When I’m working on one of these articles I usually have dozens of tabs on my browsers spread across at least two and sometimes three large monitors. I never knew that was called Lateral Reading, but I’ve been doing it for years, I just didn’t know that this it had a name. Here’s an example of the screen that I’m working from right now:

I’m always cross-checking information from different sites, hence the dozens of open tabs on my browsers. It’s even worse on my iPad, mostly because with just one screen I usually forget to close the tabs when I’m done. Right now I have 100 tabs open on my iPad. That’s just a little excessive. Anything of interest that I run into, especially if it’s from FaceBook, I’ll open it in a separate browser window and then if I think I might use it for some project I’ll save it to the Keep-It app that I referred to in my last post. But the idea is that if the story looks interesting I’m going to need to save the URL for later reference (and that also helps get out from under the FB algorithm). But I hadn’t thought that I was breaking away from whatever information the website was feeding or keeping from me, like in the ALEC example, where they are counting on the professional appearance of the site to give them some form of accreditation and gloss over any possible conflict of interest. 

Acknowledging that everyone has some form of bias or that everyone makes mistakes from time to time is not the same as saying that you cannot trust anyone or that every point of view is valid. This is not an either/or situation. The process of communication is complicated and potentially filled with much more information than is useful. That means that humans, doing journalism, need to determine what to communicate and how best to do it and we on the other end apply our filters and assumptions and everyone hopes that the signal got through. Just like the old dial-up telecommunications, someone on the transmission side initiates a signal and then someone on the receiving side does a handshake using tones so that the signal aligns and can be understood. As an intelligent follower of news I don’t take anything at face-value, but guesstimate the informations’ reliability recognizing who I’m listening to and what their motivation might be. For example, I love my Apple products but I understand that whatever Apple tells me is all about selling me something and I have to adjust the “reliability” of their message accordingly. It’s a bit less obvious with the news, usually, but it’s the same process. 

You’ll notice that I decided this week to not break the 13-minute video down with short clips with related questions. I’m still considering how I might do the “interactive thing” as simply and effectively as possible in the future. But this week it’s all about how many tabs do you have opened when you check out the news? Enjoy.

Sources:

• Check Yourself with Lateral Reading: Crash Course Navigating Digital Information #3 by Crash Course (2019-01-22), https://youtu.be/GoQG6Tin-1E, retrieved 2023-08-15