For the Motion
Tamanna Sajeed
Introduction
Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said, “Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge.”
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Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said, “Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge.”
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Our stance would like to argue that this ‘ignorance of ignorance’ (Hubbard) is the illiteracy that plagues us today. But before we present our case, we would like to make clear the difference between the terms ‘ignorance’ and ‘illiteracy’. These words will not be used interchangeably by us during this argument for a very good reason.
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Ignorance, as defined by most dictionaries is simply a lack of knowledge or information. If one didn’t know what the capital of Croatia was, or what they were serving at Coffeol today, then it would not be wrong to call one ignorant, because it’s a pretty straightforward definition. But under what circumstances would you consider someone ‘illiterate’?
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UNESCO (Montoya, 2018) defines literacy as the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed and written materials. Illiteracy would be the lack of these skills. But although this seems like a very comprehensive definition, we’d like to propose that it’s too restrictive.
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There is a state of illiteracy that plagues our word today that most definitions don’t begin to encompass. They are within those of us who are not aware of our own ignorance; those of us who don’t fully comprehend but still rely heavily on the ideas and information that electronic media so constantly bombards us with.
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According to a Forbes study (Fisher, 2019), the average adult today consumes five times the amount of information every day than their counterparts 50 years ago. Our argument today presents that this sort of dramatic increase, while maybe contributing to a lowering of ignorance, acts as a significant catalyst for illiteracy.
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In this paper, we will address key elements of our stance, including electronic media proliferation’s negative impacts on our various intelligences as defined by leading experts. We will also discuss its impacts on our physical anatomy and its consequences on daily life. Most importantly, we would like to introduce some more abstract concepts of how we define literacy. We hope that through this we can collectively confront the ignorance of our ignorance.
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Electronic media is making us socially illiterate
Social literacy, from the perspective of sociocultural theory (Montoya, 2018), is more than just mastering the basic literacy skills of reading and writing. It states that a major aspect of true literacy is learnt through social interaction with others.
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When we engage in face-to-face communication, most information is conveyed through vocal and visual cues in the context of the situation, and understanding these cues is crucial to developing social literacy (Mark L. Knapp, 2010). Today, because of the amount with which we rely on electronic media to communicate, face-to-face communication is greatly reducing, leading to a correlational increase in social illiteracy.
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Let’s take the example of children today to look at this theory in practice. It is crucial to develop their ability to process emotional and non-verbal cues, as it is associated not just with their personal and social development, but their academic success as well. So when children use digital communication extensively, it can curtail the face-to-face interactions necessary for them to develop and master important social skills such as conflict mediation, cooperation and active listening, effectively rendering them socially illiterate (Giedd, 2012).
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In a recent study (Joanne Larson, 2015), a group of children spent 5 days in a camp without access to any screen-based or electronic communication and being limited to only in-person interaction (a control group stayed at home with access to all electronic devices). It seemed that the time participants spent engaging with other children and adults face-to-face made an important difference. The children’s in-person interaction improved significantly in terms of reading facial emotions, while the control group’s skills remained the same. The results suggest that digital screen time, even when used for social interaction, can reduce the time spent developing skills to read non-verbal cues of human emotion such as spatial distance, gestures and eye contact.
All these signs point to electronic media making us more socially illiterate, leading to it making us more illiterate as a whole.
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Electronic media impairs our spatial intelligence
According to Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences (Gardner, 1983), spatial intelligence is the human computational ability to solve problems using spatial judgement and the capacity to mentally visualize objects in the mind’s eye. Although it is the type of intelligence one would generally associate with engineers and architects, we would argue that it is an important component of true literacy that electronic media is degrading.
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Let us examine one everyday aspect of this type of literacy: navigation. Numbers as recent as 2018 (Kunst, 2019) show that more than half of us use GPS services to get around on a daily basis, and studies show that this negatively impacts our literacy down to even the physical level.
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The Washington Post cites a 2017 (Amir-Homayoun Javadi, 2017) study in which neuroscientists confirmed that relying on GPS to navigate brings about physical changes in the brain. According to the study, those who navigated the streets of London themselves, as opposed to using GPS, engaged their hippocampus more and even built more grey matter. London’s cab drivers famously have greater grey matter volume in the hippocampus because of constantly navigating the city’s complex streets. Amir Houmayoun Javadi, the study’s lead author, explains that “when people use tools such as GPS, they tend to engage less with navigation. Therefore, brain area responsible for navigation is less used, and consequently their brain areas involved in navigation tend to shrink.” This obviously reduces our navigation aptitude, an important aspect of literacy when it comes to understanding the world around us.
