In our online world, increasingly dominated by social media, feelings are more important than facts.
This is the assertion of Hossein Derakhshan, an idea that I first encountered on Screened Off: The Dangers of the Insular Web.
As an online teacher, I always considered video to be an excellent tool to engage learners. But do we understand how this engagement impacts learning and thinking?
Streaming video was enabled with the spread of high-speed internet, and more often now, we consume this emotion-driven form of content over text. This makes the Internet far more like watching television than reading a book or an article.
Increasingly, our online time is spent inside apps, not on the open web. According to Hossein Derakhshan, a blogger and writer based in Iran,
“Like TV it now increasingly entertains us, and even more so than television it amplifies our existing beliefs and habits. It makes us feel more than think, and it comforts more than challenges. The result is a deeply fragmented society, driven by emotions, and radicalized by lack of contact and challenge from outside. This is why Oxford Dictionaries designated “post-truth” as the word of 2016: an adjective “relating to circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals.””
Subject matter that we consume inside apps, like Facebook, entertains us. Corporate owners design these spaces to keep us there, because the longer we stay, the more money they make. Negativity does not encourage engagement, so we are presented with “feel good” content.
Instead of engaging in dialog around important social issues, and reading text, where “facts” can be challenged, more and more, we choose to spend our time in the comfort of our apps, accepting the diet of targeted, advertisement-driven mush, fed to us by the algorithm that controls our content.
Watching video (television) instead of reading text means that we become victims of those who have mastered this one-way, emotion driven form of media, and we become passive consumers of those who grab our attention instead of citizens engaged in discourse around facts.
How does this impact our understanding of our world?
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Featured image shared by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash
All of the posts in this series can be found here:
3/10 – How the “smart phone” and mobile apps have changed the way we interact online
4/10 – Historical perspective – the co-created open web to corporately owned platforms
5/10 – Algorithms: What’s controlling what you see and read?
6/10 – Information Literacy: What will your lesson plan look like now?
8/10 – Popularity over Importance: Celebrity culture in a time of wicked world problems
10/10 – Escape Your [Filter] Bubble
This post is part of a 10 day posting challenge issued by Tina Zita. You can’t be a connected educator if you don’t contribute. Sometimes we need a nudge to remember that if nobody shares, nobody learns. Thanks Tina!
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A caution about this post: I am a learner, not an expert.
I have set out here to use my #10posts10days (#10days10posts) challenge to explore this area that deeply interests me, in an open way that lets others see what I am learning. If you know more than I do, please correct me if necessary, and share! If you have more questions, please post those in the comments too. Let’s learn more together.
All of the posts in this series can be found here: You Live in a Bubble
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