Steal This Link
4 min read
Some interesting thoughts about media literacy, google bombing, and white supremacism in a conversation started by Tom Hoffman and moved along by Will Richardson.
So, let's get some of the important stuff out of the way:
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
I love the smell of Google bombing in the morning. These legitimate links to sites on MLK will gain an incremental boost in page rank, thus pushing the crap at martinlutherking (dot) org further down in the rankings. While I don't particularly agree with artificially gaming systems, I disagree more with racist propaganda. So, Googlebombs away.
On a seemingly unrelated note, in several other places I've seen hue and cry about the need to teach MySpace to students. On the sites where people actually take the time to explain what they mean by this, they usually equate "teaching MySpace" with teaching students how to protect their personal information online.
I shudder when I read these posts because I wonder if these people are really serious, or if they are cynically using the popularity of MySpace as a search term to buoy their own pagerank, and, by extension, their perceived credibility.
To me, online security and Google bombing both fall under the umbrella of media literacy. As the whole lonelygirl15 show demonstrated (and I'm intentionally not linking to any sources about this; if you need background, just google "lonelygirl15"), Identity is now content. MySpace, and YouTube, and blogs, and podcasts, and [fill in the blank with another web 2.0 buzzword] blur the lines between content creators and content consumers, but make no mistake about it: content is being consumed, and professional content creators (we can just call them salesmen or advertisers) are infiltrating "amateur" spaces in increasingly sophisticated efforts to work an angle and make a buck.
Credibility can now be gamed. Popularity can now be gamed. People actually spend time trying to figure out how to cheat their way to "Top Rated" on You Tube. I don't point this out to criticize the internet, merely to demonstrate that the same issues that exist in Meatspace exist online. There is nothing wrong with making money. Even I try and do it on occasion. But, whether one is online or offline, ethical lapses abound. As educators and learners, our responsibility remains unchanged: how do we help our students and peers analyze the information they consume?
As Tom Hoffman points out in another post, this isn't new ground. As a species, we have made use of critical thinking in past generations. But, as the tools for gaming credibility change, we need to teach our students how to look behind the curtain.
And this points to a frequently-overlooked value of blogging. Many people see blogging as the act of finding an audience, and denigrate blogging that occurs within a walled garden, or within a course that isn't accessible to the entire internet. These folks miss the point. Blogging can be about finding an audience, but it also provides an accessible medium for finding a voice. In the process of learning how to structure an argument, one also learns how to spot strengths and weaknesses in the arguments one encounters. Through learning the technical aspects of writing well, one can learn the critical and analytical skills needed to navigate the internet safely.
Oh, and one other thing. Critical thinking works pretty well offline, too.
