ENGL 301b Truth Decay Why We Believe Lies Essay

ENGL 301b Truth Decay Why We Believe Lies Essay

Instructions/Descriptions

ENGL 301b Truth Decay Why We Believe Lies Essay

Purpose and Logistics:

Normally, as we work on assignment #2 in ENGL 301B we would be revisiting key structural elements of essays more advanced than the Five-Paragraph-Style (FPS) Essay. However, many of the lessons that I usually use for this assignment to focus on global organization are activities that (despite my best efforts) are activities that I don’t have an easy fix for to convert them to activities that can be done at home or online. So this is going to be a bit awkward.

Instead, we’ll drill down on paragraph development and strategies for introductory paragraphs and concluding paragraphs.

Moreover, since many (but not all) of you are taking the class C/NC instead of for a letter grade, some of you will only plan to write two out of class essays instead of all three.

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This assignment topic should be completed by all students taking the class who DO NOT plan to use A1 in the final portfolio. It’s another argumentative, thesis-driven essay, and every passing portfolio should have one. A3 is a more narrative topic (although it does involve some heavy-duty analysis.)

However, I am mindful that even though this assignment has two topic options, both of them may be close enough to current events that students who either struggle with issues of anxiety or who are easily distracted by news in our current study and work environments might find this assignment hard to complete, even if you choose to focus on political mis and dis instead of public health mis and dis. (Those terms will make sense soon.)

To that end, I am posting the materials for A2 and A3 at the same time and asking students to make the choices that work best for them when selecting which assignment to work on next.

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When we hold online classes, we may divide up into A2 and A3 groups to discuss the topics. Stay tuned for details.

Readings:

Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life by Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich (you are only required to read the summary and the introduction of this book-length report. If you choose to use this as a reading for your essay, you are welcome to draw on other parts of the text, but in no way required to.)

“Why We Believe Lies” by Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall. (This article was published in Scientific American but is locked behind a paywall if you try to google the article. I suggest using the Academic Search Complete database, which has the HTML version of the article. It was published in the September 2019 edition.)

“YouTube, The Great Radicalizer” by Zeynep Tufekci from The New York Times

“Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning” the executive summary published by the Stanford History Education Group in 2016.

“Misinformation Telephone” by Renee Diresta from Slate

Background:

Current events have driven home yet again that the infrastructure of information in the 21st century has allowed for very old human tendencies to move faster than they could when our information was delivered through different media.

That is to say, in the days of newspapers but before telephones and telegraphs (let alone radio and television), news arrived in print, for those who could read and could afford to subscribe to or buy, daily newspapers.

Radio brought information into the home for anyone who could understand the spoken word, and television brought moving images of the news into homes. (We should note that television became a center for the American home after WWII).

However, television news did not mean for the first four or so decades of the medium what it has come to mean to us today. Prior to the early 1990s, television was a primary source of news for many Americans, but news was generally confined to a few broadcast periods a day—once in the morning, once in the early evening, and sometimes another round late at night.

It was only with the first Gulf War in the early 1990 (a time, oddly enough, that your current instructor did not have much access to television since she was completing her undergraduate degree) that the first all-news cable network began broadcasting news around the clock. (That network was CNN, which stands for Cable News Network).

These days, and I count myself as guilty of this as the next person, if I drive by a police car with lights on on my way home from somewhere, I find myself supremely frustrated if the local newspaper does not have a story on the likely minor incident I passed on the way home.

And yet, I remember the days when news that was important enough to merit a “breaking news” incursion into regular television programming tended to flood me with adrenaline because I knew, even as a child, that anything that meant that the news people were going to speak to me from the television when cartoons or soap operas should have been on, could not possibly be good news.

One of the hallmarks of the internet and its associated technological developments is a premium on speed. That is to say, we expect to be able to get what we want instantly—whether that is a delivery of a food item that we’ve had outside our region but crave once we get home delivered to our door in a matter of days if not hours or an answer to a persistent question about why the police shut a busy street down, interrupting our commute home from the airport after a long trip home. Beyond the technical aspects, it’s also become a point of pride in many electronic discourse communities (e.g., the desire to be the first to comment or retweet).

However, as with many technological developments, the information infrastructure related to the rise of the internet means that technology may have gotten ahead of what our brains can actually process—and may have unintended consequences.

The internet has, in many positive ways, been a great democratizer when it comes to the spread of information. The gatekeepers of old media—journalistic standards, editors and producers who made sure that stories that ran or aired met those standards—had the potential to recreate certain biases. Voices of groups that were marginalized were sometimes marginalized again in terms of the stories that the American public heard.

However, while democratization can be a benefit, if the information that circulates is inaccurate, the consequences can be dire. If the structures of the internet that we think of as neutral themselves have biases built into them, those consequences can even go unnoticed unless, as a society, we do something about those biases.

In this essay, you will be asked to see what a number of experts have to say about the dangers of the spread of inaccurate information. We’ll look at the distinction between misinformation and disinformation. Then each of you will choose one of two broad topics: inaccurate information about public health during a pandemic or inaccurate information about politics at a time of deep political polarization.

Your essay will, grounded both in the research I have provided and in the experiences you have had with the topic you have selected, write an essay that proposes one solution to a problem that you have seen created by this situation.

Prompt:

Choose either inaccurate health information in the time of a pandemic or inaccurate information in the time of strong political polarization as the focus for your essay. You do not need to limit your focus to the topic in the United States if you have sufficient knowledge of a country outside the US on which to speak intelligently. However, keep in mind that your professor is pretty monolingual. (I also still have no idea what is happening with portfolio readings, so you might be writing for another instructor even more monolingual than I am.)

In an essay of at least 1250-1850 words, take a position on the following question. Make sure that the response is thesis-driven and well-supported with expository paragraphs that balance the components of university-level paragraphs.

Based on the information gleaned from the readings and from your own observations and experiences, argue in what one or two ways society ought to combat inaccurate information if you think it is important for society to do so. Be sure to explain clearly what the consequences of failing to combat inaccurate information could be.

See the daily schedule for revised due dates that differ from the course syllabus due to the need to shift to alternative delivery of instruction (ADI) due to the Great Pandemic Disruption.

ENGL 301b Truth Decay Why We Believe Lies Essay

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