The new year dawns in the Netherlands. The breakfast conversation was about the Newscheckers site in Leiden and about the ongoing "News or Nonsense" exhibition at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.
Signs are pointing to 2018 being the year that we embrace the information check habit: without thinking about it do a double check of the trustworthiness of the factuality and the framing of any piece of information that we consume in our daily lives. If the information will influence us, if we will act upon it, we will finally have learned to automatically stop, look, and listen: the same sort of skills that we internalized when we learned to cross the street as youngsters.
For me, 2018 is the year that I make peace with how costly that information quality is. On factuality: I spend hours reviewing papers and checking sources. On framing: I devote a lot of time to looking for resources in which key concepts and processes are explained in ways that my students would easily understand them. And too often I am prevented from working on factuality and framing by worrying about the consequences of missing something or making the wrong choices.
It is costly in terms of time and effort just to choose words. I need words to convey to the students in my information science course that the world is dependent on their skills and their professional standards: anyone whose work involves responsibility for communication must devote time and effort to information quality and must take constant care to inform, rather than manipulate.
What is the name for our era? I don't say "post-truth". A era can call itself "post-truth", but that's asking us to accept that it is fundamentally different than whatever came before---the "pre-post-truth" era. The moment we stop to reflect on how the evidence proves that we have shifted from truth to post-truth, we are engaging in truth seeking. Post-truth goes poof.
I don't say "fake news" era. I grew up with the National Enquirer readily available at the supermarket check out counter, with its bright and interesting pictures of UFOs and celebrity divorces. That content wasn't there to contribute to building my mental model of reality, any more than Pacman. "Fake news" has always been there.
My search for the right words continues. I am using the book Weaponized Lies by Daniel Levitin for the first time this year in order to teach critical thinking skills. Levitin uses words like "counterknowledge" and "misinformation". These are important terms, but they imply the existence of a intelligent adversary intentionally misleading us. It is important to defend against these forces. However, the idea that the problem is people putting effort into "weaponization" overlooks the less dramatic, and less easily identify problem, of reasoning from shaky, half remembered information sources or using flawed logic to build arguments.
Now at the end of the first day of 2018, I am staring at Weaponized Lies next to my keyboard, wishing there were shortcuts---that I didn't have to start from the bottom finding the words to talk about the importance of information quality, even before I start talking about information quality itself, and researching how to build safer more equitable information environments.
There are no shortcuts. The only thing that we can hope for is that we can routinize information check. Make it a habit.
I even stopped for a moment to dream about a rising demand for information quality creating new jobs. We need professionals who are able to help us monitor information without sliding into suppressing free speech and imposing censorship. This is the direction in which our knowledge society should grow.
I thought I remembered reading an article online that discussed 2018 as the "Information Year". Now, for the life of me, I cannot find it. It takes so long to track and keep track of sources. My first step in making peace with the cost of information quality: I end this blog post by admitting I have no proof for my thesis that 2018 is the year we embrace the information check habit. The title is instead an expression of hope that we can move in that direction.
