Social Media and Truth (2-3)

Image credit: Jason Taellious (CC BY-SA 2.0)

How do you know what you know? Name one new thing you learned using a social media site today and explain why you believe it is true. What source did you use to acquire this information? At times, are social media sites reliable for obtaining credible information?

Gaining Knowledge

The epistemological question has challenged philosophers and scholars for millennia, and I am ill-equipped to tackle the question on a grand scale in a limited blog post; what follows is my commonsense approach to knowledge acquisition. I know what I know largely through the knowledge of personal discovery (knowledge gained firsthand and acquired by my own sensory experience) and second-hand knowledge acquired through communication with others, whether that be through reading, conversation, or some other form of communication.

These two categories of information acquisition—life experience and shared knowledge—take many different forms: reading (both in school and on my own; my parents and teachers instilled in me a love for the library); formal education (both firsthand—science experiments, for example—and secondhand—lectures, handouts, etc.); informal education, such as through television programs (Reading Rainbow, Sesame Street, educational programming, and non-educational shows); and other texts, both written and spoken, print and electronic. In particular, information I've gained through television and internet sources illustrates, as Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel (2010) note, "'what social scientists call 'incidental news acquisition'—when people learn about things they might not be interested in" (19). Secondhand knowledge can be connected to other learning as a limited form of verification through text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-world associations. I might read about a concept I've read about elsewhere, encounter an idea that corresponds to (or even contradicts) what I've experienced firsthand, or come across a thought that is similar to what I know of the world through secondhand knowledge.

That knowledge is constantly being tested and reevaluated and is subject to modification; urban myths give one example of how misinformation can be spread, and someone exposed to erroneous information (say, that there are only five senses) can modify that view when exposed to additional information (for example, that proprioception—the sense of balance—and interoception—internal senses such as hunger, fullness, or the need to use the bathroom—illustrate senses beyond sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch). In short, I know what I know through a combination of personal experience and shared knowledge, subject to questioning and revision through a skeptical attitude or the chance encounter with new or contradictory evidence about a specific claim.

Social Media as Teaching Tools

I learned today that, at least by one measure, the air quality in the U.S. has improved over the last nine years. Nitrogen dioxide, one significant air pollutant, has become a less prevalent constituent of the air Americans breathe, according to the Ozone Monitoring Instrument on a satellite operated by NASA. Kovach and Rosenstiel (2010) present a definition of truth based on Howie Schneider's work at SUNY at Stony Brook—"Truth is a statement of what is most probable in proportion to the evidence available at the time" (p. 32)—that seems applicable to this information. I believe this to be true because the source illustrates ethos (credibility) and logos (facts, reason): the article and its accompanying video are found on the web site of Time magazine—a well-known, reputable source—and feature information gathered from a major government agency and explained by an atmospheric scientist, and they present a number of facts, including the percentage decrease of the pollutant in two major metropolitan areas as well as a graphic representing the concentration of nitrogen dioxide on a U.S. map in two different years. The video also presents a warning that there are other major air pollutants that may not have seen a similar decline, illustrating "the hallmarks of vetted news [:] a multiplicity of sources and a skepticism of what those sources say" (Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2010, p.38). This interesting nugget of information came to me through the conduit of a social media site and appears to be credible.

Source of Acquisition & Reliability of Social Media

Despite its poor reputation in some circles, Twitter is the social media site through which I was exposed to the aforementioned bit of information. While social media sites are sometimes derided by citizens and cultural critics as promoting superficial, vapid, or self-centered thinking, this need not be the case at all. In fact, Nick Bilton, technology writer for The New York Times, argued on a podcast that—even though he grew up reading newspapers and appreciates that older informtion delivery system—Twitter is a primary source of information for him (2010). As with interpersonal relations, quality comes from whom one associates with; by following the Twitter accounts of trusted news sources or influential figures in intellectual circles, it is quite easy to increase the likelihood of the "incidental news acquisition" mentioned earlier.

NASA: U.S. air pollution has plummeted in the last 10 years http://t.co/X103IC15Mw
— TIME.com (@TIME) June 29, 2014

I find that most of the information I get from social media channels comes not from those media themselves but from the sources they refer to or sites they link to. This is known as "aggregation, or being a gateway to the work of others" (Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2010, p. 50). Particularly in this regard, social media sites are most definitely capable of being reliable sources of credible information. Because credible information may be intermingled with spurious reports, self-absorbed personal reflections of web users, or information distorted for ideological purposes, savvy social media users must undoubtedly be more cautious with them than other sources of information, but these sites' potential as vehicles of sound information delivery is tremendous.

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References

Fisher, A. and Bilton, N. (2010, September 15). New Media. All Sides with Ann Fisher. Podcast retrieved from http://wosu.org/2012/allsides/npr-ombudsman-new-media/

Korvach, B. & Rosenstiel, T. (2010). Blur: How to know what's true in the age of information overload. New York: Bloomsbury.