RAIL

“Thinking isn’t agreeing or disagreeing.  That’s voting.” — Robert Frost

In this article from the blog of the Walrus magazine, writer David Rusak nicely sums up the case that social media is increasingly taking over the way in which we communicate.

He writes:

Even in the unstructured, verbal medium of the comments field, with no built-in retweet button and no formal system logging the repetitions, we see a number of people avoiding using their own words in order to instead “cast a vote” for someone else’s. They deliberately represent themselves as part of a countable mass (in this case, of devoted fans), rather than as an individuated person with a novel point of view. I have no idea how widespread this particular trend is, but I think it exemplifies an ongoing shift in the way online communication is done…What’s more, Facebook’s Like button has now allowed us to do away with much commenting, allowing one-click responses that require the least engagement possible.

[…]

This is not to say that every Facebook friend’s breezily clicked Like replaces what would have been a deep and personal phone chat or letter in days of yore. Far from it — without a doubt, this button also does what it’s purportedly supposed to, removing streams of positive but not particularly content-rich comments and saving the comments box for more nuanced expression. But, as ever, having the avenue for this kind of disengaged, maximally easy social contact encourages us to take it, and thus become used to it, and thus begin to perceive deeper engagement as tiring and maybe even a bit inappropriate.

Continuing the theme of the last sentence Rusak sums up the implications of Facebook’s replacement of the “become a fan” mechanism with the like button to corporations, celebrities and product brand names as follows:

In one fell swoop, the serious, identity-shaping connotations of declaring yourself a fan of something were replaced with the much lower-commitment sense of declaring that you “Like” it; and Facebookers who had already gotten used to Like-ing their friends’ posts and photos were given the impression that it was just the same for them to Like (sign onto the Pages of) movies, brands, and whatever else.

The trends Rusak describes in this article should, I think, greatly interest teachers of critical thinking.  More and more, our students come from a social context saturated by social media.  In the true spirit of “if you can’t beat them join them”, some voices in the academy have already begun calling for teachers and professors to begin using this technology to “reach their students where they are”. In fact, I have to confess that I’ve tried a bit of that myself–to disappointingly small effect.  But more on that later.

What I think is really worrisome about the trends mentioned in Rusak’s article is not just what they do to our communicative practices (though those certainly are worrisome), but what they have the potential to do to our critical thinking practices as well.

To begin, I see an increasing passivity as one potential result of a communicative life reduced to mere “liking”.  One never has to justify a “like” unless challenged about it, and the stultifying effects that social media have on communication make that prospect a very slight one.  In our increasingly relativistic culture the going assumption is that one likes what one likes and that’s pretty much the end of it (unless one “likes” something really heinous like puppy torture, and even then most will assume that it’s just a joke in poor taste).  Hence challenges to what one likes are going to be rare.  After all, “liking” something is just expressing a preference for it–as one would express a preference for chocolate ice cream over vanilla.  What reasons could there possibly be for preferences?  If this is the informal model of preferences that most of us have in our back pockets (as it is in my experience, at least) then it’s small wonder that they are seen–literally–as not worth arguing over.  Hence passively “liking” something supplants active argumentation for that something’s being worthy of being liked in the first place.  Indeed, the very possibility of active argumentation for one’s preferences is almost precluded by the mechanism of “liking”.

The problem with this is that all preferences aren’t as obviously subjective as the “chocolate vs. vanilla” model suggests.  A good deal more thought (one hopes) ought to go into political preferences, for example.  But the model of “liking” admits of no exceptions–it does treat every commitment as a chocolate-or-vanilla type.  In this the “like button” mentality  comports well with a general trend towards relativism in Western culture over the past fifty or so years. The impact on our political culture of thinking of all preferences, including political preferences, in this way is palpable.  All one has to do is to compare the quality of political discourse to which people were regularly exposed forty or fifty years ago with that of political discourse today:

Where we see the impact of this cultural drift in the classroom, I think, is in the increasing inability of students to supply justifications for the positions they take, be it in classroom conversation or in papers or presentations.  How often have you experienced–especially in beginning students–an “argument” that consists of little more than repeated re-assertion of the student’s unsupported opinion?  “I think X because X is what I think, and that’s because X seems right to me.”, etc.  To hold a position strongly, to them, too often means simply to hold it loudly and with an enthusiasm that borders on the atavistic.

Now one can easily say that the general decline in public education (especially in the United States) is to blame for producing college students who cannot cobble together the rudiments of an argument.  Increasingly, however, one has to add the absence of good modeling of reasoned disagreement in mass media and, if Rusak is right as I think he is, the impact that social media has on the nature of our interpersonal communication and the ability to know when argumentation is needed.  Students arrive in our classrooms practiced only at declaring preferences, believing that doing so suffices for thinking–and there’s nothing in the media that suggests anything any different to them.  Indeed, very often their first impulse upon encountering argumentation is to assume that it is just one more species of loud, aggressive, and ultimately unfounded advocacy for an irreducibly subjective point of view.

I don’t want to overestimate the effects of social media here, but as they become more and more a part of daily life for most people, I think we have to ask: How are we to teach critical thinking in such an environment?  It’s one thing to overcome lack of practiced or sophistication in the argumentation skills of students.  It’s quite another to have to overcome skepticism about the very possibility of meaningful argumentation for one’s positions.

For my part I’ve found that the “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach hasn’t worked.  After term after term of experimenting with using Facebook, and allowing laptops and going easy on cell phones, this term there will be changes.  I’ll bother with facebook a lot less, and ban cell phones and laptops so that students will have to focus–in good old sustained, analog fashion–on the people and the discussion directly before them.  Maybe there’s something to that old-time religion after all…

Note: Full disclosure: David Rusak is a friend and fellow blogger on a different site (not the Walrus, with which I have no affiliation of any kind.)