Why Bitches Hate Nuance
On critical thinking, media literacy and misinformation.
To quote Julia Hava and Eliza McLamb of Binchtopia, my podcasting gateway drug, “Bitches Hate Nuance”. This quote, although ironically not very nuanced, pretty much sums it up. As you may have noticed, there has emerged a certain choppiness to our collective engagement with information, along with, you guessed it, polarisation. A great place to observe this is ‘The Media’, that deep and obscure well from which flows the content we consume daily, hourly, by the minute. Now – the erosion of quality journalism and the impact of digital media on the financing, distribution, and consumption of news etc., is no new topic. In fact, it’s one of the main reasons I chose to study Sociology and has been continuously discussed in terms of its impact on democracy, power systems and culture for years. Together with life experience and formal education, media is how we stay informed, develop beliefs and worldviews and make decisions on what to care about and who to vote for. You don’t need me to tell you that. You also don’t need me to tell you that democracy only functions when the Demos is well-informed, because a decision is only really a decision when multiple outcomes have been thoroughly considered.
Don’t worry - I’m not going to ramble on about the dangers of Twitter or why the Daily Mail is shit. We all know it is, although some of us may visit those platforms in the blue light of our midnight phone screens for a bit of guilty-pleasure perusing once in a while. The point of today’s piece is to look at how we can deal with the great informational swamp without losing our bearings, and what the best way of coping with ubiquitous misinformation and decontextualization on a societal level might look like.
One could say we’re in the eye of a perfect storm right now. Pay-Per-Click advertising models, shortening attention spans and a ‘snacking’ approach to news consumption means that traditional outlets hold less traction amongst young people[1], and the platforms on which we do consume our news stories shape the forms in which we can receive them – shorter, more engaging, diverse. Importantly, there is a growing expectation that news should be free within my generation of media consumers. Although I think the idea of democratic and widely accessible information is admirable, we still live in an environment where nothing is really free. If you’re not paying your news sources directly, someone else is – often not out of selfless support for quality journalism[2]. The outcome? Democratic sharing of information, the ability to share raw truths and watch global events as they unfold[3] - but also misinformation, echo chambers and polarisation.
What I’d personally like to see more of is nuance and balance. Short form content is just that – short. And although I admire those who can bring clarity and conciseness to complex topics, thereby making them more digestible to a wide audience, I don’t think this type of content should be the bread and butter of how we inform ourselves. What I’m trying to do here on Substack is make my own small change – write longer form pieces, research them, take my time. Maybe I’m just making an excuse because this piece took me ten days to finish (lol), but as a writer I don’t feel comfortable throwing things out into the world that I haven’t had a little time to overthink. That doesn’t mean I’m trying to produce perfect work – it just means I’m trying to produce good work, work that means something.
About a week ago I attended a party. I spoke to several people about my entanglement of creative pursuits, a slightly terrifying experience in a room full of laser-focussed engineering students and tech men. One conversation stuck with me. I was speaking to a young marketing guy about Substack (hi, if you’re reading this, and thanks for letting me add your email to the list!), and he proceeded to give me advice on how to grow my platform. If my primary goal was to monetise this newsletter or grow a loyal audience base – which would be nice but aren’t the reasons I’m doing this – his advice would probably have been invaluable. I’ve certainly remembered some of it. What struck me most of all, though, was that his first assumption was not that I write because I like writing, or that I write because I feel I genuinely have something to say. It was that the very core idea of Detachment Manifest, the writing at its heart, is just a stepping-stone to digital success[4]. When he realised I didn’t see it this way and that my focus was “quality”, he seemed a little taken aback and said “That must be time-consuming”. That’s the crux of the issue. Not enough things are time-consuming, especially in fast-paced, new media. Good things need time to marinate and should be consumed slowly, tasted properly.
Marketing Man’s advice on how to get more clicks was to focus on “the craziest shit you can think of”, which is basically the model of how a lot of platforms on the internet now work. In my piece on attention, I spoke about how bright, loud and important things are better at capturing our attention than others. In fact, we ourselves are more likely to pass on information if it’s likely to evoke a strong emotional response from the listener. See also the example of an article claiming that AI can now read our brains – not entirely false but arguably misleading. Our primal brains seem to like bonding over juicy gossip, and this is how rumour and misinformation alike spreads. A lot of what we come across online is bait for this, our era’s most valuable resource. It means that a lot of what seems like the final product online – for example a quick and engaging reel about organic skincare or some men building mud houses in the jungle – is really just the vehicle for the real product: your attention. A huge part of what makes new media such a valuable resource is its democratising and diversifying force and its ability to give a wider range of people freedom to share and create. Brilliant people who would otherwise not have had a platform now do – but so do people with shitty, malformed or even just half-baked ideas.
