The Infodemic

These are the skills needed to survive the 2020s.

We have never had more information available to us. Yet from both a nutritionl sciences perspective and from a public health perspective, many have never felt more confused.

Those who went to school in the 1950s, 1960s and 70s were praised for their ability to memorise facts and regurgitate them at the right time in the right place. This is not the skill needed to thrive in the 2020s. That is what Google is for. An intellectual in the 2020s need not memorise facts, but filter them and synthesise them. The skill of the 21st century is to first decipher relevance and then crucially, to connect.

In that sense we can see one interpretation of innovation as not new ideas, but connecting ideas that had previously been unconnected.

The mental health of the masses is crumbling. Human brains do not seem suited to the overbearing stream of constant information. News culture has shifted. We know longer wait for anything to be printed. There is no collective consumption ritual. It is constant. A single Tweet can literally reek havoc. The last two years has brought us countless examples of how political leaders now have the ability to jump on to social media and start fires.

The very way the news industry makes money has shifted. With a click-bate economy, news titles have to appeal emotions, not to our reason. Articles are usually designed to shock or in-still fear. At best they bring exaggerated, misleading, joy. This is not good news for our emotional well-being. A quick morning scroll during and your psyche is bruised and worn down, before the first bite of the lockdown sourdough you’ve been trying to perfect. With this new 21st century battle-field you must protect yourself. You cannot go unarmed. You’ll be too vulnerable.

Never has Philosophy and critical thinking been more relevant. This context was hard to navigate in 2019. Funny, we thought 2019 was a toughie. Remember that time we mainly talked about Brexit? So naive. 2020, a global pandemic. This article is not about dismantling the momentary collapse of capitalism. Instead, here is a concise list of tips to help you navigate the “infodemic”. Before you believe anything you read about C-19, health and nutrition, you must first go through the steps listed below. This applies to all information, really, but health is a particularly dangerous area. Health and nutrition related articles are emotional traps.

How to Navigate the Infodemic

1. Stop and think! No really, switch on your ability to reason. Think about what you have read and how that slots in to what you understand about the world. If it is a completely new topic for you, maybe you need to do some more background reading first.
2. Check the sources. Many evidence-based health and nutrition articles will have references. If they do not have references, the author should be happy to give them to you. If the source is simply what someone else said, a YouTube video or another news article, it’s not looking good. For nutrition you’re looking for peer reviewed research papers, ideally systematic reviews or meta-analysis.
3. Ask yourself could it be fake? Again, this is essentially critically engaging with the information.
4. CAPITALS AND TYPOS? If the article is littered with poor grammar, typos and dramatic use of captials then it likely TRYING to appeal to your EMOTIONS and use juvenile tactics to PERSUADE YOU. PROBS IGNORE.
5. Don’t share anything unless you know it’s true. You could become a misinformatio superspreader! Misleading heath advice can cause people harm.
6. Watch out for ‘Copy pasters’. These are people that copy orginial posts and paste them into their own status. This looks original and more believable. It is harder to track this sort if information spread and harder to stop. They bring mutations and variations of the original story. A big disastrous game of internet chinese whispers. Accept it’s not a game and nobody is laughing when they get C-19 because they thought drinking hot lemon and water would make them invinsible.
7. Beware of emotional posts. Writing that is blatently appealing to your feelings to provoke fear or happiness etc. to try and get you to share is to be avoided. The art of persuasion. Again, think!
8. Viral does not equal truth. Be responsible.
9. They may be your friend, that does not mean they are an expert on health. They may have 1 million followers on instagram, that does not mean they are an expert on health. They may have exquisite biceps, that does not mean they are an expert on health.

In summary, use your brain. Brains over biceps.

Peace out. RG x