SIFTing Through Information
I find myself struggling to just rest and be both in my personal life and academic life. My tendency to keep myself busy has caused the two to blur with a constant hope for instant gratification in most areas of my life.
Take Time to Stop
These last couple of weeks have reminded me that the way I consume information is similar to how my personal and academic lives have blurred. I find myself moving through the motions seeing information and accepting it at face value. In reality, the TikTok I find telling me that something happened may not be the foremost authority on the topic. The Check Please! course has reminded me that it can only help to SIFT through information to find trusted sources. SIFTing is stopping, investigating, finding better coverage, and tracing information to its original context. After going through this process, I may find that the TikTok was a trusted source, but at least I would know rather than blindly accept it as fact.
Taking the time and reminding myself to stop is the hardest part of the process for me. With moving through life at what feels to be 2x speed, stopping my scrolling or my random Google searches are not always on the forefront of my mind. Stopping means taking an initial step bask and asking ourselves if we know and trust the source. It can also mean being patient through the remainder of the SIFT process. While attempting to find better coverage or discussion of the topic, it is important to recognize that the best result may not be the first one. We should exercise click restraint by looking through multiple results to find sources that best combine trustworthiness and relevance to the subject matter.
Why SIFT?
SIFTing provides a streamlined process to fact-checking and finding trustworthy sources, encouraging us to take the reins on what information we consume. In a world of constant communication and exposure to information, we can use this method to have better agency over the information we consume and better recognize misinformation from the beginning.
Misinformation is a distortion of original information that is often false, misleading, or inaccurate. This may happen in articles, research, statistics, social media posts, memes, and more. The best types of misinformation are the ones we are most tempted to believe. The TEDEd video “Why people fall for misinformation” by Joesph Isaac stood out to me in this regard. At the end of the video, it said that “70% of statistics are made up,” and then went on to say that statistics too had been made up. While this line got a chuckle out of the class, it is a serious comment to consider. Without hearing the second part, I honestly may have believed it. The SIFT process has given me a method to better stop and honestly doubt and investigate the information around me. In an age of many things being called “fake news,” I am often misguided by the bias and misinformation around me. If that quote and video are any kind of indication, I clearly have some room to grow in my SIFTing through information.
