Geraldine Green identifies some of the problems with social media backed perspectives.

The biggest problem I’ve noticed online is the escalating proliferation of nonsense that many proclaim as facts. The real fact is that anyone anywhere can write anything online at any time and boldly proclaim that what they’ve written is the truth. They then provide endless links to bolster their claims, while claiming the links to also be the truth and therefore prove their point(s), when those links are actually just to others who also hold no real credentials but who have bigger followings than the first writer who added the link to them. The first writer conflates the link author’s large number of followers with factual credence when nothing could be further from the truth. 

A large number of followers does not equal credence with any authority! And yet to many keyboard warriors the large numbers of followers lend credibility to someone who is actually quite undeserving. Hence all the noisy quacks online spouting misinformation all the time. There is no scholarship involved, no value placed in regular book reading by real scholars, no offline education that demonstrates any real credibility, but rather shows only the loads of dubious Googling and shouting about debunking and then discrediting those who actually do the real work, the real work of book study and scholarship that provide actual credible and credentialed citations by other scholars. 

Anyone anywhere at any time can write anything online and call it anything and people will buy it and think it’s the truth just because they read it online. So few look further than online. They do not look for the books written by the reputable scholars on the topics they’re interested in. They don’t seem to think it’s necessary because they seem to think they have everything they need online. And that is the crux of the problem. So many of them have never subjected themselves to a scholarly discipline. They don’t know what it means to follow through on a particular field of study and how disciplined one must be to meet its completion. 

It takes a great deal of time and humility and commitment, none of it is instant like Google, it is rather a long and arduous process of realization, a realization acquired through deep book study and scholarly discussion with qualified mentors, the deepest realization that no true scholarship exists in a vacuum. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” And so, obviously, many opinions stated as truth online have no real or truthful foundation


Geraldine Green runs in the age of Covid!


Escalating Proliferation Of Nonsense

Geraldine Green identifies some of the problems with social media backed perspectives.

The biggest problem I’ve noticed online is the escalating proliferation of nonsense that many proclaim as facts. The real fact is that anyone anywhere can write anything online at any time and boldly proclaim that what they’ve written is the truth. They then provide endless links to bolster their claims, while claiming the links to also be the truth and therefore prove their point(s), when those links are actually just to others who also hold no real credentials but who have bigger followings than the first writer who added the link to them. The first writer conflates the link author’s large number of followers with factual credence when nothing could be further from the truth. 

A large number of followers does not equal credence with any authority! And yet to many keyboard warriors the large numbers of followers lend credibility to someone who is actually quite undeserving. Hence all the noisy quacks online spouting misinformation all the time. There is no scholarship involved, no value placed in regular book reading by real scholars, no offline education that demonstrates any real credibility, but rather shows only the loads of dubious Googling and shouting about debunking and then discrediting those who actually do the real work, the real work of book study and scholarship that provide actual credible and credentialed citations by other scholars. 

Anyone anywhere at any time can write anything online and call it anything and people will buy it and think it’s the truth just because they read it online. So few look further than online. They do not look for the books written by the reputable scholars on the topics they’re interested in. They don’t seem to think it’s necessary because they seem to think they have everything they need online. And that is the crux of the problem. So many of them have never subjected themselves to a scholarly discipline. They don’t know what it means to follow through on a particular field of study and how disciplined one must be to meet its completion. 

It takes a great deal of time and humility and commitment, none of it is instant like Google, it is rather a long and arduous process of realization, a realization acquired through deep book study and scholarly discussion with qualified mentors, the deepest realization that no true scholarship exists in a vacuum. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” And so, obviously, many opinions stated as truth online have no real or truthful foundation


Geraldine Green runs in the age of Covid!


10 comments:

  1. Geraldinbe

    Execllent piece! Unfortuately tne click-bait nature of the Web and algorthyms used by the social media behemoths enable the speeedy tramsmission of simply expressed, easily readable and invariably false stories and memes of the sort you mention.

    It is a sad reality that what was hailed as an emancipatory project (the Internet) has increasingly become for the uninformed, intellectually, book and print averse lazy and the gratutiously provocative to spread tneir simple but dangerous content online backed with the superspreaders of "likes" and retweeters.

    An even worse prospect in this era of surveillance capitalism is the possible loss of our agency, autonomy and even future through the harvesting of our data via our declared likes and preferences and the internet of things which Big Tech converts into behavioural surplus as advdertising foil for Big Biz to colonise our minds and bodies and the life world of humanity as a whole. All that timme this will be (and is being) done outside our concscious awarenes.

    Time to campaign for the democratisation and liberatory potential of the Internet. I would be interested in your thoughts, Geraldine and those of any other Quiller.

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  2. Geraldine - thanks for this. I really enjoyed the piece and it makes a lot of sense. Spot on about the endless links that demonstrate nothing more than that the person posting the links agrees with the contents of the link. I ask people not to post them in comments as they are a waste of time because I never read them much like I never read people quoting scripture.
    Barry - I agree there is a deficit but the cure might be worse than the ailment.

