The Danger of Pretending To Be Informed

It’s okay to say you don’t know.

How many of you have experienced this situation before?

Friend: “Did you see that article about X? Isn’t that incredible? Wow.”

You: “What’d it say?”

Friend: “Oh, I didn’t actually read it, I just saw the headline on Facebook.”

At first glance, this interaction may seem innocuous and harmless, but if we dig one level deeper, it becomes more apparent that not only is this type of conversation increasingly commonplace, but also this can quickly become extremely dangerous for our society’s collective knowledge. What this approach to news does is feigns one’s sense of feeling informed. A staggering two-thirds of American adults claim they get their news from social media sites. I’ll argue that, unless we’re careful, this method of news consumption will continue to erode our collective intelligence and ability to engage in reasoned discourse.

And everyone does it, I’ve definitely been a culprit in the past. You’re scrolling past birthdays and friend updates when a headline catches your eye. Your thumb abruptly stops scrolling. Maybe you don’t have time to dive in and read it, there’s no fault in that. So you take the headline at face value and go on with your life.

Where I think we must be extra cautious, however, is in internalizing the headline and equating it in our minds to having fully read the article and understanding the topic at hand.

If we, as a society, only read headline deep, our view on the world only becomes more dramatized. Those headlines are designed to hook us in, not to convey the nuances and complexities — that’s (hopefully) the job of the text within the article.

By only referencing issues that we ourselves have read about and subsequently given deeper thought and analysis to, we not only can reach a place of more thoughtful discourse, but maybe, just maybe, we can start to climb back up that slippery slope that is news consumption via social media.

My last point is a plea to all of us: take it easy on someone who hasn’t read or heard about the latest breaking news. I’ve been there, you have, too. It’s too easy to be belittled nowadays by friends, coworkers, and family members who assume you’ve kept up with the 24/7 news cycle. It’s more than ok to say “I don’t know about that.” We should work as a society to celebrate slowing down and going deeper when it comes to an understanding of the issues.

That’s all for today!

See you tomorrow.