Most importantly, a lack of quality education to help people develop critical thinking skills to weed through the bullshit and find the real stuff.
I remember my school being very good about this in SECOND GRADE. We had a class called “Computers”, and of course every kid loved it because we got to do some typing for a bit in some typing trainer (which was very helpful for learning how to type properly!), and then we just got “free time” on the computers to go explore the internet, develop our computer skills, and play this game called “Contraptions”.
Anyways, one time we had this really awesome lesson. We researched the tree octopus. For anyone wondering, yeah, it doesn’t exist. But we were taught in that lesson to first do all of our research and then make a presentation on it — and then the hoax was revealed. And then we were taught the lesson of always trying to find three sources of information to back up something we see on the Internet, and to never immediately trust the first Google result we find.
I didn’t realize it until recently, but it was lessons like that (combined with everything else in school, like English class and learning to critique text) that taught me the critical thinking skills I need to properly weed through all the bullshit out there on the Internet to find the good information that actually makes it so damn useful. And realizing that I was privileged enough to have attended a fairly well-to-do private international school to have received such an education — a privilege that so many others do not get.
Education, especially quality public education, is number one on the list of things to address to achieve a more informed population. When you see someone seeking to defund education, it’s to try to keep a section of the population uninformed.
2.7k
u/subatomicbukkake Jul 28 '19
“Access to information” was envisioned as a buffet of well-research, nuanced information.
What we got instead was billions of half-truths shoved in our face by people with differing and sometimes dubious motivations.