This is about so much more than powerpoint. I recently came across this article from The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/23/powerpoint-thought-students-bullet-points-information
How we think, act, and react is being regimented, made linear and put into clean narratives, reducing the scope of conversations that need to be expanded upon rather than compressed. Knowledge isn’t a series of bullet points, but our schools, industry, governments and other organizations exchange the reliability they once offered for bullet-point answers that reduce our cognitive abilities to tackle complex problems.
And it’s not just powerpoint lectures to university students. Listicles and information is being transmitted en masse over so many platforms, but in the end, very little of this information is helpful.
I remember hearing/reading a story, some time ago. I wish I could source it, but it’s been too long. In short, around the time that the Gutenberg printing press was developed there were some concerns that it’s development and means of producing and plotting information would make it’s users “stupid.” After all, if you could just record and read information on a piece of paper in a book, why remember it? This logic is, of course, absurd. It’s problematic that we evaluate one’s intelligence on their ability to recall a piece of data.
But what about now? So much of our information is presented as bulleted data in small, digestible bits. I love a good slice of delicious, delicious data, but alone it’s useless. Where’s the context? Where’s the research? How do we know what the data really means if we have nothing to compare it to?
Overall, I think we’re smarter than the Internet would lead you to believe. Following the zipf pattern (see Vsauce’s video below), we can possibly articulate that 80% of all accountable pieces of information–accurate or not–come from 20% of available sources, but limiting ourselves to sources, un-fact checked pieces of data and weird facebook shares gives the wrong impression about data.
What we think of as “knowledge” has become a metric, like our assumptions about IQ. We treat our brains like hard drives capable of storing a certain amount of information. Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock is picky about the information he loads into his brain.
I sometimes feel like I suffer from information overload. A 2014 study aimed to quantify information overload in the social media sphere, specifically in regards to Twitter. From the intro, they use the original definition of “information overload” from Alvin Toffler in 1970’s Future Shock: “Information overload occurs when the amount of input to a system exceeds its processing capacity. Humans have limited cognitive processing capacities…”
So is our restricting information in the form of “factoids”, “listicles” and “bullet points” a response to the growing influx of information? The overall assertion is that information overload negatively impacts our skills at decision making.
None of this is anything new, but The Guardian’s article begins to show how pervasive this reductive plotting of information is. It’s crucial now, when there are strong arguments that anti-intellectualism is an important leading movement and has been a subtext of American culture since as early as Richard Hofsteader’s 1963 book about it.
Knowledge, data sets and information is one thing, but allowing them to flow through culture with appropriate critical discourse is more important.
Not to be grim, dark and dreary but there are rays of hope. The critical haranguing that Texas police received regarding the interrogation of Ahmed Mohamed about a home-made clock, which couples anti-intellectualism with Islamophobia, is a sign that many people are starting to see through racism, bigotry and hatred for the ill it is. The critical and financial success of such science heavy science-fiction films like The Martian and it’s incredible representations of “knowledge can save your life” without creating drama where there should be–no “evil” characters or organizations show up, it’s just Mark Watley (Matt Damon) and NASA working against the all natural elements. Further, Neil Degrasse Tyson’s Cosmos shows a renewed interest in the natural world. And none of this shies away from the details, because those details should be interesting to us. Bill Nye the science guy has popped up. Now, this might be a nostalgic response, but his attitude towards our ignorance to science is apparent, but watching opposing opinions on the matter can be difficult to watch.
In the end, let’s not be negative towards people who are trying to learn, but lets teach them how to be cautious of manipulative information. Look for the clues, consider the source, and help them understand why face value is not always deep enough to validate the information we like to spout.
Paul Sawchuk 