Misinformation, the media, and the role you're playing in both | Blake Simpson | TEDxNashville

[Music] we have a problem we live in time where we have access to too much information and when it comes to the role the media plays in sharing this information it's important that we know who we can trust it's important that we're able to discern fact from fiction so how do we do that i grew up in a household where the today show was on during the morning rush to school npr was blaring on the radio in the car and nightly news was on during dinner prep so mbc family three newspapers hit our doorstep each day the new york times the wall street journal and the local examiner two major magazines time and u.s news and world report so i like to think i grew up in an informed household my parents loved talking about current events and it was during these discussions that i started to recognize how issues of the day at times mirrored those of the past my parents also encouraged challenging conversations with friends and family who maybe had opposing views because they firmly believe that in order to truly understand a topic you need to understand all points of view so nothing was off the table anything from religion to politics to abortion rights to the great vaccination debate and as i grew older i realized i wanted to be part of the industry that was responsible for celebrating this type of conversation i wanted to be part of the industry that provided information to the public who that could then take it and learn more about a subject matter that was important to them either as an individual or as a larger member of society i wanted to be a journalist so i went to school i studied politics and undergrad and journalism and graduate school but by the time i entered the workforce at my dream job at 30 rock because nbc family the media landscape had already dramatically changed with the explosion of online media anyone anywhere in the world could have a voice and that was a problem because so long as you had a point of view and a platform upon which to share it you were part of the media consortium and so began the erosion of the media and the role they played in our democracy once a destination we as active participants went to to gain inside knowledge on subjects that mattered to us and so began this shift from us being active participants in this process to passive recipients of information from the information superhighway or autobahn as i now refer to it and i found this terrifying so how did we start to shift from being active participants to passive recipients of information you don't have to look very far if i think about my childhood newspaper hit the door and we read it we knew the times that the news came on each day and we watched and if we missed either one of those opportunities we missed the news that is definitely not the case today today it is incredible to see how much information is available to us online and a lot of these outlets are operating with little to no oversight when it comes to the accuracy of the information that they're sharing you have everything from the new york times to tmz and everything in between there is space for everyone and this information is coming at us 24 hours a day seven days a week 365 days a year so when you think about that when you think about the volume of the information that we're receiving and the frequency it's no surprise that we're taking a passive stance it's no surprise that we're going on autopilot it's no surprise because we put a lot of our life on autopilot we have our groceries delivered we use siri or apple or google home or alexa to turn on our lights to turn off our security system to feed our pets i am fairly certain one of these devices is teaching my son and when it comes to directions don't get me started i don't even know how i got here thanks to waze and maps and the navigation system in the car we have embraced the conveniences that allow us to put parts of our life on autopilot and maybe that's okay in some instances but what happens when you allow that behavior to become part of how you receive information so if you put it all together if you think about the amount of information that we're receiving and the frequency plus our tendency now to sort of be passive go on autopilot and the fact that as a society we have a severely diminished attention span the latest studies have us hovering at around eight seconds so thank you for still paying attention when you put all of that together it is no surprise that misinformation is flying all around it's taking root and the truth is lagging far behind the misinformation is flying and the truth is lagging behind and it's lagging behind because we're allowing it to we aren't taking a beat to check a fact to dig a little bit deeper to gain the insight that we need so that we can make an informed decision we absolutely are not looking back to something that we heard about the day before and we just want to check and see is that still true or was there a retraction or was there a correction we're just being fed information we're digesting the information and we move on another byproduct of being on autopilot is the amount of information that we share with companies we tell them where we shop we tell them what we purchase we tell them where we travel where we vacation what we listen to what we read and everything and companies take this information and they start to establish a narrative of who they think we are what we want to buy what we want to read where where we want to go on vacation in the case of media they start to create an archetype of who they think we are what we want to hear who we want to hear from and because we've taken more of a passive position we start to follow and as we follow we are moving further and further away from people whose views don't align with ours and we're starting to sit in these echo chambers where we're only hearing from and speaking to like-minded people what's happening is they're contributing to the polarization of our society let me ask you a question do you think that fox news speaks to a certain type of viewer and do you think that msnbc speaks to a certain type of viewer do you think they speak to the same viewer now i'm gonna make an assumption that you don't and how interesting is that that two major news networks responsible for providing us the public with information we need to make informed decisions on at times the same topic have little to no overlap when it comes to their viewers and this is what happens when the media starts to tailor information to a specific audience but let's bring this conversation forward let's talk about something more current let's talk about covet 19. there has been no shortage of information on this subject matter from severe downplaying early on to seemingly end of days it's run the gamut and it has been on every minute of every day and the information is all over the place you can't discern the fact from the fiction the misinformation is flying around and as a result we as a society are unable to agree on a path forward to mask or not to mask to open or to remain closed to go back in school in person and to go to sports or to remain virtual and to postpone so as i was working on this talk and thinking about this point in particular i asked my husband a question and it's important that you know that i consider my husband to be a very informed person he is a voracious reader he stays current on events every day and he loves his podcast a range of podcasts so i asked him why do you wear a mask he looked at me like i was crazy and said because dr fauci said so okay and when dr fauci said so what did you then do to learn more about why you should wear a mask did you learn anything about the particles did you learn anything more about covid19 what did you do to learn more about the subject so that you could make an informed decision around wearing a mask and he looked at me he said dr fauci said so and it's funny because maybe that's okay maybe it's okay that the foremost knowledgeable person on this subject said so but it doesn't change the fact that my husband my my informed husband didn't do due diligence he was he followed the information he was fed information from an outlet that he listens to and he acted accordingly he was not a critical thinker in the process and so maybe it's okay in this instance maybe it's all right it's dr fauci except i would argue i'm not sure we have the luxury for it to be okay because of the time in which we live misinformation is all around and that's not new misinformation has been around since the beginning of time we are the consumers of the media and at some point in time we abdicated our responsibility to be critical thinkers in the process we stopped checking facts we stopped digging deeper to get the information that we needed to make informed decisions sometimes life or death decisions we stopped having conversations we stopped hearing from people with opposing views stopped being okay with disagreeing and we need to change that we need to get back to being the active participants in the process we need to get back to being those critical thinkers we need to stop the canceled culture we need to do the work and for me i think it's work worth doing because if we don't we're gonna wake up and the erosion of our democracy won't be happening it will have happened we were all just on autopilot thank you [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 31,686

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Global Issues, Activism, Big problems, Decision making, Media, Technology, Truth

Id: 7byH2HQoJxE

Length: 15min 2sec (902 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 17 2020