“He exhorted America to ‘turn on, tune in and drop out’ and claimed to have discovered a new primary colour—which he called gendale. Now Timothy Leary, the eccentric spokesman of the 1960s counter-culture, is to become the subject of a Hollywood movie.”
A “fact” was born, and despite Stoneman’s petitions, it remained online without correction for three months. Fortunately for us, Stoneman’s purpose is social experimentation and humor—looking at his Wikipedia user page, it’s clear that he spends a significant amount of time clearing out and correcting gullible.info entries on Wikipedia.org for the greater good.
Gullible.info is just a small example of what someone can do on a low budget to inject ignorance into culture. The fictitious color gendale went from Stoneman’s site through Wikipedia’s editorial process, made it through The Guardian’s fact-checking process, and stayed there for three months. The only person not presenting the discovery of gendale as fact in this scenario is the source.
Search alone won’t help if we’re unable to find the most reliable and accurate sources of information, or we’re unable to draw accurate conclusions from the data we’ve found. We also must be able to think critically about the information we’ve received, and use the best tools we can to process the information effectively. The Internet is the single biggest creator of ignorance mankind has ever created, as well as the single biggest eliminator of that ignorance. It’s our ability to filter that eliminates the former and empowers the latter.
We must judge good sources through filters such as: what is the intent of the author? Is it to inform you, or is it to make a point? How does the information make you feel? Is your intent in consuming this information to confirm your beliefs or find the truth? Are you capable of viewing the information objectively?
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, partnered with the Aspen Institute, provides a good overview of critical thinking skills. In the Knight Commission’s report[77] (available for free online, and a good read if you’re interested), they describe this skill as the ability to determine “message quality, veracity, credibility, and point of view, while considering potential effects or consequences of messages.”
But the skills to apply these kinds of filters alone aren’t enough. Data literacy must also include the ability to do something with that raw information—to process it in some way. In an era where spreadsheets help us to make the grandest of decisions, we must have basic statistical literacy and fluency in the tools that allow us to make sense out of numerical data, not just words and ideas.
Understanding how to use a spreadsheet like Microsoft’s Excel, Apple’s Numbers, or Google’s Spreadsheets will help you sort through and see the facts better. There is also a variety of other tools that move beyond the spreadsheet that make it easy to sort through information; these include Google’s Fusion Tables, Socrata, and Factual. They take time and patience to learn, but when coupled with the enormous amount of public data that’s now available online, they give us incredible new opportunities to start seeing our world more clearly through the lens of data.
Creation
Data literacy also means the ability to communicate and exchange information with others. Knowing how to publish information and the ability to take feedback are both critical skills necessary for data literacy. Tools like Blogger, Wordpress, and Typepad, and the technologies that power them, like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—these aren’t just tools for keeping a personal diary; they’re tools critical to digital literacy and expression.
Content creation and digital self-expression, through the creation of text, audio, or video content, are critical components of a healthy information diet. Content creation and publication are a critical part of literacy because they help us to understand better what we say, both through the internal reflection it takes to make our findings comprehensible to others, and through the public feedback we get from putting our content in front of others.
The creation of this book—the writing and editing of it—has given me more clarity on the message within it. Many paragraphs have been tested: I’ve taken paragraphs that I thought may be controversial, copied them into Google+ and Facebook, and pursued dialog with those people who were willing to engage with me. It’s helped me strengthen some of my arguments, see things more clearly, and more importantly, recognize when I’m being nonsensical.
Synthesis
The year 1999 was probably the most anticipated in nerd history: the year George Lucas returned to debut the latest movie in his Star Wars franchise—Episode I: The Phantom Menace. I was down in Albany, Georgia when it came out, my dad, my cousin Wallace, and I were all headed to see it.
After the movie was over, Wallace and I leapt into a discussion about the movie, praising the special effects and expressing our overall annoyance at Jar Jar Binks, now one of the least-liked movie characters in cinematic history.[78] We discussed the plot line and how we thought the other two announced movies would go.
My dad, a therapist for over 40 years by then, broke in. “I don’t understand why it had to be so violent. It seemed to me like they had a forum, and all kinds of structures in place for conflict resolution. Why did people have to keep going on attacking one another when they probably could have just sat down and talked it out?”
Wallace and I rolled our eyes, and Wallace quipped: “It’s called Star Wars, Uncle Ray. Not Star Dialog. That’d make for a boring movie.”
Dad was right, though. In an ideal world, we’d all strive for the great synthesis of ideas, and it’s a shame that more of us are concerned with winning an argument than we are getting the best out of one another. The problem is, Star Dialog just wouldn’t make for a particularly entertaining movie (though I have to wonder if it would have been any less entertaining than The Phantom Menace).
The last component of data literacy is synthesis. Once we retrieve information, filter it, and publish it, we must be able to synthesize the ideas and concepts of others back into our ideas. Synthesis isn’t entertaining, and we’d all rather argue or be entertained. View publication as a chance to get feedback and a chance to make your ideas and thoughts better—an opportunity for education as much as an opportunity to educate.
These critical thinking and data literacy concepts aren’t skills you’ll learn simply from reading the pages in a chapter of this book. It’s a skill that takes years, lots of practice, and constant refinement to develop. But just like a regular workout, these skills are good for your health—they’ll keep you living a richer, fuller life.
Chapter 8. Attention Fitness
My friend Rajneesh and I plodded down the pathway next to the C&O Canal on our 18th mile of a 20 mile run. For the first two hours, we talked about work or technology, politics or how our weeks had been, but after the first 10 miles our minds began to care less about the weekly minutia of our lives and more about our ability to survive. We’d been at it for about four hours, and about two hours before, we’d lost our ability to carry on cogent conversation.
77
http://www.knightcomm.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Informing_Communities_Sustaining_Democracy_in_the_Digital_Age.pdf
78
I have no data to back myself up on this, and the data probably doesn’t exist. But trust me, Jar Jar ruined childhood memories of