Now that we've spent some time learning about the physical stuff that makes our digital culture possible, this week we'll look more directly at that digital cultural landspace and specifically the ways in which digital platforms tend to steer us toward further division as a culture. However you feel about the outcome of the 2016 presidential election and the ongoing scandals, tensions, protests, investigations, you probably will agree that our nation is pretty divided right now. One reason for that is the way that news shared through social media steers us toward information that simply confirms our beliefs. You can see this illustrated starkly in the Wall Street Journal's "Blue Feed / Red Feed" simulator.
Consider the fact that 59 percent of the articles shared on Facebook have not been read or even clicked on. This means if you see a friend share an article in your feed, there's only a 41% chance that that friend has actually viewed the article, much less read it, evaluated its credibility, and deemed it important enough to lend their authority to it by sharing it in the context of a Facebook feed.
This is either a cause or a symptom of something else I've noticed in political discussions: it's not about political ideas, it's about which team you're on. If you're not on my team, my only goal is to make you look bad, and vice versa. This is a mental shortcut: policies and ideologies can be confusing, so if I can just recognize it as a good thing because it comes from my team, then I can move on. Facebook encourages this kind of thinking, but it hardens our sense of group loyalty and turns us against one another.
What often happens when we share an article is, instead of hoping our friends see and learn from this information, we're hoping that our friends see us as the kind of person that reads that kind of thing. This plays a big part in our present age of "post-truth politics", and it's a depressing reality for those of us who entered the digital age at the peak of hype about its revolutionary potential for transformative political action.
But maybe we can do something about it! Like most things, that hope starts with education, so we're going to do something about the trenchant polarization of the web by contributing to the Digital Polarization Initiative. This is a student-powered fact-checking site -- think of it as a cross between Snopes.com and Wikipedia -- where you'll develop your digital critical literacy by getting to the bottom of dubious claims that have been shared in social media and researching and explaining your discoveries.
This week will be another busy one: you'll work simultaneously on the Making the Web a Better Place project as well as another DGST101.net module focusing on Digital Culture.
To start getting acquainted with the intellectual context and terminology for Digital Polarization, watch this lecture by Michael Caulfield of WSU Vancouver who is the project leader for DigiPo.io. He came to UMW a couple years ago to talk about the project and some of the bigger problems we're facing in the digital world. One of his most interesting claims here is that we should replace the "CRAAP" method for analyzing the credibility of information on the web.
After watching that video, join a conversation in Slack #general-chat about some of Caulfield's claims and techniques. I'll seed that conversation with some discussion questions that you can reply to in threads like we did before.
To learn more about this terminology and the methods behind it, start reading through the online textbook "Web Literacy for Student Fact Checkers". We'll eventually use the first four sections, 15 chapters in all, but start with the first 6 chapters for today. Chapters are relatively short, so this should take you 30 minutes or so.
The assignment page for this project includes a good deal of information, and I'll be supplementing this with a video or two this week. Your first task as a group will be to find a claim that you're going to be researching together. So review and discuss the sections, and let me know your top three choices by midnight tonight. I'll be with you in your group's Slack channel, so you can @ me there with your list.
I'll review these to make sure that you've got viable and interesting research questions and that there's no overlap between groups.
Finally, it's also time to work on another DGST101.net module, so with your Digipo group, browse the modules tagged "culture", and choose one to work on this week. Like before, you will be working on an individual project, but every one in your digipo group will be working on projects within the same module.
Make your selection as a group by Midnight, June 4, and start working on your Phase 1 for that module.