Is social media making us lazy thinkers? Is social media ripping our critical analysis skills from our brains and chucking them on the trash pile of archaic customs?
Last week over on Marketing Pilgrim there was a great discussion about this theory that many folks think is taking us down the cyber-road to ruin. Roderick Ioerger, the post author, wrote about how easy it is to get a question answered via social media, and he tentatively despaired about how such quick resolution may erode our ability to solve our own problems, and with it our skill for critical thinking.
The allure of those quick answers do feel tempting. I mean, you can tweet, Facebook, LinkIn, or blog for an answer to a perplexing, and perhaps chronic, problem that you face far too often. Surely you are going to get an answer. The question is then, critically thinking, “What’s the value of that answer?” Is it correct? Is it even close to correct? Just because it’s on the Internet, or from the Internet, or from a “collective information” base borne of social media, doesn’t make it true, correct, or right. Doesn’t necessarily make it incorrect either.
I’ll tweet, Face, Link, or blog for an answer upon occasion. But, depending upon the importance of the question, of course, I’ll usually back it up with my own offline research. Well, technically offline. Rather should I say, outside of the social media community. I’ll check library sources. Did so today while doing some research at work. Consulted the local library. Now, I didn’t physically go there. I went there virtually. But the point is that the sources I reviewed were outside the social mediasphere.
When doing any type of research, and the inevitable critical analysis springing therefrom, I want to get as much information as I can from different sources that lie in different realities. The online, social mediasphere is one reality. Other sources, let’s call them Web 0.0 sources “unsullied” by social media, are another reality. Why do I call them realities?
Because information passed around on the Internet, and in social media as a subset, tends to get distorted as it goes from eye to fingertip to eye to fingertip to eye and so on. Conversely, that information can also get augmented and improved and strengthened. It’s just hard to know how much of which is going on unless you get some corroboration or refutation from another reality. A correlation of answers from both realities is the best way.
Oooops. I think I just answered my own question.
Make sense? What do you think? 
