Alright Gang, what shall we discuss in week five?
WELL, after another day (not Tuesday since there wasn’t a reading) of reading from our marvelous prize winner’s book, Verified, we were given even more “gifts” on how to conquer our little friend, the internet.
Previously we got introduced into beloved acronyms like SIFT and CRAAP that helped navigate sources through a series of steps. Stopping, investigating, finding coverage and tracing the claim. The backbone I would call it of this book when it comes to debunking the internet and its plethora of idiotic claims all over the World Wide Web.
There introductions of juicy little tips, one called Lateral Reading (within chapter four), and the other called Reading the Room (chapter five). These two tips kinda seep back into their beloved child I had mentioned, yes SIFT, but even done individually can bring out some good information or help with identifying what you may be looking at.
Alrighty then, Reading the Room it is. Reading the room is a general term of course, and simply means looking at what you have when you first enter, just as you might do with articles you are looking into. This usually helps bring you to one of five theories that the article might be portraying as, hence, reading the room. Competing, meaning there are multiple explanations; majority/minority, the majority of the population supports one theory, but there is still a small group that gives to the other; consensus, the rarest but shows that the majority is probably right; uncertain, just as it reads, there is too much to determine the best option; and Fringe, viewpoints that are not accepted by any, but some how still get out.
The big thing that game from chapter five is this little thing called trust compression. Trust compression is the idea that you are looking into something, and they say it is x, when in actuality it might be y. Do to simply following their conclusion, you then feel as if you can’t trust this source anymore since they had messed up and caused you to be stuck with a handful of crap, and no, not the good craap.
Now that you have a small understanding of types of theories are out there, and what trust compression does to us on the daily, we can move into lateral reading. Lateral reading is the idea of when you click on an article, before you even dive in, open a new browser, maybe even a few, and search the web of the same story. Let’s say one piece is claiming to say that energy emissions is actually going to be up 662%. Instead of simply going “wow, yeah you’re right!”, and then ruining your coworkers down with your nonsense, go look into what other sources have to say. This would be held within the investigation/finding other sources section of SIFT. By lateral reading, you might be able to determine whether a source is lying or not simply by what other sources may have to say. Whether they entire site is a hot pile of crap, or their claim is, lateral reading will take your vision and expand it widely (just as lateral goes east west so will your brain) so that you can determine whether the article/source is worth looking into before you even start.
Comments
2 responses to “Goodness, It’s Week Five”
I love how you emphasize the connections that lateral reading and reading the room have to SIFT, therefore emphasizing the interconnectedness of this book as a whole. I think talking about Reading the Room is really important when talking about an article or the Internet as a whole because if you don’t know what opinions are more popular and which might not be, we can make some mistakes in what we believe. However, becoming cynical about every piece of information we read on the Internet very likely leads to trust compression. Trust compression is the feeling that since one source might have produced inaccurate information, you cannot trust that source or any related sources on that topic anymore. At its worst, this leads to a total cynicism in almost everything on the Internet.
Your post was so fun to read, while also being informative. I appreciated your mention and emphasis on trust compression. I find trust compression to be an everyday issue we have all faced a least once. The idea that a friend, coworker, or family member will compress the means of a particular issue to limit the number of differences between the options is a common incident that happens far too often. This usually causes you to make a decision without knowing the true facts behind each option, because “Hey, my good friend told me they are all the same, so why does it matter?”… well, it obviously matters because there are differences behind the compression of the options. With all that to say, I appreciate that you touch on how to avoid that issue. Overall, great job on this post!