If we were to travel back into medieval Europe, we would find society divided sharply between the learned and the common people. The learned communicated privately through writings and, sometimes, languages that the common people couldn’t access. Such an arrangement observed Wisdom’s teaching: “Do not cast your pearls before swine.” (Matthew 7:6)
Today, this separation is not as clear as it was then–but it needs to be made so.
Social media is a natural product of democracy, the inevitable result when the freedom of speech meets the internet, though it wasn’t meant to be so. Originally, the internet was designed to provide scholars and researchers with a means of sharing information and citing sources by means of “hyperlinks”.[efn_note]http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html[/efn_note] The internet was a place to access documents by means of links. This is referred to as “Internet 1.0” today.
It wasn’t long, however, before the commercial opportunities available through the internet were realized and early services like “America Online”[efn_note]https://web.archive.org/web/19961220155557/http://www.aol.com/[/efn_note] made common information–news, sports, weather, etc.–available to the general public. The term “surfing the web” was coined to refer to the habit that developed of wandering through links at random. Most importantly, however, was the development of the online chat room, where users began to create rather than merely access the content on the internet. This was followed by the development of social media platforms such as Myspace, LinkedIn and then Facebook around 2007.
What was fascinating about social media on the internet was that anyone and everyone could post anything and everything on the internet. What was terrible about social media on the internet was…that anyone and everyone could post anything and everything on the internet. It quickly became a mess of information that “search engines” uselessly tried to make sense of. It was terrible, because any content could be posted with any titles or keywords and appear in search results. There was seemingly endless information–but it was impossible to access.
Google was founded in 1998 and established an algorithm for ranking content. This algorithm, known as “PageRank” was published by the founders of Google, two Stanford students, and order was established on the internet. It was primarily concerned with ranking information based on academic credibility, giving preference to content posted on reputable websites (.edu, .gov) rather than personal blogs and commercial sites (.com, .org, .net). It rewarded articles that were being linked to as sources for other online content, and used other strategies to present search results in some reasonable order. To this day, Google is what makes the internet useful, handling over 90% of all internet searches[efn_note]https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share[/efn_note].
So, the internet and social media is not total chaos, but the greater question is whether the common internet and social media platforms are where men and women should be who desire wisdom and truth? The answer to this question is a clear “No.”
Many are aware of the the useless wrangling, advertising and spam on the internet, and most of the people we interact with on social media channels are people who we would never interact with in a classroom, business meeting or public office. The end of work and study is to gain accessibility to greater influence that we may “direct temporal affairs according to the will of God”.[efn_note]Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 898[/efn_note]. The people we are commonly discussing things with, or arguing against on social media are commonly people of no influence, or education, or even employment. We are not learning from them, nor are we improving our circumstances in life, nor are we communicating in an influential way. We are wasting our time.
Weaning Ourselves Off Social Media
It doesn’t take much to persuade internet users of this. The challenge, however, is weaning ourselves off of the internet and social media and finding better resources for research, discussion and influence.
1. Online Courses Rather than Online Discussions
After an hour of discussion with a random person on Facebook or Twitter, what do we gain for it? Perhaps we gain some new insight through the discussion, but most often we gain nothing. These discussions are useless.
If, rather than burn time in social media discussions, we would enroll in an online course and engage in discussions with teachers and classmates, we would actually have the opportunity to gain something from the discussion, both with respect to the discussion itself, and also the completion of a lesson or course that benefits in some material way.
Opportunities for significant online study are endless today, from graduate degree programs at the world’s greatest universities all the way down to basic courses in K-12 concepts you never mastered. The time wasted in useless discussions and “web surfing” could be spent in significant life-changing studies.
2. Expert Sources Rather than Popular Sources
When we have questions and want help finding answers, where do we turn? Common people run a Google search and start clicking on links, but this is not intelligent. Many of our questions are serious and complex and require reliable, mature answers. Many of our decisions require researched information made public in articles that are accountable to expert review before being published. This information is not accessible through lazy Google searches, but requires expert sources.
