My little canine friend and I have a favorite walking place: the nearest college campus.
It’s a place of great sensations for a dog, and I’m not just talking about goose droppings near the reflecting pond.
Sure, any place we go, Penny’s nose will reward her. But the college, with its sprawling intramural fields, seems to be the rewarding-est.
If you haven’t noticed, a dog’s focus is always on the ground. The nose informs aplenty, but dogs also miss a lot.
Pondering Penny’s nose-to-ground imperative on a recent campus excursion, it occurred to me: Most of the collegians walking among us were looking down, too.
Not to the ground: to their phones, of course.
Those amazing devices convey a lot of information. They also convey goose excrement by the truckload.
We just had an election where our means of information let us down. Disclaimer: That would have been true even if a person who wasn’t a convicted criminal had won.
To what extent were we let down? Well, I teach college classes. Of the otherwise sharp and engaged young people in my classroom, I know how little most of them know.
From my sampling, I’m confident in saying not even one in 10 members of Gen Z knows that the man just elected president was indicted by five – one, two, three, four, five – grand juries.
Not even one in 10 voting-age young people knows what a grand jury is, anyway. Trust me.
I was the “Whaddya mean?” news-bearer who seeded gasps in my media class to inform students that being a felon does not disqualify a person from the presidency.
The ignorance I know so well is not a problem simply of the younger set. It’s nationwide and afflicts all ages.
The focus of this commentary isn’t on-the-cable propaganda, however. It’s those little walk-around mis- and dis-informers in all those hands. Yeah, ahem: smartphones.
We are living in a high-tech world where most of the news consumed isn’t fit for fowl.
Consider Google: an amazing thing — also a debilitating thing. Nicholas Carr, in his perfectly named book, “The Shallows,” wrote about the “Google effect,” the fact that obtaining information isn’t the same thing as being informed.
Because of Google, anyone who wants to believe vaccinations cause autism can find a study that affirms it, even if the author has been chased out of the medical field.
Really, the “Google effect” is the problem of knowing something but way too little to understand much of anything.
In the rise of Donald Trump we see the wages of voters knowing just a little bit. It’s true, for instance, that in 2016 Trump said he’d self-finance his run for president. He said it. True. He just didn’t do it. It was one of the lies so many swallowed for lack of more than a little bit of information.
To his benefit, Trump has redefined the Information Age. Henceforth it is the Little-Bit-of-Information Age.
One will get information from TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitch, Discord or any of social media’s mind-control cousins, but precious little. The rest is what the geese leave.
What I advise my media students toward better informing themselves online, aside from subscribing to an online newspaper, is to frequent a news aggregator. (Dare I say, “Google that”?)
A news aggregator curates what actual news organizations report based on topic and importance. Not only is it a good way to be informed, it’s a way not to be faked out.
Face it, however. The phones in our hands, the screens demanding our attention, are not serving our minds.
In recent years controversy erupted over the effects of the endearingly hyper-cute children’s program “CoComelon.” (Newsweek commentary: “CoComelon made my kid a Zombie.”)
Critics call it too stimulating and dangerously addicting.
It’s only mildly amusing that we would look at something like that and not see the very same problem with all social media and much on our screens: addicting, banal, time-sucking, only marginally redeeming.
The fact is that never has better information been at our fingertips, whether online publications, literature, TV, cinema, music, podcasts — so much that elevates.
Suffice it to say that somehow we must train our fingers toward matters that matter, like self-government, and lift our collective noses out of the droppings.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
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