Disagreeing experts, difficult choices / Craig Gibson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gibson, Craig, 1954- author.

Series:

Student success.

SAGE skills: Student success

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Specialized journalism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource : illustrations.

Place of Publication:

Los Angeles, CA : SAGE Publications, Inc., 2022.

Summary:

You make decisions all the time about small matters and maybe less frequently about more momentous ones. How do you know which information sources, experts, collections of data, or organizations to rely on in making these decisions? You will choose a major and make decisions about a job, a career, a major purchase, a place to live, as well as selecting information sources for your academic courses. You are learning all the time about information sources and their origins and how they circulate; learning how to trust some sources and not others will be an ongoing process for you. Some important decisions that you may make in the immediate future, where you have to consider the perspective and origins of information sources or the viewpoints found in them, are shown in Figure 1. One of the most important dimensions of becoming informed is learning that information sources are often not neutral, that there is a vantage point, a slice of reality, a perspective that is present. Political organizations offer a particular agenda, and appeal to certain parts of the voting population based on a set of positions about the economy, education, laws and our legal system, and any number of contentious social and cultural issues. You know as well that our media and news landscape is made up of a wide range of media platforms-newspapers, TV and cable channels, magazines, journals, newsletters, radio stations, podcasts, blogs, and others-that take certain perspectives and usually align with a particular political, cultural, or social perspective. True neutrality-in the sense of not taking a side and being passively unaligned with any agenda-may be impossible. But you also become informed by understanding yourself better and understanding your own filters and biases. That means that your experience in life to this point has equipped you with a certain set of filters through which you understand the world-including family background, geographic origin, public or private schooling, your reading and viewing habits, and your own information consumption habits. These filters mean that making good choices about information in the future means you'll need to become aware of your own biases. In other words, none of us is neutral, either, and you'll need to develop some good habits to widen those lenses-looking beyond surface features of articles, news reports, social media posts, and understanding them more "in depth," in context. Important contexts could include the surrounding sources, the community of scholars that a journal article comes from, the social media platform, and the memes used on it. Learning about your own biases and how they might influence where you look for information, and then understanding the context where it lives, will help you avoid the idea that information sources are somehow "neutral." At the same time, you'll need to learn about a related but different idea, that of objectivity. Objectivity and neutrality are often confused, but they are very different concepts. Objectivity is possible in degrees or along a spectrum but is not part of the "not taking sides" aspect of neutrality. It is based on following a claim to truth or facts or evidence, even if these may not be totally established or certain. Scientists, lawyers, and doctors strive for objectivity in introducing a new vaccine and the protocols for it, trying a case, or pointing toward more evidence for climate change-even if there are controversies and debate surrounding their discoveries. Objectivity relies upon methods for gathering data, or evidence, and using reasoning from facts to move toward a broader hypothesis or theory about a case, or a large claim about the natural or physical world. Objectivity can also result from the reasoning powers of any of us about everyday situation if we're attuned to the virtues of openness, fairmindedness, our own intellectual courage, and willingness to change our minds. We may take eventually take sides-meaning we're not neutral-but only after looking at evidence and facts as we understand them. These are complicated matters to sort out in looking at the information landscape that we face all the time, and learning to detect biases and perspectives in sources and media systems and other parts of that landscape requires a lot of attention. One important aspect that you will learn about through this Skill is that uncertainty about information published by experts, media channels, and other players may continue even after you've studied them. You have to be prepared for the reality that experts will disagree, even in established academic disciplines, and you'll need to attune your lenses even more finely in making decisions about which expert, scholar, spokesperson, writer, or public intellectual has a better claim for your attention, and to inform your own thinking. This Skill addresses the full range of these complex issues, and you may not be neutral, just as information sources themselves aren't, but you can develop habits of thinking that help you make more thoughtful decisions in the future.

Notes:

Publication: Information's Not Neutral, and Neither Are Individuals.

Includes bibliographical references.

Description based on: online resource; title from PDF information screen (SAGE, viewed December 23, 2022).

ISBN:

1-0718-9889-2

9781071898895

OCLC:

1342120917