A significant gap between actual and perceived media literacy exists in the UK. As of 2022, 34% of 16-24 year olds in the UK still thought the mere fact that a site was listed by a search engine signified it contained accurate and unbiased information. In other words… if it’s on Google, it must be true![5] Shocking for a generation of ‘digital natives’ if you ask me. So what to do? In my opinion, it’s unlikely that the informational swamp will dry up, and I honestly don’t know if I want it to. I like being able to access peer-reviewed journals on Jstor and discover disgustingly cute illustrations of translucent caterpillars or reels on the best sunscreen on Instagram minutes later (sometimes I like to be influenced too). What I don’t like is having fiction disguised as fact shoved down my gullet all the time. Moderation on social media is one important part of that, but this raises its own questions around censorship. Who builds the criteria for exclusion/inclusion? Are moderation criteria and practices transparent enough? Can you even have a safe and free internet? Moderation can only take care of so much, especially considering that some moderators deal with over 400 posts a day. That’s some seriously speedy processing. What we need now is to improve public media literacy on a large scale, as well as focussing on effective debiasing.
I was lucky in this sense. My parents taught me to see critical thinking as a valuable tool for navigating the modern world. My mother also questions basically everything at least once, which I now do too (it’s slightly annoying for others, but very effective). I also attended a school where we were explicitly taught to check our sources, identify credibility and, yes, not to think that just because something is on Google it must be true. Media literacy needs to be a central part of any holistic approach to education, because without it, you’re at the mercy of anyone with access to a good marketing agency or even just a keyboard.
Why do we need media literacy? Why not just improve moderation and save ourselves the trouble? Or what about disclaimers? Adding pre-exposure warnings to dubious content is an effective way of getting people to consider something with more care – but only when it’s explained why the information could be incorrect. I think we can all agree that having the tools to tease apart what is real and what isn’t, or even what content is actually relevant for you and what isn’t, is more sustainable. A compass and some good waterproofs are arguably just as essential for navigating the informational swamp as having a guide with you. I love the de-influencing trend or pages like UK Fact Check Politics that try to cut through the bullshit, but it’s never good to rely too much on external sources to do it for you.
Misinformation is more ‘sticky’ than retractions of that same information once it has become accepted as true. That means: if people are exposed to a false story which is seemingly coherent and that story is later retracted, they’re still more likely to hold onto the false narrative than accept an incomplete explanation for an event. For example, 20-25% of the UK population held onto beliefs in a link between childhood vaccines and autism, even after the study in question was retracted by the journal that published it and its author lost his license to practice medicine. Similarly, 20-30% of the US public still believed that weapons of mass destruction had actually been discovered in Iraq years after the invasion, although public corrections had been made. Not only does well-disguised misinformation affect our ability to make accurate decisions and skew our worldview – when retracted, it can have a destabilising effect in our trust in the media, causing us to turn to alternative news sources – which are themselves sometimes questionable. A vicious cycle forms. Coupled with selective exposure in a fractured media landscape, you can quickly find yourself in a bubble of inaccurate information, like many disillusioned people during the pandemic. Better to recognise false or misleading content before it even has time to settle.
If you were taught the importance of media literacy at school or work, good for you! If you weren’t (or you’re over a certain age), here are some things to think about next time you encounter something represented as fact – not just on social media, but the media in general.
A. Try to see through the content’s entertainment value and focus on the what rather than the how. Nice audio quality, transitions and visual aids do not an expert make.
B. Who’s giving you this information? Is it a source that’s likely subject to fact-checking processes?
C. Is it an opinion or is it presented as fact? Where did the source get their information from? Could the source have a vested interest in the story?
D. Is it short and clear information about a complex topic? If yes, take this simplification into account when learning from the information.
E. Are there gaps in the narrative? Does the source make unfounded assumptions?
F. How strong are the ideas presented? Are they really convincing or did the source just use effective storytelling?
This list is by no means exhaustive, and you probably have your own ways of evaluating the accuracy of what you come across online. But remember the gap between young adults’ confidence in their own media literacy and actual performance? Don’t get too comfortable. I’ve definitely accidentally absorbed some bullshit in my time.
[1] Don’t get me wrong – lobbying has always been a thing and newspapers have always meant business, but established outlets do have more robust fact-checking and quality control protocols – and a reputation to maintain – than random blogs on the internet (like mine!).
[2] There are, of course, models such as donation-based funding, which is a very important way of keeping independent journalism independent. The Guardian uses one such model.
[3] Russia’s war with Ukraine and its coverage on social media, often with on-the-ground footage and personal stories is a real example of this, and is a way of understanding the conflict in a new way.
[4] Granted, alcohol was involved - so if I’m being unfair here, do let me know.
[5] There’s a great initiative by the News Literacy Project called Checkology, in which you can test your own media literacy skills and train yourself to improve your ability to critically engage with the media you consume. Access it here:
https://get.checkology.org/