Gaurav Ojha
Critical thinking is the cognitive process of analyzing and evaluating information. Many people find it problematic, discomforting, and even challenging to engage in critical thinking while spending time on social media. After all, it’s easier to like, share, and subscribe to content that aligns with your beliefs, confirmations, and preferences. Social media users often prefer to interact with content by searching for evidence that supports their existing claims, conducting reality checks, and evaluating the credibility and reliability of the information.
Moreover, on social networking sites where anonymity and detachment are possible, people tend to make false assertions and wrong assumptions, generate doubts, formulate conspiracy theories, draw false conclusions, deceive the masses with half-truths and fake news, and use various forms of propaganda to gain influence and virality. Therefore, social media users need to continuously monitor how they consume and engage with different content. Critical thinking significantly impacts how users interact with social media content. A social media user with a critical thinking mindset is more eager to objectively analyze issues, compare and contrast information from reliable sources, and avoid immediate responses without proper investigation.
Reflect Before You React
The basic issue here is that as we move our fingers up and down on the screen, our thinking about social media content also becomes impulsive, emotional, confirmative, reactive, and limited. The consequence of this automatic, fast, and reactive thinking on social networking sites can be detrimental and damaging to individuals, society, and the democratic system as a whole. When people start to believe in all sorts of nonsense, unscientific, and outrageous opinions and claims without facts, data, logic, or evidence, the harm is profound.
It’s not surprising that ideas and information supporting the social status quo, fostering pessimism towards politicians, igniting conspiracy theories, and encouraging certain segments of people to engage in propaganda and divisional politics are the most popular content on social media. Therefore, we need to stimulate our critical thinking as we engage with social media content to avoid making judgments or accepting information without proper analysis and evaluation based solely on impressions and instinctive reactions.
To apply critical thinking in the domain of social media, the first step is to keep our minds open, slow down, ask questions, and apply reasoning. In other words, we need to restrain ourselves from making premature judgments and impulsive conclusions. Before reacting to viral content, we should at least consider that visuals can be edited and manipulated, and that video content may not provide complete information or relevant context.
For example, on social media, you often find condensed videos of politicians with incomplete messages and no reference to historical context. Interestingly, people frequently share well-edited and fabricated videos of politicians based on their political preferences. Therefore, when engaging with social media, we need to apply critical thinking skills to perceive different sides of a story, explore alternative interpretations, and uncover hidden layers of uncomfortable facts within viral content. It’s crucial to recognize how this content is used to initiate unfair persuasions, spread incomplete information, manipulate opinions, and propagate propaganda. Hence, we should avoid drawing explicit conclusions from social media content solely based on believing what we see.
The Difference Between What, Why, and How You See
What we see regularly in social media feeds is determined by algorithms that picks up a pattern based on our engagement with a particular set of content. Hence, what we see regularly is a type of content we like, share, subscribe to, and comment on. The basic issue is not what you see; how come you only see social media content that resembles your choices, tastes, preferences, and prejudices? Hence, without the analytical thinking that enables us to discern patterns within the information, there is a danger of becoming entrapped by algorithmic bias that keeps on reinforcing our frame of references, confirmations, and prejudices on social media.
Another important aspect of critical thinking is the analysis and evaluation of arguments. In critical thinking, before agreeing or disagreeing with any conclusion, we want to know on what basis a conclusion has been derived. We are looking for evidence, reason, data, examples, visuals, assumption or a theory that provides sufficient grounds for someone to formulate a particular conclusion. For example, in social media, when someone uploads visuals of water puddles on the road, a broken drainage system, and clumsy restoration works to ridicule the efforts of the Mayor of Kathmandu, Balen Shah, it is also necessary to ask whether these visuals are sufficient to formulate the conclusion that the initiatives of Balen Shah to transform Kathmandu city have been an all-out failure. What about the remaining facts that the uploader has decided to selectively ignore?
Moreover, on social media, people usually upload content that supports their beliefs, decisions and judgment. Another illustration would be a student who has gone to a foreign country for higher education, asserting that his future is bleak in Nepal. He will only reveal the warm, comfortable, and cozy shades and positive sides of that foreign country on his social media platform, ignoring other unpleasant truths. Hence, critical thinking reminds us that we need to distinguish between facts and opinions, examine the basis upon which claims have been formulated, and connect the pieces of missing puzzles to visualize a bigger picture. After all, there is more to what you see and hear on social media.
(Gaurav Ojha is a faculty member of communication, critical thinking, management, and research at various educational institutions in the Kathmandu Valley. As part of his creative interests, Mr. Ojha regularly publishes opinion posts, poems, and non-fiction articles on a wide range of topics, including death, disease, social issues, humanism, and spirituality.)
