Common Misconceptions
If you look at old glass windows carefully you will notice that the bottom of the window is thicker than the top. My fifth grade teacher taught me that at room temperature, glass is a highly viscous liquid that is slowly settling. I was amazed that a liquid could be so viscous that it would take centuries for it to slowly settle in a puddle on the floor.
My fifth grade teacher was extremely intelligent, but she was misinformed. Glass is a solid at room temperature. Not that it matters much. I’ve had intelligent people claim that it’s a liquid since then.
In third grade, my teacher taught me that Daddy Longlegs are the most poisonous spider, but that their mouths are too small to bite through human skin. It turns out Daddy Longlegs are not spiders, they are not poisonous, and there are places where human skin is thin enough that they can puncture the skin.
These anecdotes are from a time before the internet, social media, and fake news. It would have taken a concerted effort in a library at the time to discover that these “facts” were wrong. I am sure the teachers were not purposely trying to misguide their students. They had probably heard it from someone they had trusted as well. In the grand scheme of things, a misunderstanding of these facts doesn’t really change all that much.
Each year, I try to remember to have my students look at the Wikipedia page “common misconceptions”. When I read common misconceptions for the first time, it occurred to me how many things people had told me, intelligent people, that I had just taken as truths that turned out not to be true. As we become more interconnected through the internet, we should be checking everything. Are daddy long legs the most poisonous spider? Is glass a liquid? Do you have to wait 24 hours to file a missing person report? Did Lincoln really say that?
Lincoln never talked about the internet. But what about this next quote?
I came across this quote when my cousin posted it to Facebook. This quote makes Lincoln look like an advocate for the rich and powerful. Lincoln contains multitudes, so I wasn’t sure that he had not said this. Lincoln is a model for an American self-made man. Courage, initiative, and independence fit my expectations for what the man stood for. But for a man who spent his political life speaking out against slavery, I had to check to see if this was right for myself.
So I went to Snopes. Turns out, the quote comes from the Rev. William John Henry Boetcker wrote the quote in 1916. It was first misattributed to Lincoln in around 1942, long before the internet. So I commented on my cousin’s post. He asked if it really mattered who first said it. If the quote is true, the misattribution is not that big of a deal.
One of the things I struggle with is trying to decide when and how often to correct people. Someone else’s interesting fact, that they’ve been sharing at dinner parties for the last twenty years, is completely wrong, and there’s a lot written about how wrong it is. Scopes! Check it out before you retweet or repost.
As my school became one-to-one, and a students brought phones to school, one thing that I liked is that they would google the things I said that were wrong and challenge me in class. Teachers used to be the source of so much information in a student’s life. Now, their role is shifting to teaching the student to be a curator of the information they are getting on the internet, on social media, from their friends and family.
Some false information is harmless. Some false information seems harmless. I think memes are often a part of a larger narrative. Not really parts of a larger story. It’s more like a meme will reinforce or add to an idea. No individual meme, and no individual misunderstanding or falsehood, is all that bad. It’s how those individual ideas and misconceptions get paired together with hundreds of others that shapes how an individual approaches certain ideas or topics.
I’ve been talking about media bias and the importance of good sources with my students for fifteen years. But it would be a lie to say that I have been focusing on “fake news” for that long. But, starting at the end of October or the beginning of November, the term “fake news” became a buzzword. Now everyone is talking about it. And the term is playing itself out on social media.
I got a subscription to NYT at the end of December in part because I wanted one source of news that I knew wasn’t fake. I think things like, “Does Facebook manipulate what I see? Does YouTube? Does Reddit? Who is posting this? Do I trust them?” NYT is a way for me to periodically check in with a reputable source. (Even though it is probably biased in my direction.) Watching Trump beat up CNN on a presidential tweet makes me wonder if CNN really is reputable.
“A fake story claiming Pope Francis — actually a refugee advocate — endorsed Mr. Trump was shared almost a million times, likely visible to tens of millions,” Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina who studies the social impact of technology, said of a recent post on Facebook. “Its correction was barely heard. Of course Facebook had significant influence in this last election’s outcome.” – NYT, 11-12-2016
In government class, we learn about the freedom of press and speech. We learn that in a free society, a marketplace of ideas posits that if an idea is sound and supported by evidence, it will rise to the top. Democracy is based on a healthy marketplace of ideas. As much as things have changed in the past year, the strongest ideas will hold out in the long run. But in the short run, it is clear that a well orchestrated media strategy can change the direction of the conversation. These strategies might not change the outcome of a debate, but it might be enough to swing an election.
There are many more factors to consider in understanding the last election. Whether fake news is the main culprit is hard to tell. Part of citizenship is being able to select which facts are true from which ones are false or misleading. I think it was easier to do this twenty years ago. We need to teach each other how to do it now.
Maybe we just need a Wikipedia page of common political misconceptions or common current event misconceptions. I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t work. Wikipedia’s editors would probably be getting threats. Even so, how Wikipedia is edited and how conversations play out on social media have an impact in forming public opinion. Knowing how those conversations are formed is worth paying attention to.
So that’s it. A meandering stream of consciousness with no strong conclusion. A handful of thoughts and ideas with nothing in between to pull everything together. Pictures and hyperlinks that illustrate what I think and why I think it. With time, this essay could have had a point. But this hodge-podge of an essay might reflect our thinking about the subject.
scottamatthews 