Name: Introduction to Crash Course Navigating Digital Information #1
Uploaded: 2020-03-30T04:10:54.000Z
Duration: 13 min 34 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hello and welcome to Crash Course: Navigating Digital Information.

Modal verbs - B1

My name is John Green, and you may know me from my various channels on YouTube, all caps

tweets about Liverpool Football Club, Q&As about books on my website, or elsewhere on

The average American spends 24 hours per week online, but one in four U.S. adults say that

I love the Internet--it contains so much helpful information; it connects us to each other;

it allows more people to have a voice in public conversations.

But of course, the Internet is also littered with misleading, sensationalized, and downright

I'll tell the other one at the end of the series, but here's the first one, which

was made famous by the American writer David Foster Wallace:

Two young fish are swimming along one day when an older fish swims past and says, “'Morning,

The young fish just look at each other for a second and then swim on for a while, and

then one says to the other, 'What the heck is water?'”

Now I am not the wise old fish of this enterprise.

I am as susceptible to misleading information as anyone.

I tend to focus on information that reinforces my pre-existing worldview, and to passively

ingest all kinds of media while scrolling and swiping endlessly through my feeds.

But I also think we ought to be suspicious of anyone who claims to be the wise old fish

with some special understanding of what we're swimming in.

Believing that you're immune to the seductions of false and misleading information is, if

anything, a symptom of being influenced by false and misleading information.

I tell this joke for two reasons: First, because I need you to call me out if I start acting

like the wise old fish, and second, to point out that much of what we're swimming in

is new and strange--and we're still figuring it out together.

So, for this series, Crash Course has teamed up with MediaWise, a project out of the Poynter

Institute that was created with support from Google.

The Poynter Institute is a non-profit journalism school.

The goal of MediaWise is to teach students how to assess the accuracy of information

The MediaWise curriculum was developed by the Stanford History Education Group based

on civic online reasoning research that they began in 2015.

Other MediaWise project partners include the Local Media Association and the National Association

I'm saying all that, and I'll say it again, because I think it's important to understand

where this information about information came from.

Over the next ten episodes, we're going to dive deeply into the feed and share some

tools that are proven to work when it comes to evaluating the quality and accuracy of

We may not figure out exactly what water is, but we're going to try to learn to improve

INTRO When you want to see what your friends are

up to, you might head to Snapchat, WhatsApp, Instagram or maybe /Fin/stagram.

I don't get that joke but young people in the office said that it is funny.

And then when you want the news, you may wait to be startled by a push alert from a news

app, or you might go to twitter, or snapchat, or reddit.

And when you need to settle a feud over how to pronounce g-i-f, or possibly gee-i-f, you

These habits all feel quite natural to me, but in fact they are part of a huge shift

in how humans find, and produce, and share information.

Just a short time ago, the production of information was controlled by a much smaller group of

Instead of Googling movie times, you had to buy a newspaper or call the movie theater

and risk talking to an actual human being.

To write a research paper, you had to hunker down in the library, not for the outlets and

the free Wifi but for the access to Encyclopedias and books.

Now I should note that there's a lot of information that's not available online,

Libraries continue to be incredibly valuable resources.

But these days, anyone can hop online and produce information via their personal website,

Access to digital devices and high-speed Internet is still a real barrier to entry for many

people, which means unequal access to information.

It also means that while it can feel like everyone is participating in facebook or instagram,

in fact billions of people are not part of those conversations.

Still, the barrier for creating and retrieving information is much lower than it was a generation

Like, when I was a kid, if you wanted to share an opinion with the public, you wrote a letter

to the newspaper and hoped they would publish it.

There was no other way for a stranger to hear your story or your perspective.

Furthermore, as you already know from the three DMs you've answered since you started

this video, the internet changed how we communicate.

We can connect across geographical and political boundaries, we can create organizations and

communities, find people with similar interests, or we can lift people up when they feel alone.

But, when information flows this freely, dangers are inevitable.

Misinformation -- unintentionally incorrect information -- and disinformation -- information

that's wrong on purpose -- spread quickly online.

Plus, we can easily create online worlds where we only see information we already agree with,

For instance, if I only followed people on Twitter who were Team Blake, I would have

been pretty blindsided when Garrett won The Bachelorette.

The same could be said for, say, actual elections.

And because we use information for all kinds of decisions, misinformation and disinformation

This is true for small everyday decisions--restaurant reviews affect where we eat--and for much

larger issues, like choosing a college to attend or a place to work..

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Introduction to Crash Course Navigating Digital Information #1

content

access

evidence

presence