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Cognitive offloading , a concept explained by Taylor et al. (2016), leads to cognitive dissonance and nothing proves this more than an experiment conducted by Storm et al. who divided study participants into two groups: those who were allowed to use only their memory to answer questions and those who were allowed to use Google. Participants were then given the option of answering subsequent easier questions by the method of their choice. The results were that participants who had previously used the Internet to gain information were “significantly more likely to revert to Google for subsequent questions than those who relied on memory.” In fact, thirty percent of participants who previously consulted the Internet “failed to even attempt to answer a single simple question from memory”. They also reached for their phones more quickly each time. Altogether, it doesn't take a sage to see that our very relation in which we derive cultural basis as well as relationship is nothing without our techs.
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What does ‘the common good’ mean?
Literacy and media have been cyclically used as a tool for both oppression and liberation across history.
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The 16th century Protestant Reformation (Sullivan, 2012) in Germany is a perfect example. Illiteracy, especially among lower classes, was rampant in medieval Germany. The Catholic Church -the major concentration of power at the time- purposely printed the Bible only in Latin. Common folk could not read Latin, and thus relied on and believed whatever the elite priestly class told them was true. This trust was highly misplaced, and corruption within the Catholic Church was rampant because the people were not literate.
Martin Luther, however, translated the Bible into German, the language of the common people. Because of the Catholic monk, ordinary people could now read the Bible for themselves. As a result of the Reformation this sparked, literacy increased throughout Europe, particularly among the common people.
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With literacy came a newfound sense of scepticism. The masses no longer blindly held onto what their priests told them; literacy meant that people could discover things for themselves. Literacy liberated them the same way that it had oppressed them.
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While its confinement to the upper echelons of society reinforced elitism, media and literacy’s proliferation today has made all of us equal and accepting of each other. At least, that’s what one would assume.
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Critical consciousness (Freire, 1968) is a theory integral to the concept of literacy. Simply put, it is the idea that education can propel society towards the common goal of social change. It talks about how the true role of education is not to just give knowledge, but to provide people with the tools to both critically evaluate the society they are in and actually go out and improve it, such as critical thinking and people skills.
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To understand ho this is relevant to our argument, we must also understand the Reinforcing Spirals Model (RSM) (Slater, 2007), a prevailing model regarding how we consume media content. This model states that people generally select media that correspond with their own pre-existing beliefs and values. This, over time, reinforces our own pre-existing patterns of thought and behavior.
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The intersection of these two concepts is where we propose that while the proliferation of electronic media means that everyone has access to multiple standpoints, we rarely actively seek them out in an effort to increase our own literacy. When faced with the tidal wave of content on electronic media, people will generally choose content that reinforces their own values.
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The debate topic chosen by the other group in our class provides a good platform to explore the notion. While many may agree that there is a definite link between human rights and climate change, there are very few who actually know what the opposing stance’s arguments are, and even fewer who actively try to understand the reasoning behind them.
Due to the sheer volume of content electronic media offers to choose from reinforcing every stance imaginable, people can choose to ignore the flip side of their own beliefs as it seems that both sides have equally valid points, giving a sense of false equivalence to all stances.
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The formation of political ideologies provides an ideal place to observe the real-world applications of this intersection. Recently, the growth of partisan news sources has raised concerns that people will increasingly select attitude-consistent, leading to increased political polarization. A 2019 study (Peter Dahlgren, 2019) confirmed that people sought out ideologically consistent online news and this selectivity reinforced citizens’ ideological leanings over time. As their exposure to online news grew, so did their alliance with either the liberal or conservative side of local politics.
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Because of electronic media, the notion of critical consciousness is at risk, and it is now easier for us to see what we want to see instead of the truth. As the world grows more divided, we as a society can no longer agree on the meaning of the phrase ‘the common good’, and this results in major conflict across the world. The public debate about gun violence in the US is a good example, because while those in power argue about what constitutes ‘the common good’, lives are lost. 408 people have died in mass shootings this year alone (Archive, 2019), and very little consensus has been reached on what to do about the epidemic.
