Fool Me Once: Fake News Makes Its Way to the Workplace
A survey from MindEdge found American adults are lacking when it comes to digital literacy. That's very bad news for us — and for our employers.
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etween antitrust concerns, questions of data privacy, and a number of political dust-ups, Google has caught a lot of flak over the past few years. Depending on where you're standing, the tech giant may be deserving of the criticisms.
its "State of Critical Thinking" report. Among the report's key concerns: Just how digitally literate is the average American? "We define digital literacy as an individual's ability to effectively find, identify, evaluate, and use information from digital sources," explains Jefferson Flanders, CEO of MindEdge.
Still, there's something neat about every bit of information you could ever want being just a search away. Need a recipe for dinner? Want to Matthew Kosinski teach yourself how to change the oil The results of the survey should in your car? Either way, you can find the answer on have us all reconsidering just how astute we are: Google. 88 percent of respondents told MindEdge they were confident in their critical thinking skills, but Even in our professional lives, as we're doing the only 9 percent of them scored an "A" on a basic work we get paid to do, Google digital literacy test designed “In addition to trusting can be a real boon. I admit it: to measure a person's ability I may be a professional editor, to identify fake news and the internet too much, but I still turn to Google when think critically about online a tricky grammar question we're simply too tired to handle resources. Respondents with the information onslaught.� less than a four-year degree arises. I'd wager most readers have done similar things in had a 76 percent failure rate; their own day jobs. those with degrees had a 62 percent failure rate. But here's the catch: Just because you found it on the internet doesn't mean it's true, and Google's search rankings are no stamp of credibility. Results are based on relevancy, which is not the same as accuracy.
"Overall, I think most of us don't pay close enough attention to the origins of online content, and [we] assume that it's trustworthy when it may not be," Flanders says. "Because of this, we need to be more skeptical of what we read on the web."
We savvy web users consider ourselves to be pretty discerning, though. This isn't our first time on the internet! The problem is we're not as discerning we think we are, and that's bad news for us and everyone we work with.
In addition to placing too much trust in the internet, many of us are simply too fatigued from the information onslaught. As neuroscientist Daniel Levitan said in a 2016 interview with PBS NewsHour, "We're making more and more decisions every day. I think a lot of us feel overloaded by the process. ... [I]t's getting harder and harder to know, when you find things on the internet, what you can believe and what you can't. And there isn't really anybody doing it for us."
Most of Us Can't Pass a Digital Literacy Test This past summer, educational technology firm MindEdge surveyed 1,001 American adults for 22
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