Preview the Article

Follow the steps below to preview the article “To Navigate the Dangers of the Web, You Need Critical Thinking – But Also Critical Ignoring.” Ideally, you should print the article and write your responses in the margins of the printed copy. To read more about previewing, visit the chapter on previewing a reading.

1. Read the title. What does it make you think about? What do you think the article is about? What questions do you have? Record your predictions and questions on the printed copy of the article next to the title.
2. Consider your own experience online and your prior knowledge. In what ways might the web be dangerous?
3. Read the first two or three paragraphs. What additional predictions do you now have about the article? What additional questions do you have? Record them on the printed copy of the article.
4. Scan the article and notice the headings (e.g. Critical Thinking). What additional thoughts or questions do these raise? Record them on the printed copy of the article.
5. Scan the bolded and underlined vocabulary in the article.  If there are any words that you do not know well, look them up in a print or online dictionary and write some notes about their meanings on the printed copy of the article. Keep in mind that some words have multiple meanings. For example, the word rash is used in paragraph 4; however, it does not refer to an irritation of the skin. You may need to read the sentence containing each word to understand the word’s usage.
6. Based on your preview of the article, what do you think is the central point of the article? (Don’t worry if you are not sure. This is a prediction or guess – you do not have to be correct as long as you are engaging your brain.) Record your prediction on the printed copy of the article.
7. Based on your preview, do you predict that the article is narrative, expository, or argumentative?

Read Interactively

Now, read the article using the guidelines from the chapter on reading interactively. As you read, follow these steps to engage with the text.

1. Pause to confirm or revise your predictions and to answer the questions you posed while previewing the article. Write down those revised predictions and responses to the questions as you read. If you cannot find the answers to your questions, save them for further research and discussion.
2. Pause at other points to check for understanding of what you just read. Can you explain key ideas in your own words yet? If not, reread to clarify. Ideas that come later in a text build on the previous ones. Therefore, it makes no sense to keep reading if you did not understand something or if you became distracted. Anyone can become distracted while reading, so don’t hesitate to use the strategy of rereading when necessary.
3. Pay attention to any vocabulary words that are confusing. Look up the words in a dictionary if they are interfering with your understanding, or mark them to return to later.
4. Record any opinions or reactions you have to the reading in the margins of the article.
5. Write down any further questions that develop as you read.

To navigate the dangers of the web, you need critical thinking – but also critical ignoring

Sam Wineburg, Stanford University

May 14, 2021

---

¹ The web is a treacherous place.

² A website’s author may not be its author. References that confer legitimacy may have little to do with the claims they anchor. Signals of credibility like a dot-org domain can be the artful handiwork of a Washington, D.C., public relations maven.

³ Unless you possess multiple Ph.D.’s – in virology, economics and the intricacies of immigration policy – often the wisest thing to do when landing on an unfamiliar site is to ignore it.

⁴ Learning to ignore information is not something taught in school. School teaches the opposite: to read a text thoroughly and closely before rendering judgment. Anything short of that is rash.

⁵ But on the web, where a witches’ brew of advertisers, lobbyists, conspiracy theorists and foreign governments conspire to hijack attention, the same strategy spells doom. Online, critical ignoring is just as important as critical thinking.

⁶ That’s because, like a pinball bouncing from bumper to bumper, our attention careens from notification to text message to the next vibrating thing we must check.

⁷ The cost of all this overabundance, as the late Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon observed, is scarcity. A flood of information depletes attention and fractures the ability to concentrate.

⁸ Modern society, wrote Simon, faces a challenge: to learn to “allocate attention efficiently among the overabundance of sources that might consume it.”

⁹ We’re losing the battle between attention and information.

‘Glued to the site’

¹⁰ As an applied psychologist, I study how people determine what is true online.

¹¹ My research team at Stanford University recently tested a national sample of 3,446 high school students on their ability to evaluate digital sources. Armed with a live internet connection, students examined a website that claims to “disseminate factual reports” on climate science.

¹² Students were asked to judge whether the site was reliable. A screen prompt reminded them that they could search anywhere online to reach their answer.

¹³ Instead of leaving the site, the vast majority did exactly what school teaches: They stayed glued to the site – and read. They consulted the “About” page, clicked on technical reports, and examined graphs and charts. Unless they happened to possess a master’s degree in climate science, the site, filled with the trappings of academic research, looked, well, pretty good.

¹⁴ The few students – less than 2% – who learned the site was backed by the fossil fuel industry did so not because they applied critical thinking to its contents. They succeeded because they hopped off the website and consulted the open web. They used the web to read the web.