Thankfully, we can access authoritative sources for questions of the Catholic faith–the Scriptures, the Catechism, the writings of the Doctors of the Church, and so on. However, our needs are rarely satisfied by accessing the words of these sources; we need to know the correct interpretation of them. This is true in all subjects.
For expert interpretation, we need to look to expert sources, where leaders in different fields publish the conclusions of their studies on the subjects we’re asking about. These are found in scholarly journals and databases online.
For example, rather than running a common search on Google, which accesses any and all content on the web, we can search “Google Scholar” instead, which limits the search to scholarly literature.
Another source is JSTOR, which “provides access to more than 12 million journal articles, books, images, and primary sources in 75 disciplines.”[efn_note]https://about-jstor-org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/[/efn_note].
These are two widely-used sources for information, but there are many others. The Harvard library provides the following list of online databases:
- Academic Search Premier
- ARTStor
- Business Source Complete
- DASH
- Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest)
- Factiva
- Education 3-in-1 Search (EBSCO)
- Google Books
- Google Scholar
- Harvard Dataverse
- HathiTrust
- Historical Newspapers (ProQuest)
- JSTOR
- Kanopy
- MLA International Bibliography
- Nexis Uni
- Oxford Bibliographies Online
- Project Muse
- PsycINFO
- PubMed
- Sage Research Methods
- Social Science Premium Collection (ProQuest)
- Statistical Insight
- Web of Science
- Worldcat (FirstSearch)
- Worldcat (Worldcat.org)
3. Paid Sources Rather than Free Sources
“Free resources” are used on the internet to gain attention. They are a marketing tool that serve as the first step of a “marketing funnel”. It’s common for us to make our first contact with an organization through some free resource we learn of, but at some point, we need to move forward.
For example, in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, I post free YouTube videos and offer a free book to provide seekers with an easy entrance into the discussion of classical Catholic education. After learning of the history of classical Catholic education, and listening to some practical talks on the subject, men need to make a decisions: get into classical Catholic studies or find something else to do.
Many, especially in Christian circles, imagine that free resources can be strung together as a “cheap” way of getting what’s needed, but this is not realistic. The free resources are made so by their sources for simple reasons. They are not intended to lead anyone to mastery or serve as a final solution.
Even worse, when it comes to news media, free outlets generate their revenue by means of advertising and, therefore, they intentionally publish “clickbait” to get attention and clicks from as many viewers as possible. These are not reputable news sources, nor do they pretend to be so. One can see all over their websites advertiser content: that’s their business.
Therefore, if you’re going to get serious about your information sources, you’re going to need to move beyond the freebies and purchase access to quality sources. For news, these would include the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. For education, these would include enrolling in actual courses and academic services that are intended to lead students to mastery rather than merely introduce materials.
4. Long-Form Posts Rather than Short-Form Posts
Ultimately, however, we have to address the problem of seeking information from lazy, short-form media such as social media posts, memes, YouTube videos, etc.. Complete questions normally require complex answers and we’re not going to find solutions to the dilemmas of adult life in posts intended for ignorant, silly audiences. We have to be willing to engage with mature, long-form content such as books, articles, etc.. Moreover, these sources need to go beyond “Dummies” books and other entry-level information.
When we were in school, we learned to do “research projects”, but that was not just for school assignments. We were being taught (poorly, of course) how to access quality information to gain answers we’d need throughout life and most adults have simply thrown those lessons away. When we have a question, we turn to short YouTube videos, social media posts, magazines, or whatever happens to show up on top of the Google search results.
We need to do better.
If we’re going to free ourselves from the endless and useless wrangling and web-surfing of the ignorant class, and move ourselves into a class of intelligent adults, we need to make these changes in how we use the internet.
God bless your studies,
Mr. William C. Michael, O.P.
Classical Liberal Arts Academy
mail@classicalliberalarts.com
