also have a lot of contact with teachers - my friends and family being almost exclusively acedemics - and they share the same feedback about highschool/early college kids these days. they are more savvy about baseline use of internet to gather some facts, but slower at developing filters that allow them to critically evaluate things.
I certainly dont blame wikipedia, and think that it's all invaluable stuff, but the problem may lie less in the 'transferability' of information sources, as much as the ability to read and understand things.
to cut it all short... to quote 2 of my highschool-teacher friends = '60%+ of the papers they receive share whole paragraphs of identical information' - because kids are more 'cut and pasting' than reading and writing.
the 'cut and paste' idea is the problem. There is a declining focus on ability to digest, internalize, and create a unique argument based on sources you find yourself that are specially-suited to the question asked. The exercise of defining a goal, reviewing and vetting sources, and writing critical analysis is sometimes ultimately more important a pedagogical exercise than simply "churning" data gleaned from a few hours in front of a computer.
Of course, those few hours in front of a computer a necessary as well... but there's nothing like the satisfaction of being the one person who actually read the 'footnoted' book, as opposed to simply quoting/referencing it.
Stevo Darkly | January 14, 2008, 10:16pm | #
So much to say:
1:
When books had to be handwritten by carefully trained monks, you knew that what you were getting had been properly vetted and peer-reviewed. But if if this newfangled "printing press" allows any Tom, Dick or Harry to get published, there will no longer be anything reliable about the printed word.
You may already know this, Jennifer, but your satire there comes pretty close to the historical truth. I've read that when the printing press was invented, the Roman Catholic Church was very wary of it -- in fact, tried to have it suppressed -- because the printing press made it so much easier to disseminate a particular kind of minisinformation, which the church called
heresy.
Note to people who don't know me: This is not a gratuitous swipe at anyone's church. I'm a Catholic myself. This is just to show that some forms of human misjudgment are eternal.
In fact ...
2. At Saint Louis University, I took a course from a Jesuit named Walter Ong. "Technology of the Word," I think it was called. About how the technology used to store and and transmit information affects the way a culture thinks.
And here I learned that Plato in his day was very critical of an increasingly popular technology called
writing. Because people would use it as a crutch -- they'd keep track of knowledge and facts by writing them down instead of keeping them in their heads. And as a result, no one would truly "know" anything.
3. I am unconvinced that the Internet is significantly more prone to error than any other medium.
Print has long enjoyed an unearned credibility. Because of all the trouble it takes to print something, people have come to assume that information is more credible simply because it
is printed.
But remember what George Orwell said: "Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper ... "
And my own experience with public relations confirms what Brian Doherty once said: "Almost every time I read a newspaper story about a topic of which I have personal knowledge, or about an event that I've witnessed, I find errors--sometimes in minor details, sometimes in key ones. Almost everyone I've asked about this says the same. But our knowledge of journalistic error in a few specific cases doesn't translate into a strong general skepticism."
I don't think the Internet is any more prone to error and misinformation than the more traditional media. However, I think the Internet is
much, much better than the traditional media at
correcting misinformation. Online, it's much easier to find a correction, a rebuttal, or a clarification of a dubious statement. Newspapers and magazine, on the other hand, acknowledge only a tiny fraction of their errors, usually in some hard-to-find cranny in tiny type. And I don't think I've
ever heard a television news show issue a retraction of an error.
4. Some skepticisim toward Wikipedia and other online sources of information is always warranted, of course. But students should learn to be no less wary of statements found in newspapers, books, magazines, encyclopedias or broadcast media. Singling out Google or Wikipedia for suspicion just gives those older media more unearned credibility.
(Although I will say I was very surprised at this, while browsing through Richard Dawkins'
The God Delusion this weekend: I read a description of some appalling behavior by GW Bush, mocking a death row prisoner, and upon checking the footnote, I found that Dawkins' cited source was a Wikipedia article. I would think he could have cited other sources that are at least perceived as more reliable.)
The key is to be aware that any source of information could be in error, and the more important the truth of a statement is to you, the more sources you should consult to verify it. The instructor should give this admonishment to his students, and then turn them loose on the Intertubes.
