Let’s all be critical consumers of information on the Internet–even though it’s very Liberal Snowflake-y–it could help the soulless Republicans among us in ways we can’t imagine!/Image credit: Licensed Adobe Stock, noam.
Ahoy, Trumpist travel aficionados! We want to take you on a cruise–yes, endless shrimp plates, shuffleboard, and sad discotheques that are always empty–on a trip around the Internet Information Sea. This is a dangerous place, teeming, as it is, with pirates out to fool us with their disinformation and misinformation that we consume under threat of a stroke of their sabers. Any old scallywag can throw up a website, and in the early days of the Web, we all hoped this would lead to the democratization of the information-availability. Whoops–misjudged that one! What really happened was the landfillization of information, meaning anyone can and does make a site–millions per day–and pass it off as sound fact when it’s the equivalent of a used hypodermic needle on the sidewalk. People now sidestep the gatekeepers–highly educated book editors, fact-checkers, you know, people with a brain cell or two–these Internet info buccaneers–on their mission to be heard, because they are convinced of their own right to yak on every subject. It’s every vigilante-of-the-sea for himself. So let’s take a cautious, careful trip to identify the information we can trust.
You Say Disinformation, I Say Misinformation
Let’s call the whole thing off, as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers sang in George and Ira Gershwin’s classic song from the film, Shall We Dance. But we’re not ready to call the whole thing off just yet. We still have a shred–just one, though–of hope that you red-state reactionaries can get this. Disinformation and misinformation mean the same thing, but we at Spread Your Right Wings (SYRW) use them in this article to mean two slightly different things. They’re both wrong information, but we’re going to use “disinformation” to mean wrong information meant to mislead, while “misinformation” we’ll use to mean information that wasn’t malicious in intent, but effectively is, for it misleads by nature of its incorrectness.
As you, our faithful readers, know we love to pull together different texts to make a point here at SYRW, so for each of our stops on this journey, veering and swerving through a network of hook-handed information-marauders, we’ll provide excerpts from texts that helped us think about this issue of assessing the validity of information in the Wild, Wild, West waters of the World Wide Web.
Related: See what Tomi Lahren said about her daily hair-care regimen.
Yo Ho, Yo Ho, A Pirate’s Life Isn’t for Me
Now, everyone got a proper rest in their cabins and some yummy breakfast in the cruise ship’s buffet, we trust. Good, because we’re going to need our strength to avoid the pirates venturing out from their island homes to sack and pillage the world with their lies and flotsam-jetsam-excuse for information
The first port we’re going to stop at is Nichols Nest, named for Tom Nichols, author of The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters. He writes in this must-read: “Yet rather than usher in a new era of enlightenment, the Internet has helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today everyone knows everything: with only a quick trip to WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on equal footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism.”
And it’s not, dear readers. It’s just reality that there are experts on, say, voter suppression. Some people have spent years studying that topic and your random opinions, formed after ingesting the grog that Internet info-pirates encouraged you to drink, aren’t as valuable as theirs. We’re Republicans! Aren’t we supposed to be good at elitism?! Why are we letting intellectual potty-mouth bandit screaming banshees like Tomi Lahren or Alex Jones–who are just pissed as all get out that their white heterosexist patriarchal positions are being challenged–tell us what to think?
“Thar She Blows, a Hump Like a Snow Hill
T’is Moby Dick!” So wrote Herman Melville in his sea-faring classic. Moby Dick, the great, white whale herself, is the behemoth of the collective dis/misinformation waiting to be clicked on online today. But we know how to sail a cruise ship, so we’re going to just veer around her, because we are aware that there’s valuable information in this sea too. That’s the rub. The pirates can’t make us walk the -plank of dis/misinformation as long as we say, “no,” to their deceitful campaigns.
And: Three Trump admin stars audition to decorate your home.
Welcome to our next stop, Helfand’s Harbor, named for David Helfand of Columbia University. He wrote a 2016 article in The Human Prospect entitled, “The Dawn of the Misinformation Age.”
In that article, he wrote: “In my view, the more insidious aspect of our bit-saturated culture is that it is necessary to filter the incoming barrage of information and it is now far too easy to filter it to conform to one’s pre-existing beliefs.” Enter Fox News, Infowars, Breitbart and the rest of right-wing media info-pirate culture, trying to jump aboard our cruise ship of knowledge-seekers. Whatever–we have citrus fruit, which they desperately need to stave off the scurvy making their bones hurt and their gums bleed. We’re not afraid of them, right Alt-intellectually-curious-ites? Right!
