Practicing criticality amidst the increasingly fast pace of digital life and information

How we hold discernment in the face of the overwhelming flood of media and social media

Mar 04, 2023

Image is a photo of a misty evergreen forest with cream text in block letters that says: BEYOND THE ALTAR and CRITICALITY. The two words are separated by a cream divider line.

Hey! So today, I’m just finalizing some thoughts about this topic as we are now fully into March, and I’m just going to jump right in. There is so much I feel I left out! This month felt very nuts and bolts so maybe at some point, I’ll return to fill in the other ideas that I initially had planned around the subject of criticality—there is always more to say on the topic of critical thinking and media literacy; especially in the digital realm!

So, last week we left off on the idea of discernment, of using criticality as a lens and a tool for our own purposes and internal evaluation of information either from others, or for ourselves. We’ve talked about how to use criticality towards breaking things down from particular authors, writers, and producers of any kind of media as a way to really better understand them and what they’re saying. And again, I keep coming back to ask, “Why is this important to do? Why does criticality matter at all? Why should we do it now?”

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Well, we have a lot of overlapping conditions to be aware of in the first quarter of the 21st century. I want to be clear that I regard the advent of the internet, and subsequently the evolution of social networking sites, to be largely beneficial to our connectivity, communities, and the democratization of knowledge and knowledge-sharing. The shift from social networking to social media is noteworthy though, not just as a linguistic shift but as a commodifiable one—whereas a social network was something anyone could build together on the internet (and technically still can), towards the purposes of connecting and sharing ideas and community amongst people; social media has largely been housed by app-based platforms launched by corporations towards the purpose of capital. In the last 10-12 years, these platforms have become predominantly driven not by the needs and organic interactions of the user base but the demands of the corporation’s profit margins.

What this means for us, in regards to criticality is, we have to constantly navigate the pressures of algorithms, asynchronous feeds and timelines, and forced* methods of information-sharing and presentations such as reels, videos, lives, and the use of aesthetics and sound—all which are designed to manipulate our behavior, as both audience and authors. These strategies can be of great benefit to the producer of the content, and the consumer of it, because of course we love to look at and listen to well-produced and beautiful things (these roles of “producer/consumer” are something I’ve questioned in past posts (linked above) and something we’ll come back to again later). The problem here is, sometimes the drive to increase visibility, to overcome platform-based obstacles such as algorithmic manipulation and asynchronous timelines, prioritizes the production over the quality or the depth or even the accuracy of the content we’re seeing. This becomes harder to identify the more seductive the material appears or the more pressing a social or political issue or event. Humans are sensory beings, and we are absolutely subject to be swept up in aesthetic rhetoric, whether visual, aural, or linguistic rhetoric.

(*What I mean by this, which I didn’t really explain, is that Instagram in particular is forcing our hand as to how to present our materials in order to adhere to the parameters of the algorithm and be prioritized in the timeline. We may not want to create videos or reels, but if we want our work to be seen by others, we have to; and by extension, audiences who are not much interested in watching videos or reels are forced to view them.)

Social media’s ability to spread information, misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda has more alacrity and a tighter grip on the collective imagination than ever before. In social media’s ability to provide a platform for individuals, institutions, organizations, and corporations they also have an ability to create and nurture a cultish sort of following among audiences who are truthfully just hungry for knowledge, information, and above all, community. It’s precisely because of the collision of predatory marketing, capitalism, and celebritism that we must be more careful than we have ever had to be. One person with 50K followers on Instagram or 1M followers on TikTok can sway thought among audiences in ways that are really beneficial to culture; or entirely malefic. This becomes especially important in the ways we talk about topics that impact us deeply and personally, such as politics, spirituality, ecology, and health. So-called “thought leaders” not only have the power and potency of well-crafted prose at their disposal, but also the power and potency of advertisement and marketing strategies that propel and compel us in ways we aren’t even entirely consciously aware of. From the rise of educational tools such as the bullet point slideshow carousel to the specific use of sophisticated graphics and various colors and color combinations, to video and music, we are in an absolute maelstrom of intellectual, visual, aural, and emotional rhetoric that is designed to make us feel any given number of ways, but towards the growth of someone else’s profit and capital (whether social, political, or financial). When we’re not careful, and especially when we’re entangled in parasocial relationships, it’s easy to get caught up. I’m no different. We must ask: to what purpose does this material serve, what is it for?

Criticality allows us to problematize material, which is important, because so much of what we’ve been given has been taken for granted, culturally; largely incorrect histories written through the lens of those who have perpetuated colonization, capitalism, and oppression. That being said, propaganda and rhetoric, as a means to sway an audience to one’s cause, are also the tools of people, organizations, political parties, and other entities to whom we believe we are aligned; but they can be intensely misused and abused. To problematize material then, is to propose and treat something as a problem; not just to define it as problematic but to seek a solution; to question it as definitive or complete but to also attempt to make it whole. Therefore criticality has become a tool through which we have learned how to problematize, and dismantle the information that’s been passed down to us, in order to reconstruct it better or set it aside entirely. And what’s crucially important is to not just identify problems, but the solutions, as well—if we problematize something to the point of complete diffusion, nothing is left; it’s an empty space. But the purpose of dismantling is to rebuild. So our work is to use criticality to look for what is being proposed, what solutions are being offered, how the material introduces paths forward; and if it doesn’t, build towards these solutions in our own work, our communities, and the world.

So! To that end, I really look forward to our ongoing conversation in the Discord, and I really hope that we do get into it some more there! And if you have any questions, or if you want to problematize my material, please do! There's a lot to unpack here, it’s not perfect. [laughs] Anyway, I’m really grateful you’re all here for this discussion with me. These conversations are important and yeah, we just need to keep having them so… I hope you all have a really great weekend!

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