Mojoyinoluwa Oke
No! To Free think
Media Ecology Theory purports that media shape the way our society is formed directly on a cultural level. In this theory, we see that society as it is at the moment is strictly whatever blessings or chaos media has made it (Moreno et al., 2019). One might see little to this point and simply state two counter cases: media simply refers to any channel used to pass across information, to which the logic of the topic bites back with the counter of how little people are forming their own opinions and dwelling on what they are told or preached to by the actors of new media. A good example of this could be found as stated by the Kaiser Foundation Report that found it to be that the amount of time spent on reading books has remained the exact same from 1900 to 2009 (Lamontagne, 2010). and to this a naysayer might ask “so what?”. Well it's clear to the eyes to see that although times have changed and population increased, education that ought to increase has maintained its state and nothing more. It's nothing if not humorous to see that in this day and time only a handful of people know who Dostoevsky is or the amount of people that have consumed the works of Nietzche but have a very pristine knowledge of what meme Kim Kardashian posted.
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To this matter is not just flimsy issues, it's the controlling of the thoughts of the masses via the use of media. For example the popular claim of climate change as if it be illegal for climate to change, no less the reports and what is carried on and on by everyone is that 97% of scientists agree that the change or global warming as it was called was as a result of nothing but man-made effects. We needn't look far and we find clear as day that report cited by researchers John Cook ignores a significant sum of information and dives into ad hominems to get that across (Epstein, 2016) Nonetheless, with the concept out in the open, we are bombarded by acolytes and ‘educators” that this is the highest existential threat to ourselves as a people and within 7 months or 11 years or 12 years depending on how left on the paradigm the speaker is, the world as we know it would be over unless we make moves and this in turn has wrought on us another mental illness called “Eco-anxiety’. With the advent of media and the effectiveness of the wide arms of globalisation we find it to that singular concepts overrun the minds of the man and so he has no room to think and dare he think, he shall be cancelled and deemed a hater or bigot.
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Wait! I don’t remember, do I?
In human communication, one must be able to retain information and apply that which is learned previously, without which can fall into the abyss of cognitive dissonance. This skill is referred to as functional literacy. With the prevalence of electronic media, it has hence become the case that we are unable to remember any information without the assistance of our technological devices (Briggs, 2016). The argument might be placed in the terms of how that is good and that we have more solid detailed information and though that might be, the fact that we are dependent on technology to bolster our daily activities simply means that without the technology in the mix we will be unable to have thorough interactions.
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Cognitive offloading , a concept explained by Taylor et al. (2016), leads to cognitive dissonance and nothing proves this more than an experiment conducted by Storm et al. who divided study participants into two groups: those who were allowed to use only their memory to answer questions and those who were allowed to use Google. Participants were then given the option of answering subsequent easier questions by the method of their choice. The results were that participants who had previously used the Internet to gain information were “significantly more likely to revert to Google for subsequent questions than those who relied on memory.” In fact, thirty percent of participants who previously consulted the Internet “failed to even attempt to answer a single simple question from memory”. They also reached for their phones more quickly each time. Altogether, it doesn't take a sage to see that our very relation in which we derive cultural basis as well as relationship is nothing without our techs.
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Critical Theory
Two words that pull to question all that is within our society, looking at it through the lens of the knowledge of social sciences and humanities. Being that this theory stands firm as it is, we must then look at the lenses, scanning them properly and seeing whether or not we have the ability to be critical theorists who can look at society and speak the truth to power or if we are all the more illiterate on this issue due to electronic media usage.
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To dive into critical theory, one must possess tools that allow for introspection and something near self-inspection, the simple name for that is Meta-awareness which is, in simple definition, thinking about thinking. We find that the presence and speed as to which information gets to us makes it near impossible to focus on what's important and now, we simply look into what's new. It's basically the state of ‘not all matter matters. As a matter of fact, a Stanford University researcher who stated that the more you acclimate yourself to the technology and the constant flow of information that comes through it, it seems that you become less able to figure out what’s important to focus on. Due to media heavy use, we have hereby become victims of lost cognitive control and this in turn makes it so that we lack the mental power to inspect our society but simple go for likes and clicks (Bates, 2018)
Finally, although one might be able to scrape the bottom of the pot to provide the merits of electronic media to weather the storm that is their demerits, the storm seems very much stronger than the merits: as even though there are some merits they are absolutely trumped by the amount of demerits and one must personally be able to mitigate his or her action to ensure that we as a people are not taken away by the storm utterly.