Information Dieting For the Soul

 How I feel, daily, trying to keep ahead of misinformation trends among my students...

    This week, I was asked to think deeply about information literacy- what constitutes my information diet, how I process it, how I evaluate bias, and how all of that fits into the larger framework of Being A Librarian (TM). 

    The first thing I noticed is that a *lot* of my information comes from social media.  Not the badly spelled Facebook Minion meme type, thankfully, but from places like Twitter and Reddit, where I tend to rely on the ability to read other people's views and opinions to form my own.  In some ways, I think this Information By Consensus approach is useful, insofar as I'm not getting my information from one unknown source, but rather a multitude of independent evaluations of an existing, credible source- like a news article or national broadcast.  Often, other commenters point out areas of bias or notable anomalies, which helps me evaluate the trustworthiness of the source, and how readily I accept the overall narrative.

    Generally speaking, I'd like to say that this approach, and my own hypersensitivity to when a certain narrative is being pushed, makes me well-equipped to navigate online disinformation, but I fear the truth is a little less flattering.  Yes, Reddit comments on r/Politics may be occasionally insightful, but their sources are just as unknown as the aforementioned Facebook meme.  Usually, the evidence of a consensus among commenters points to a solid factual grounding, but it is also VERY possible for such groups to become echo chambers, parroting each other in a bid to sound informed, and spreading disinformation along the way.

    I definitely think that, as a professional, I'm going to need to refine my information palate- Particularly when it comes to things in my own field.  I should be prioritizing actual academic articles and the newsletters of organizations like the ALA and AASL over content aggregators like Reddit.  I should also cleave more closely to one of the established frameworks for learning- The Future-Ready Librarians model discussed in our lecture seems particularly apropos.

    After all, my own professional ethos is explicitly forward-thinking in terms of the library's adapting role in shaping the lives of young learners.  A librarian MUST be prepared to navigate the challenges of an increasingly digital world, and one such challenge is ensuring access to equity and privacy for students as they search for information that impacts their lives and communities.  A big part of facilitating that process is in training them on how to discern valuable information from junk, and ensuring that they have full access to reputable sources; Saying "don't get info from TikTok, read the New York Times!" is only useful if the student can actually get behind the NYT paywall, after all.

    Finally, on to the second portion of this week's assignment- the posting of an AI image.  Before I post, I wanted to provide some context:  Generally, I do not use AI image generation, on principal.  AI generated art does not simply magically appear- it had to be trained on how to construct images, and this training, generally, comes from trawling vast databases of stored images in order to isolate and reproduce common patterns in art.  

The trouble with this is that, in virtually all cases, the art that is used in the training is not public domain, but is, rather, stolen from the online galleries and social media posts of artists.  There is a real conversation to be had about the ethics of such generation, particularly when it is copying the style and effort of existing artists who rely on the ability to sell their work for income.  

However, I also acknowledge that AI-generated art is not going anywhere, for better or worse.  My students will use it, my peers will use it, and it will, in all likelihood, ingrain itself into our information diet.  As such, despite my reservations, I have opted to satisfy the requirements of this portion of the assignment- if only to better familiarize myself with the format.  And so, without further ado, I present to you what Microsoft Designer thinks I look like:

Honestly... pretty accurate.