Cerebral Spill
by Worlds_Gr8test_DeFective
I am calling for an Information Revolution. Gone are the days in the United States of America where you can turn on the evening news and be presented vetted facts based on the most significant events of the past 24 hours. Instead, we have a 24 hour for-profit news cycle spitting out half-baked, emotionally-loaded, biased information in an attempt to attract viewers.
Televised news is not the only guilty party. The Internet has grown from adolescence and made amazing strides in providing people with avenues and resources for analyzing a diverse plethora of information, along with a diverse population to have conversations. However, this too continues to be tainted with information manipulation and for-profit schemes to attract viewers on websites loaded with ads also based on targeted advertising.
We have become more connected yet grow further apart in large part due to information manipulation. When facts don't matter and reaffirming your own preconditioned biases becomes a priority, we have failed as critical thinkers.
In an age where we are approaching the vectors of automation and robotics being used to replace human beings, it becomes harder to argue against this when we prove time and time again how easy it is to suppress our ability to analyze, investigate, and correlate. When a human brain does not exercise its ability to do these things, then tell me... What is the difference between that and a playwork written into lines of code?
I have learned stumbling throughout my life to never present a problem without also having at least a framework to move towards a solution. For this I recommend offering courses starting in elementary/primary school that teach media literacy. Not just teaching how to cite sources and correlate information, but also detection of biased or emotionally loaded reporting, as this is often the first indication of attempting to distort and manipulate a narrative.
I wish this was an original idea from my mind, but it's already in action outside the United States. Finland is an example of how teaching media literacy as a deliberate and collectively supported educational method has already produced positive results. The United States already has private organizations in place that have a vested interest in making progress towards media literacy. However, this has proven to not produce substantial results and lags behind in collective priority compared to international counterparts. The Department of State's Bureau of Public Affairs has also executed an initiative to work towards factual reporting, but there are checks and balances in place for the government to regulate this.
I am not advocating for government regulation or the banishment of independent privatized media. I want a collective understanding that information is powerful and, if not properly analyzed and digested, can lead towards destruction. A successful democracy can only flourish when your citizens are educated and informed. We have amazing minds capable of amazing ideas; please do not allow others to take away your inherent freedom of thought.
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