¹⁵ As a student who searched the internet for the group’s name wrote: “It has ties to large companies that want to purposefully mislead people when it comes to climate change. According to USA Today, Exxon has sponsored this nonprofit to pump out misleading information on climate change.”

¹⁶ Instead of getting tangled up in the site’s reports or suckered into its neutral-sounding language, this student did what professional fact checkers do: She evaluated the site by leaving it. Fact checkers engage in what we call lateral reading, opening up new tabs across the top of their screens to search for information about an organization or individual before diving into a site’s contents.

¹⁷ Only after consulting the open web do they gauge whether expending attention is worth it. They know that the first step in critical thinking is knowing when to deploy it.

Critical thinking

¹⁸ The good news is that students can be taught to read the internet this way.

¹⁹ In an online nutrition course at the University of North Texas, we embedded short instructional videos that demonstrated the dangers of dwelling on an unknown site and taught students how to evaluate it.

²⁰ At the beginning of the course, students were duped by features that are ludicrously easy to game: a site’s “look,” the presence of links to established sources, strings of scientific references or the sheer quantity of information a site provides.

²¹ On the test we gave at the beginning of the semester, only three in 87 students left a site to evaluate it. By the end, over three-quarters did. Other researchers, teaching the same strategies, have found similarly hopeful results.

²² Learning to resist the lure of dubious information demands more than a new strategy in students’ digital tool box. It requires the humility that comes from facing one’s vulnerability: that despite formidable intellectual powers and critical thinking skills, no one is immune to the slippery ruses plied by today’s digital rogues.

²³ By dwelling on an unfamiliar site, imagining ourselves smart enough to outsmart it, we squander attention and cede control to the site’s designers.

²⁴ Spending a few moments vetting the site by drawing on the awesome powers of the open web, we regain control and with it our most precious resource: Our attention.

---

Sam Wineburg, Professor of Education and (by courtesy) History, Stanford University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Reflect

After reading the article, use the following questions to reflect on the content of the article and your reading process. See the chapter about reflecting for a discussion of why this is a crucial step.

1. Try to paraphrase the main idea in a sentence. This may be challenging because you have read the article only once. If you are struggling, do your best. You can refine this when you reread and summarize the article.
2. Is the article primarily narrative, expository, or argumentative? What is the purpose of the article? In other words, why do you think the author wrote it?
3. Which predictions were accurate, and which did you have to revise?
4. As you previewed the article, you wrote questions.  What questions remain unanswered after reading the article?
5. What else do you want to know about the article or topic of the reading? Write down any additional questions.
6. How did previewing the article help you to understand and engage with the text while reading?
7. Where did you struggle to understand something in the text, and how did you work through it?
8. What, if anything, could you have done differently to improve your reading process?

Summarize

Complete a summary of the article by following these steps. Make sure you have read the chapters about Reading to Summarize before proceeding with the summary.

1. Reread the article and complete the Summary Notes. See Preparing to Summarize for a review of this topic and an example.
2. Then, use your Summary Notes to write a one-paragraph summary of the article. See Writing a Summary for a review of this topic and an example. Make sure that you include in-text citations and the Work Cited.
3. Use the self-assessment/peer review questions from Evaluating a Summary to self-assess your summary or invite a peer to provide feedback.
4. Use the self-assessment or peer feedback to make changes to your summary.

Make sure you are comfortable with your summary before advancing to the response. If you misunderstand something in the article, then your response may be skewed based on that misunderstanding.

Respond

Write a response to the article by following these steps. Make sure you have read the chapters about Reading to Respond before proceeding with the summary.

1. Use the Response Questions from Preparing to Respond to brainstorm possible ideas for your response. See the example in that same chapter.
2. Read over your replies to the Response Questions. Choose one idea to write about in your response. Express that idea in a topic sentence. See Writing a Topic Sentence for a Response for examples. Ask a peer for feedback on your topic sentence.
3. Brainstorm about possible support you could use in your response. See Generating Support for a Response for examples.
4. Use your topic sentence and ideas from the list of support to write a one-paragraph response. See Writing a Response writing guidelines and examples. Make sure that you include the Work Cited and in-text citations for any quotes or specific ideas from the article.
5. Use the self-assessment/peer review questions from Evaluating a Response to evaluate your response or have a peer provide feedback.
6. Use the self-assessment or peer feedback to make improvements to your response.

Extend: Apply

Author Sam Wineburg discusses “lateral reading” (par. 16) in the article. Revisit the article if you have forgotten what this term means. Practice lateral reading to check the facts while viewing an unknown website or reading a news article. How did lateral reading affect your reading process and engagement with the article?