Welcome to the beginning of my ambitious mission: to spread awareness of the need for critical thinking skills in the general public beyond the limited population who have access to learning such skills (at A Level or university); and to make available and accessible resources and exercises that encourage these skills.
Why?
The world we find ourselves in is ever-more complicated and overwhelming. While most of us have been adapting and finding our feet, other, more insidious progress has been made in the utilisation of our data – leading both to personal convenience and targeted political content. The rise of ‘Fake News’ is only a small aspect of the general problem – a problem that, unfortunately, is not generally focused on. While targeted advertising might allow us to more easily find a product we desire (although, personally, I am no advocate of excessive consumerism; this post and this site are not about these things), targeted news content and political media has already been demonstrated to have a tangible effect on the beliefs and ideologies of populations.
Furthermore, our divisions are not only reinforced and artificially manufactured in partisan ways. The progress that has been made in equality and justice in the past century can often be undermined by content produced by those (individuals and institutions) who fear that their world-view is at stake. Research demonstrates (for example, Cass Sunstein’s Going to Extremes (Oxford University Press, 2009)) that, when a person is surrounded by others whose views are more extreme or polarised than their own are more likely to move in the direction of the extreme thinkers. In practice, this might look like a person who has been brought up in an environment that is prejudiced in an entrenched and non-explicit way being exposed to content and voices that argue for, perhaps, white supremacy; choosing to engage with and thus strengthen their beliefs about their perceived social hierarchy.
If we are surrounded – in life and on the Internet – by information that seeks to polarise us, divide us, make us feel safe in an in-group that should ultimately be non-existent (for example social hierarchies), then in order to protect ourselves it is perfectly natural to follow Sunstein’s pattern and align ourselves more closely with that group which has the loudest and most powerful voice. Such behaviours, when they act to further unnecessarily divide us, have no place in the Global Society.