Consuming Information Wisely
As I’ve started teaching more ‘Faith and Fake News’ classes at different churches, I’ve stumbled onto a few phrases I keep coming back to over and over. The first/main one is is the idea of consuming information wisely. In my Faith and Fake News classes, I like to talk about the idea of information consumption and I am fairly deliberate about using the word consumption.
Every day we make conscious decisions about the food and water we will consume, deciding how to sustain our physical bodies. But the question I keep coming back to is, what does it look like to consciously decide what information we will consume?
If we’re honest, I think many of us consume information passively. We doom-scroll through the news and social media, passively taking in ideas, concepts, and current events. I think this is part of how misinformation thrives. People don’t bother to double-check what they’re reading or watching. They share without thinking. Or worse, they share based on an emotional response to the content or headline (a concept for another post).
Over and over, I see the same thing: people overwhelmed by (mis)information. What if we choose to be wise instead? To be thoughtful in online spaces? Here are some steps I think we can start with:
Understand the information landscape: Do you know how social media works? Can you see the bigger trends of how the information landscape has changed over the past 50 years?
Evaluate the information you find/see/read/hear: Do you have the tools to fact-check if you see/hear something that sounds a bit crazy?
Choose and discern how you want to engage with the information: You have a choice in how you respond to information. How can you practice intentional decisions around information?
Additionally, for people of faith, I think there are some specific steps we can take to engage in the last step. A step 3a and 3b, if you will:
Loving our neighbors
Speaking truth to misinformation
These things are not easy. They can take time and human beings aren’t generally in the business of choosing hard over easy. Consuming information wisely is like choosing to drink a second glass of water instead of another can of soda.
But growth comes through hard things. If we choose to engage with information wisely, how might we grow? What division in our world might be stopped?
My challenge to all of us is to be intentional — to choose a posture of learning and wisdom over a posture of easy answers and mindless scrolling.