Welcome back to my serial piece–I’ll pick up where I left off last week, on the idea that it is difficult to abandon old techniques and move toward new ones, argumentatively. Something that exacerbates the comment-section mentality is that we’re experiencing something of a cultural shift to a post-fact era wherein no media source can be trusted, especially those that challenge your pre-existing notions. Living under this mindset exacerbates my students’ reluctance to disagree with the group. Donald Lazere produced the book Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy in part because of an 1970s era NCTE push for teaching the “critical reading, listening, viewing, and thinking skills necessary to enable students to cope with the persuasive techniques in political statements, advertising, entertainment, and news,” and again, the composition and rhetoric field asks, in 2018,“how do we teach people to read, write, and think in an era of Disinformation on the internet?”

In the op-ed that inspired my title, Adam Grant, professor of management and psychology of University of Pennsylvania says, “If no one ever argues, you’re not likely to give up on old ways of doing things, let alone try new ones. Disagreement is the antidote to groupthink. We’re at our most imaginative when we’re out of sync.” Now, Grant is talking about parenting. But his observation holds true in the college classroom, during collaborative learning exercises, too. I want my students to disagree, constructively and with purpose because if they don’t, they often fall short of true critical thinking.

One of the ways I find that people can disagree constructively is via research—when they have someone backing them up, they’re more willing to go out on a limb. But even in well-built assignments asking for varied opinions research can be a dead end. Professor and writer Audrey Watters, says, of the disinformation and distrust of fact as phenomenon in culture that it creates an environment where cherry-picking is not only good research, cherry-picked data is the only research we will even trust. Watters says that the distrust of the press that is so popular even presidential candidates tout the “internet” over traditional journalism has created “a world in which institutions and experts are no longer trustworthy.” As someone who teaches information literacy, I find that deeply disturbing. The fact that misinformation is believed “because its not in print and not from experts or academics or certain journalists” is chilling (Watters). Watters calls this “a crisis in all our information institutions – journalism and higher education, in particular. Expertise is now utterly suspect… The Internet has made it particularly easy for us to confirm our beliefs and our so-called expertise. Digital technologists (and venture capitalists) promised this would be a good thing for knowledge-building; it appears, instead, to be incredibly destructive.” She’s got a point–it’s a big challenge for me, while I’m teaching information literacy and argument to my students. To read more of what she has to say, check our her website. 

Check back next week to see what I’m doing to fight against these problems.