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  3. I know that I'm going to be the heretic here.

    Certainly there are many people on social media who don't own a book or a library card between them, conversely there are those who have earned accreditation for spending three or more years in a formal higher education process.
    Are we to accept that the conclusions drawn by latter group will always be 'The Truth'?

    'no offline education that demonstrates any real credibility'. But what is this credibility?

    'a realization acquired through deep book study and scholarly discussion with qualified mentors'. Have these mentors no bias?
    Have the authors, whose books are subjected to deep study and scholarly discussion, no bias?

    Have those scholars who design these university courses no bias? And what of those education establishments which provide these courses, have they no bias?

    How is it that students of The Humanities do not all come out of university with the same World view?

    Even in Science, a fact is only a fact until someone else comes along and disproves it. Electric current flowed from positive to negative until the 1960s when someone discovered that it actually didn't.

    Almost everyone who takes part in debates online already has accumulated some knowledge. The fact that they can read and write proves this. Augmenting this by carrying out a Google search is surly something that even scholars do.

    Now, away and google 'conventional current flow'.

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  4. Mike - I don't feel Geraldine is arguing that "truth" will only come out of serious study but with peer reviewed material there is more chance of it having been rigorously tested. This was the issue with Intelligent Design. It was claiming to be a science but only talked to a self referential group of people and could not get anything approved by peer review. So, basically, bunkum could pass in that world where a conspiracy theory held sway - everything was designed and the proof lay in irreducible complexity. Ultimately, once confronted and given no wriggle room and tested by a scientist in open court it was forced to concede its own science was on a par with astrology.
    There would be something deeply flawed with any education system that churned out people from the humanities with the same world view. More important to produce people who can think rather then telling them what to think. During my Marxist days (I still very much subscribe to Marxist description but not its prescription) I would frequently say better the thinking pluralist than the unthinking Marxist.
    Science is much more rigorous than the way you depict it. I think you risk reducing it to relativism and no more a reliable source of knowledge than say theology. It is a method not a dogma. Something that recently attracted my eye was from Brian Hines in discussing the work of Brian Greene the theoretical physicist. No doubt a linker with a link will try and prove us wrong on that but the best way to deal with linkers and their links is wish them a nice day and move on to more substantive stuff: material that we can learn from and risk being proved wrong in the course of that learning.

    Science is open, creative, experimental. Unlike religion, science doesn't say "this is the Absolute Truth; you must not consider other truths." If someone can come up with persuasive evidence that theory Y is a better reflection of reality than theory X, then X takes a back seat to Y.
    "Back seat," though, almost always doesn't mean being tossed out of the car.
    This is another misconception that religious fundamentalists and other anti-science types are prone to. They wrongly believe that fundamental understandings of science are regularly overthrown, so why accept what scientists currently are claiming to be true?
    Greene demolished this point of view, using Newtonian and Einsteinian physics as an example. Newton's laws of motion weren't shown to be wrong by Einstein. He just showed how they don't apply in realms far distant from what we experience in everyday life, such as at near light-speed.
    Science progresses. It learns. It changes. It builds upon current knowledge.

    Without the internet I would never have covered anything like the ground I managed to over the years. It is a great source of learning. What I draw from Geraldine is not that the net is filled only with useless information but the method of extraction and filtering information from the net is fraught with numerous hazards.

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  5. AM

    Well I can't really argue with that!

    By the way, I deliberately gave a confused example - 'conventional current flow', to see if anyone would go and do a Google search.
    The subject would be something which most people would have come across at school and quickly forgot about. So unless you had a special interest in electronics or physics, etc. it's not something that would be at the front of your head.

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    1. Mike - the chances of me following links are just about zilch!! So I didn't google conventional current flow! Every conspiracy theorist and his dog will be found hurling links but to me it is like scripture squawking. I simply pay no heed to them LOL

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  6. Just came back in from cutting the lawn. Now I'm choking on my tea after reading that :)

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    1. I came in from walking the dog - knackered - downed a pint of cider the minute I returned - delicious but might keep me away from the 2100 Bourbon later

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  7. Funniest argument I've seen in awhile was two of my in-laws, one a Psychiatrist and the other Haemotologist butting heads.

    The Haemotologist doesn't believe Psychiatry is a valid dicipline of medicine and used a throw-away line from the TV show Frasier to win the argument by saying that Psychiatry is a job were you make an obscene amount of money and it's in your financial interest to make sure the patient never gets better!

    Funny how two educated people can look at the same dog and totally disagree with each other!

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  8. Anthony

    Have not touchded a drop since the lockdown since I do not like the idea of imbibing at home. My longest period of abstinence since my Comfirmation pledge! Not missing it, surprisingly.

    Some better news for us both. Defender Dominic Matteo, ;late of both our parishes, has fully recovered from the brain tumour he suffered last November. Has had a bad time of it recently with his bankruptcy as well. Will always be remembered by us for "that f_____ing great goal in the San Siro" 20 years ago. Yes that long ago!

    Enjoy your Bourbon, you deserve it!

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