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Mood: Distorted ]
[ Currently: Editing the Podcast ]
I love my friends. They are some of the nicest people I know. But some of them posses NO critical literacy skills. These are the well, meaning, earnest people that forward every email without applying any kind of filter. Case in point
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I stand with the majority on this poll below. This country was founded by Christians and to date there seems no reason to give up the basics of our belief system.
Shock on CBC Yesterday Morning This is not sent for discussion. If you agree, forward it.. If you don’t, simply delete it. By me forwarding it, you know how I feel. I bet the response came as a big surprise to CBC to the question : Do you believe that the word God should stay in Canadian culture? CBC yesterday morning had a poll on this question. They had the highest number of responses that they have ever had for one of their polls, and the percentage was the same as this: 86% to keep the words “ God Keep our Land” in the National Anthem 14% against. That is a pretty ‘commanding’ public response. I was asked to send this on if I agreed or delete if I didn’t .. Now it is your turn. It is said that 86% of Canadians believe the word “God” should stay, therefore, I have a very hard time understanding why there is such a mess about having the word “God” in the anthem! Why is the country catering to this 14%? AMEN! If you agree, pass this on, if not, simply delete. |
Now when I received this, the bias of this piece hit me on the head with a 2 x 4. It was more than a little obvious.
What I also found fascinating about this email is the lack of reference to any CBC show. As a long-time, regular CBC listener, I can tell you that CBC does conduct polls all the time. When they want the answers to count, they hire a poling firm and then they site that polling firm repeatedly when they discuss results. Notice a lack of that in this "report".
Both those things have me starting to question the validity of this email.
Given that I have critical literacy skills, I went and did some searching on the CBC website. I found a poll. It is a web poll. You can find it here.
And right under the poll it says "This poll is not scientific, it is based on readers’ votes." So CBC knows that the poll does not necessarily reflect the views of all Canadians. They recognize that webpolls can be hijacked by special interest groups who get their members to flock to the website to influence the results. Or by people who write scripts to robo-vote.
And it gets even better. This is a variation on an email about a NBC poll that has been circulating for YEARS! Canadians can not even make up their own damn chain letters!
The person who created the email referenced above didn’t mention any of this at all. Most likely because it didn’t fit with their very blatant (and I suspect right-wing, anti-immigrant) Christian agenda. As a Christian and thinking person, I find that particularly offensive. Believe what you want, you can even tell me what you believe, but don’t you dare twist the facts (or ignore others) to make your argument work. That path is the way to some of the darkest places in human history.
So why is it that so many people on the web lack the critical thinking skills to winnow through this kind of thing? It is not an intelligence issue. I have seen some smart people forward emails like this. It’s not politics, because people on both sides of the spectrum do it. It’s not socioeconomic, again, all walks of life, all incomes forward this kind of stuff. It’s not age, because I know some younger people who forward this stuff all the time.
Now I will admit, when I first hit the net, I fell for a few of these, earnestly forwarding virus warnings to my entire address book. And then I learned the evil of Spam and Chain Mail and started to apply critical literacy skills to the Internet too.
And there is the crux of this. It seems that a significant proportion of people lack the basic critical literacy skills to be on the Internet. I try in my very small way to educate them. I play Hoax Busters and find the origin of the story and then forward it back. (Thank you Snopes.com.) If there is a grain of truth, I find it and put back the attribution. And some of the people mentioned above have stopped. Others now forward me the emails first to have me do the fact checking. Most are still doing it.
And I will keep doing it, because I like these people and I want to help them. But there are times I feel like I am trying to hold back a tidal wave. A tidal wave made up of people who should know better.