Somewhere between an endless amount of media to consume and an endless will to consume it lies the decaying remains of our ability to think critically about the information in front of us. Would you believe me if I told you that 47% of US adults have knowingly shared fake news? Well, you shouldn’t. Who came up with this statistic and what motive do I have to get you to believe it? Just because I printed this information in an article doesn’t mean that it’s true. What if I told you it was actually 10%? This is what you need to consider before you believe any piece of information you consume.
A study done in 2023 showed that around 73.3% of adult Ameri- cans feel as if their critical thinking skills have not improved since high school. How is this possible? The interaction between the blue light our devices emit and our decision making–center, the prefrontal cortex, causes neurons in our brain to fire less often when trying to engage our information-processing abilities – this is why we are unable to be more critical of the information we consume on our phones.
It doesn’t help that our phones are also filled with people trying to misinform us, as well as applications that enable them to do so. They present to be one way, but in reality are another. This is well-known between employees of these different companies – over a quarter of for- mer Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (now X), and Google employees have shared that their former employers not only sell the data they collect, but find loopholes in federal policy to distribute it to other countries’ governments for profit. These are the same companies that seem so innocent on your home screen.
The combination of the negative impacts of blue light on decision making and the sinister intentions of the companies that provide you content has led to a scary reality. The issue is not one of solutions, but of awareness – the more you and I are aware of this issue, the lesser the issue becomes. Spread this article, so everyone around us can be more well-informed. By the way, all of the examples in this article were made up, so really try to think critically, even if it’s in an article about critical thinking.
