Sylvia Wynter's Dream

Multimodal post | September 17 2023 | Assignment 1

Who I am? The question that everyone has to ask themselves.

Good whatever time of day you may be reading this to whomever has stumped, tripped, slipped or felling into the bobby trap here (Sorry🙏🏾🥹). My name is Jason Anthony Tomlinson and I am aspiring author, blogger, youtuber….. Yeah, lets just say I am a digital media connoisseur. My main purpose here is to pursue knowledge which is rather relevant to the upcoming post (spoilers,😉). To be more specific though I am here to learn from an expert in the field about the digital world and use this knowledge to improve myself and hopefully make so money (as a broke college student😅). What I hope to accomplish here is to talk about the things I believe need to have a conversation on a platform where I can get the help to properly articulate myself.

INFORMATION POWER OR POISON

Power is poison as information is power so therefore can be said that information is poison. We live in a society where information is constantly at our fingertips and easily reliable …or so it should be. Within society and specifically the digital eco-system exist people and thing and main purpose is to generate or erase information to cause chaos and widespread ignorance as well as keep information away from the public.

Before we discuss that we must first operationalize information as it is often times a board and very unclear word by itself as it doesn’t not full encompass the truth of what exist within this world, specifically misinformation. Misinformation is information with the general purpose within the digital space to create chaos and ignorance. They are often in the form of authoritative or easily accessible content like Wikipedia.

tHE TROJAN HORSE OF ACADEMICS EVERYWHERE

Wikipedia is an online digital website that has information from thousand and thousands of sources. It serves as the Apollo’s chariot of misinformation for anyone who has a keyboard and can edit, add or delete which this site allows ALL of it visitors to do. Worse it wouldn’t be known to the public, so you know that one person who think that its funny to annoy people, yes that one person, they could go on wiki and edit the information your using for your homework worth half your grade. Often because of this, many warnings are given to student and scholars alike that Wikipedia is untrustworthy and is not recommended for academic use. However, this does not extend to those who may not have access to higher education or are too young to understand what misinformation is. Therefore, they may take the information as law without critically evaluating where the information came from or how valid it may be,

Additionally, we must remember that misinformation comes in many forms, and it not solely limited to what is present but extends to what may not be present. As mentioned within the article, there are often issues of diversity within the digital spaces from a historical context specifically in regarding to cultural and ethnically accurate. An example of this would be the conversation initiated by the republican party and around a vast majority of topics which includes critical race theory.

Ron the master of misinformation

Ron DeSantis is the current of Governor of Florida and bidding (begging really cause republican can’t be that insane, right?) to be the president elect of the United States of America. In his campaign, he has used and abused misinformation in a bid to play into the minds of white conservative men and women that they are under attack. He’s claim that white people are being demonized to their children by teaching about the accurate historical events of slavery and additionally we should educate our children on what “Benefits slave may have acquired from it.”

Now the question many have failed to ask is what actual is critical race theory or if its being taught to children because news flash my lovely reader it isn’t. Critical race theory is a COLLEGE level course that is an ELECTIVE taught to student of their own CHOOSING not the scary monster that Ron has made it out to be. Furthermore despite you your lack of belief, yes Ron is still trying to say in short “Slavery was bad because slave got to live in America and they learnt valuable skills,”…. Yeah, Ron not buying it because it wasn’t like they got paid fairly for their skill and for this I reference the building of the Tennessee courthouse.

This branches into another point, media literacy and how its as low as the standards women have to set for men (Who stay playing limbo, but we move). Media literacy is not a skill that is taught within schools until possibly the university level and that is specific to some major who are required to acquire this knowledge. The rest are really and truly left for dead. So, unless its known to be a threat to public information such as Wikipedia, you have to learn something very hard to learn by yourself to protected your form something that in truth and fact really should be a thing.

Now the result of this is well in short America. It sounds cliché and a little harsh but it is the truth because America right now is the greatest hub of misinformation to exist within the world. Well maybe not the world but is definitely up there next to Korea and Russia,

Finally, we have to talk about how misinformation survives and thrives with a society that has so much access to resources that should in theory help avoid the spread. Firstly, are things like the prevailing lack of media literacy or media literary classes being taught and the “Authoritative nature” of many people such as Ron DeSantis who while not the best source of information is seen as a leader and a trustable person within the community. However, more than that is what I stated at the start information is poison. We live in a world where there is a lot of conflicting information. Religion, science or even history, new information is constantly being found and more information start to conflict with each other, and no-one know what to believe because you can’t believe everything. So, you choose a side and stick to it, because if that side it wrong and it may be then that mean you’ll have to go though the process of re-educating your and relearning everything you though you knew. It easy to just be told what to believe it harder to educated yourself on what to believe in. Always remember power is poison information is power so Information can become poison