The Online Photographer

["Open Mike" is the often off-topic Editorial page of...hey look, a squirrel!]

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I'm back, and I feel properly energized by my Summer Work-On-Something-Else-For-a-Change Staycation.

So listen up for a  sec; I think this is interesting. For Friday's "Social Media" post, Reader "Not THAT Ross Cameron" recommended a link from a site called "The Conversation":

"When critical thinking isn’t enough: to beat information overload, we need to learn 'critical ignoring'," by Ralph Hertwig and Anastasia Kozyreva of the Max Planck Institute, Sam Wineburg of Stanford, and Stephan Lewandowsky of the University of Bristol.

That one led me to a second related article:

"To navigate the dangers of the web, you need critical thinking—but also critical ignoring" by Sam Wineburg.

If you're going to read those, I recommend reading the second one first.

Now, these are both easy reads. They're both written in plain, jargon-free English. They're both short: "When Critical Thinking..." is only 1,096 words, and "To navigate..." is only 794 words. Both are broken up by big friendly subheads...

My brain = oatmeal
...And yet, it took me forever to read them, and I read them in a fractured, disrupted way, almost like I didn't know how to, well, read. Which is funny. I'm in the habit of quickly scanning things that people link in the comments, just to be sure we're not going off the rails, and that's how I first approached the one Ross linked. I skimmed it rapidly, and kept getting distracted, both by the inline links (through which I discovered the second article) and other things. After skimming the second one, I went back to working on comments, then found I was still thinking about the article, so I rummaged around TOP until I found it again and went back to read it later. By that time I felt like I am a perfect example of what they're talking about: the low-attention-span reader who approaches "finds" on the Web superficially and uncritically.

By contrast, what I've been away doing for the last few days is the opposite. I'm working on my book. I made a lot of progress, and got immersed in it. I even had a great conversation with a veteran reader of the kind of book it is, which was illuminating and helpful (thanks Sue). The funny thing about writing the book is that it tends to dominate my mind when I'm working on it. I'm sure I don't think about it all day long, but it feels like I do. It's close work, and consuming work. And I love that. What it does, really, is that it allows me to have a long attention span—a very long one.

I'd like to write books for the rest of my life.

It's not that TOP is failing—it's not. Social Security is coming to the rescue next month like the cavalry galloping over the hill in an old Western. It should keep me afloat for a few more years. But the trend lines are clear, and it's clear that I need to figure out what to do next, just in case I live for "a couple three" more decades (the thing about life is that one day you'll be dead, maybe, but you never know when. That makes it hard to plan).

This book, the one I'm working on, is going to fail. It's highly unlikely I'll write a successful book first time out of the gate. It's unlikely that I'll earn minimum wage for the hours I put into it, much less that it will fund a second one. Even John Camp, AKA John Sandford, had to write three practice books before he worked out how to do it. And he's good—he's now had 187 #1 bestsellers (warning, that could be an exaggeration. The real number is probably just as impressive—35? 40?—but I can't find it). I don't even know if I'm good yet. Could well be that I'm not. And making time to write this book is like getting blood out of a turnip, for the very reason I mentioned above—because it needs to dominate my mind when I working on it, making it difficult to concentrate on anything else. When I work on the book project, my mind goes blank for TOP.

Note that other people may be able to multitask effectively, and write a book in the midst of the innumerable interruptions and distractions of life, and alongside multiple other quotidian aspirations. I know a lot of people do that. I'm just talking about how it works for me.

But boy, that's what I want. I want to get up in the morning, and have nothing to do all day but write on one project. Half a page or five pages, infinite room for revising, no specific deadlines. I might die early and I might die late, but if I could do that for a while I'd die happy. These last five or six days have been so much fun. The problem is, how to get there from here.

Snopes
Back to those two articles from The Conversation. They make many interesting points. One of them is that students are typically taught "critical thinking" in schools—close reading and textual analysis—and that this is perfect for those who are trying to hijack your attention. It means that our reflexive tendency is to read fake articles carefully when trying to evaluate their trustworthiness. Actually, the authors say, what you should really do is "lateral reading"—"examine the site by leaving it." That is, look for signals and telltales elsewhere that might bolster or refute the site's or the article's claim to being true.

Another defense mechanism for the Web is to have known sites that you trust. I have a handful of newspaper sites and magazine sites that I trust. I have a pretty good feel for famous organizations and where they currently stand in their arc. I know the biases of certain sites and often have a general idea how they do or do not accord with my own beliefs.

For example, I read the other day that last year there were 13,000 weddings in the USA that cost $1,000,000 or more. I didn't look into that myself, because I read it in The Atlantic, and that's a source I trust. Even if they make a mistake from time to time, my guess is that they've done the fact-checking.

One of the sites I trust is the one that should be everybody's first stop when they encounter an extraordinary claim on the Web: Snopes. "Snopes, formerly known as the Urban Legends Reference Pages, is a fact-checking website. It has been described as a 'well-regarded reference for sorting out myths and rumors' on the Internet. The site has also been seen as a source for both validating and debunking urban legends and similar stories in American popular culture" (Wikipedia). Snopes has not been without its own problems, but it does a great job of fact-checking common "memes" and claims. I can't tell you how many times friends and relatives have passed along nonsense to me that has already been explained and evaluated on Snopes. I read the site periodically just for entertainment and general knowledge. Quote Investigator and the Annenberg Public Policy Center's FactCheck.org are other good ones.

Finally, I think I have a good nose for ulterior motives. But I'm not smug about that—there have been times I've been fooled, times I've been gullible, and I'm very aware of those lapses. I'm not immune. At the very least, though, people should be well aware that powerful special interests are engaging in coordinated disinformation campaigns on the Web, which then get amplified in the echo chambers. So, if something looks suspicious, it might be. Even in the absence of evil intent, there are a whole lot of enthusiastic liars out there.

Anyway, read those two articles if they sound interesting. But clear your mind first, hit "Reader View," and focus. Don't do what I did. It's too trickster-ironic to read an article about attentiveness without giving it proper attention!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Rob de Loe: "You need to take more short staycations because you come back loaded! This was excellent. 'Critical ignoring' is such a simple but powerful idea. I sorta-kinda use it already, but not enough and not consciously.

"My main contribution to the post was going to be to suggest the Bielefeld Academic Search Enginer (BASE) for people who want to find relevant open-access scientific publications. I just discovered it today and was going to post the link for readers because it looks extremely useful, and it can be hard for people outside universities to access published science. Whoa Nelly! I just found it. How do I know it's any good? I hopped off the site and did a quick search for external information about it. I then did some test searches on topics I know. Seems legit, so here's the link."

"The impact of this post will also go beyond me. I'm going to integrate the articles you linked, and the idea of critical ignoring, into the first-year course I teach in Winter. My students need this idea. Thank you!"

Mike replies: Don't thank me, thank Ross Cameron!

KeithB: "Be careful, because Snopes does not want you to even trust them, and have several fake articles, notably that Mr. Ed was actually a painted zebra."

Not THAT Ross Cameron: "Thanks for sharing Mike, Glad to be of service to Global TOP HQ. I think the TL:DR is that our time is precious, so we need to learn how to spend it wisely when giving attention to the interwebz. The Conversation is becoming one of those sites that I trust for information. It is published by academics, so we still get their biases, but there seems to be less of an ideological bent behind the publication itself. And all the best to Rob with teaching his classes."