Many herbaceous annual, biennial, and perennial weeds can be characterized as competitive ruderals.
– How weeds affect us all
This is far from a singular incident of fake news being spread through Facebook, indicating the fact that it is not necessary for a story to be extremely detailed or particularly credible for it to have an impact.
– Testing Children and Adolescents’ Ability to Identify Fake News: A Combined Design of Quasi-Experiment and Group Discussions
Would you willingly select a weed to be the centrepiece of your garden? Weeds have no desirable qualities to take centre place and perhaps because of this, they don’t wait to be selected. Unwanted as they may be, they find ways to insert themselves jarringly into our lives and pollute by occupying, an otherwise beautiful frame with their massive girth. They assert, ad nauseum, their right to express themselves abundantly and in so doing, take every opportunity to sully the splendour of the plants we do select, treasure and take pride in.
A weed is “a plant that interferes with the management objectives of a given area of land at a given point in time” and has been described as “noxious” and a ruderal “with short life cycles and high seed output that are found in highly disturbed environments” (Beck, 1994). They have “the ability to produce thousands of seeds” which are “great at dispersing” (Kalil, 2018).
It is one thing to have no remarkable qualities to speak of or to be plain and ordinary. It is something else altogether when there is potential to cause great harm. According to a paper from Colorado State University, there is a species which releases toxins through its roots which cause legitimate plants to self-destruct from within. Coulter in How to Kill Weeds without Hurting your Garden, says they steal water “and nutrients from your desirable plants and many will spread until they overrun everything from the rhubarb to the roses”.
In sum, a weed makes no one’s life better and “is adapted structurally” (Parasitism, Wikipedia) to live off the plants which do. Its expression benefits only itself and for this reason, there is nothing ordinary about it.
Weeds can be found on all landscapes including that of our minds and screens. The Zen master Shunryu Suzuki of The Beginner’s Mind speaks of Mind Weeds and says, “pulling out the weeds” gives “nourishment to the plants”. Mind weeds are essentially undesirable and debilitating thoughts. “When the alarm rings in the morning, you get up” and “do not feel so good” (Suzuki, 1970) it is probably because of mind weeds.
The esteemed Zen master who transformed many lives including that of Steve Jobs, advises those with minds harassed by intrusive and unproductive thoughts to not make any attempt to battle such thoughts. Instead when “something comes into your mind, let it come in, and let it go out. It will not stay long” and in this way, he tells us not to “be bothered by anything”.
A calm mind is indeed a great asset. However, it may not be practicable for non-renunciates to perennially cultivate total emptiness. The mind has to be applied to process information to make decisions for daily living. In this regard, leaving those bent on deliberately spreading disinformation to come in and go out as they please may not be an option because, such disinformation can and does stay long.
Disinformation thrives in disturbed environments. Tandoc et al. (2017) cite the example of Pizzagate, a conspiracy theory. Here a man who had started out with the seemingly harmless activity of reading right wing blogs wound up walking into a pizza restaurant, the Comet Ping Pong in Washington, DC with an automatic rifle. According to a RollingStone article, he had believed he was fighting the good fight and that it was incumbent on him to do something. He texted his friends (whom he attempted to rope in) that their mission could require sacrificing, “the lives of a few for the lives of many” (Robb, 2017). A friend’s incredulous reply is telling – Sounds like we r freeing some oppressed pizza from the hands of an evil pizza joint (Robb, 2017).
Disinformation robs people of the hope necessary to effectively harness and channel their energies with a long-term view of progress towards more productive endeavours, leaving them cynical, disoriented, angry and consequently weak.
In other words, even when short lived, the shadow disinformation casts on those who rely on the information, is long.
There are several reasons for this. In their very recent book, The Psychology of Fake News, researchers from the Australian National University (ANU), show how our brains are predisposed to accept uncritically what is presented to us and how “many incidental influences that have no bearing on the substance of the message can influence its perceived truth”.
They present findings such as, “false news diffused faster, with the truth taking about six times as long as falsehood to reach 1500 people” and suggest there is “normative pressure to spread fake news”. They illustrate with examples, how the tools for legitimate consensus building have been misappropriated for malevolent ends and how the rules for decent and conscientious engagement with publics have been breached.
When even adults get taken in, children are even more susceptible to disinformation. Indeed, researchers from the US and Netherlands who have conducted experiments with hoax websites found that a majority of students were unable to identify a fake website (Dumitru, 2020). In a study conducted in 2007, 89% of 13-year olds did not know they were looking at a fake website. In 2018, 96% of 11 to 12-year olds and in 2019, 65% of “first graders to fifth graders” did not either.
The latest such study with a similar research design was conducted in Romania amongst 11 and 12-year olds as well as 18 and 19-year olds. These kids went to “a public school with no fake news, digital literacy, or online skills programs” (Dumitru, 2020). Here, 50 out of 54 students expressed their firm commitment to sign “a petition to save the jackalope”.
The jackalope could of course be saved if it exists.
There are less harmless, more subtle fabrications, which mere fact checking would not sufficiently dispose of. Given how natural state psychology lends itself to being misled, there is pronounced need for critical thinking amongst students.
The publication by ANU recommends that “students’ misconceptions can be corrected by confronting them with correct information, showing students step by step why one idea is wrong and another one is right, preferably repeating this process multiple times” and qualifies this with the condition that students must themselves want to “think through the issues”.
To think critically is among other things, “knowledge updating”, “analysing differences and comparisons, namely the establishment of similarities and differences” and “evaluation on the truth value, utility, positive or negative effects” of what is received (Florea & Hurjui, 2014).
It is a “complex cognitive process which is closely linked with the language, with specific activities of young pupils: reading, writing, speaking, listening” (Florea & Hurjui, 2014).
Reasoning develops as language competence progresses. Intuitively, to take a view and to be convinced in the merits of such a view would require using language to ask the right questions and to derive defensible answers to such questions. If an initially held belief cannot be defended, students would realise that they need to update their view. In this way, erroneous beliefs can be crossed out upon closer examination. This ability to question and defend views can be incubated in an environment of critical inquiry. Such an environment should be one where willingness to participate in a respectful exchange of views is recognised even more than the ability to give right answers. Then, students would be rid of the pressure to defend the indefensible.
Untruths like crippling self-doubt have the ability to creep up and rapidly proliferate, draining a landscape of all dynamism and vitality. They are weeds of a different form. Indeed, weeds take many different forms and names. These include: Rumex obtusifolius, Senecio vulgaris, Lamium purpureum, Prunella vulgaris, Convolvulus arvensis.
Regardless of its form, a weed is not a good sign for any environment. A weed by any other name will sound just as rude, obnoxious and convoluted.
The Brain Dojo