Don’t Abandon Ship!
Our next stop is the port known as Keentown, after author Andrew Keen, who wrote The Cult of the Amateur. It’s an argument against the vigilante–pirate!–nature of the free-for-all Internet. We love it!
A wonderfully curmudgeonly elitist, like us here at SYRW, we’re not gonna lie, Keen bemoans the “I’m-a-writer-because-I-poorly-typed-something-into-my-Wix-site” aspect of the Internet. Yeah…no, you’re not. Kundera, Rimbaud, Arundhati Roy, David E. Kelly and lots of others with innate talent who honed their skills as authors for years are writers. To call everyone who throws something on the Internet a typist, even, is pushing it, and devalues the skill of typing, actually. That’s how low-quality and often morally reprobate a lot of this rubbish you see on the Internet is. But as we said, we can twist and turn pass these skull-and-crossbones purveyors of dis/misinformation. We’re in a giant, tacky cruise ship, after all, with a motor the size of Connecticut. All the pirates have are tattered sails with no winds of informational weight to propel them.
“In the digital world’s never-ending stream of unfiltered, user-generated content things are indeed not often what they seem. Without editors, fact-checkers, administrators, or regulators to monitor what is being posted, we have no one to vouch for the reliability or credibility of the content we read or see on sites like Xanga, Six Apart, Yelp, Odeo, and countless others,” wrote Keen in Cult. Ok, so the references are a little dated. But the quote as a whole is timeless and timely, given the Trump era, when unscrupulous self-promoters label any fact they don’t like “Fake News” as fast as they can say the words, and an army of supporters, like us right-wingers, listen, smile, and nod like a bunch of dumb-asses.
Keen goes on to rightly point out that distinguishing “truth from fiction, genuine content from advertising, legitimate information from errors or outright deceit” is a constant challenge. But with some training–the first step of which is the intellectual humility to believe we have something to learn–we can learn to see from afar who are the shiny, clean. Carnival Cruise Ships and who are the rotting, lopsided, lurching pirate-vehicles.
We got this, right-of-center sailors. It’s a scary place, this unforgiving sea filled with boats of marauding pirates. But the Internet is here to stay, and we have to, each of us, learn to distinguish the wheat from the chaff. Doing a Google search and ingesting whatever nasty swill some toothless pirate hands you isn’t going to cut it. Just say no–to certain stuff.
What to Do, What to Do?
First, dear readers, we want you to get a dictionary– an analog, hard-copy one, like the Merriam-Webster, Just do it, even though your computer may have the Oxford English Dictionary full-text on it. We want you to do this, and part of judging the validity of sources is learning who you can trust, We care about you, conservative readers–you can trust us. This dictionary will help you see who uses words well online, and, if you’re putting words online, doing so with care.
Get or borrow from your local library A Journalist’s Guide to the Internet by Christopher Callahan. Not only is it an awesome handbook that will help you quickly judge what is quality information online, it’s written by a journalist of the highest caliber. Callahan was at the University of Maryland College Park’s Phillip Merrill College of Journalism when we were. It was (and is) a top-notch journalism program, and he was (and is, now at Arizona State University) a top-notch scholar.
Also get or borrow from the library, The Truth Matters: A Citizen’s Guide to Separating Facts From Lies and Stopping Fake News In Its Tracks by Bruce Bartlett.
Get a notebook and pen to jot down your thoughts as you critically assess and weed out the aye-aye-captain good information versus walk-the-plank-matey dis/misinformation. Some thought the Internet would be like a public library–where curious people thoughtfully pursue the acquisition of knowledge conveyed by people who wrote because they knew what they were talking about and had to prove that over and over before they got book deals. Uh…not so much. The Internet is more like a back-alley of thieves and miscreants waiting to feed you a bunch of bull, while rats and roaches nip at your heels as they splash about, scurrying through the puddles of urine and god-knows-what-else around you, But you can beat the pirates if you have the proper tools. And this is just the first sea-based sojourn to begin our helping you learn to do that, and learning a lot of our own, too, with you on that journey.
We at Spread Your Right Wings generally don’t like people, the Internet, or interacting with people on the Internet. Seek out someone—in person—to talk to and laugh with about this article. Check back with us as we continue to mock the right wing. Follow us on Twitter at @worstaltlife join our Facebook group, and follow us on Instagram at @worstaltlife. If you simply must get in touch with us, DM us through our Facebook group. Also, please, please see the disclaimer in our About section.
© 2018 Akbar Khan
