Transcriber: Marine Gallois Reviewer: Helena Bedalli
(Applause)
Thank you everybody, it's very good to be here.
I want to talk to you today about a condition.
Some would call it a disease
that's rapidly infecting the American population,
and threatening thousands, thousands of our students
right here at Stonybrook,
by totally robbing them of their cognitive functions,
so that they no longer can think at all.
The name of this condition is Newsmosis.
You may not have heard of Newsmosis.
That's because we just coined the term
at the Center of News Literacy in the School of Journalism.
And I'm going to tell you about exactly what it is,
and I'm going to tell you about its crippling effects,
and I'm going to talk to you about a possible cure.
But before I do that, I need your help. So these black bags that you have,
can you please take out your black bags?
Can you please take out your cell phones?
Everybody. I'm going to take out my cellphone.
Can you put that cellphone in the black bag, right?
Good! Wrap it tightly.
And now I want you to put it some place
where you can't easily get at it in the next 18 minutes.
It ought to be really tough for you to get at it.
Everybody doing that now?
Good!
I want to tell you something.
By doing this simple act, you are now participating
in one of the largest shared undergraduate academic experiences
at Stonybrook University.
Only you're putting away your phone for the next 15 minutes.
And the thousands of students who have gone through this experience,
they put away their phone for 48 hours.
And here is how it works: all of these students enrolled
in an introductory course in News Literacy at the university.
They come from every discipline on campus, and they all enroll.
And at the end of the very first class,
this is what I tell them. I say to them:
"Welcome to the Twilight Zone."
Everybody remembers the Twilight Zone.
For the next 48 hours, you cannot
listen, read, hear, watch,
view, share, any news,
any weather, any ball scores.
Nothing! No cheating opening your laptop,
no drive time radio,
no talking to friends or family about news.
Walk away!
No Tweets, no Texts, no Facebook postings.
Cold turkey 48 hours!
The reason we inaugurated this assignment
was to try to answer one question:
If enrollment in higher education has been skyrocketing in the past thirty years,
- it's gone up almost 60 percent, -
and if the digital revolution has spawned
an inexhaustible supply of news and information,
why aren't we getting smarter when it comes to civic education?
Why aren't we getting smarter when it comes to understanding
major news development around the world, and what they mean for us?
Why aren't we getting smarter in being able to recognize
the people making decisions who affect our life?
So the Pew Research Center for people in the press
has been doing studies for the past thirty years
on civic knowledge in the United States.
And look at that chart.
It shows that it's just flat lined.
Despite all of these revolutionary changes,
in this information world, and in technology and education,
we're not getting any smarter?
More people could recognize
the Vice President of the United States in 1989, Dan Quayle,
than can recognize our current Vice President, Joe Biden.
What's going on?
And in fact all of the students who come to this News Literacy course
are symptomatic of these problems.
They have very low news awareness.
They have no level of civic engagement.
And when we give them this 48-hour blackout, you know what they say?
"Big deal, so what…
I don't bother to consume the news anyhow."
So we said: Ha! We're going to create a deficit.
We're going to take the little news they have, so they'll appreciate it,
and maybe, they'll expose themselves to more news and information,
and become smarter.
Well ladies and gentlemen, the verdict is in.
We have now collected data on over 9,000 students.
And guess what we found.
We were asking the wrong question,
and they had come to the wrong conclusion.
The question is not whether they need more exposure to the news.
They're getting overexposed to the news.
They're drowning in the news.
And they think they're not consuming information?
They are absolutely consuming information!
How do we know? Because during this blackout,
they tell us in their essays that they write:
"It was impossible, Professor Schneider, for me not to see the news.
It's everywhere. I had to walk out of the cafeteria
because my friends were talking about the news.
My mother talks about it.
There was no way I could escape it."
So if that's the case,
how come they still can't name the President of Syria?
How come they still can't understand what the affordable care act is,
and how it relates to them, if they're consuming it?
And we found a clue. In these essays, we found a pattern that began to emerge,
in comment after comment after comment.
And this one comment that I'm going to show you
really encapsulates and dramatizes what the students were saying.
"Who knew I read the news? I sure didn't."
That's what one of the students said.
"Who knew I read the news? I sure didn't."
Which begs the question:
if he didn't know he was reading the news, who knew he was reading the news, right?
And we heard this over and over again.
We heard students tell us: "I realize that I'm a mindless news consumer."
And one student said it was an in-cognitive experience
to be a mindless consumer. In-cognitive!
They're destitute of the faculty of being aware of what they're taking in.
So we decided that all of these students, and many more were suffering
from a malady called Newsmosis.
And what Newsmosis is, is a process by which
we take in news and information,
but it never gets to our brain.
It never gets to our brain!
And the result is that we lose the capacity
to understand what's valuable,
what we need to retain, and what we need to discard.
Now you may have a hard time following this.
So the School of Journalism has prepared an anatomical animation
of what happens to a body suffering from Newsmosis.
Now I have a word of caution.
We are not the School of Medicine.
And so you'll have to take it as it is.
But here's what it looks like.
(Laughter)
Now, it may be amusing to you, but I have to tell you something:
Newsmosis can be a matter of life or death.
And I'm not exaggerating. And here's why.
In 2009, there was an H1N1 pandemic
that began in Mexico and moved up the coast of the United States.
One of the target groups in that pandemic were people 18 to 29.
Not only young people and old people, 18 to 29.
Public health officials warned everybody to get vaccinated against H1N1.
President Stanley had just arrived at Stonybrook,
and in his installation, he rolled up his sleeves,
and he was vaccinated,
because he thought it was so serious.
And you may have remembered that picture.
So I'm teaching a big class of News Literacy,
and three weeks into the class, I say to the class,
to those 200 students,
"How many of you have become vaccinated?
How many of you took the shot?"
Nine. Nine students!
So I said, "I'm not your physician, but I've got to know.
Why aren't you taking this shot?"
Hand goes up. "It doesn't affect me...
It only affects young people and very old people."
Hand goes up.
"My mother said it was a conspiracy by the drug companies."
This is true!
Hand goes up.
"Taking the vaccine could be worse than the disease,
it could hurt me or kill me."
And I said to that student: "How do you know?"
And she said: "I watched a video on Youtube
in which a cheerleader for the Washington Red Skins
took this vaccine, and after taking it,
she could only walk backwards."
This is true. "She could only walk backwards."
And in fact that's what the video shows.
What the video on Youtube did not show,
was that she never took the H1N1 vaccine.
She took a regular flu vaccine.
And what it didn't show is that the doctors who examined her
could find no link between the vaccine and her condition.
Students were making decisions.
Not only were they making decisions,
but look at this poster that was put up around campus.
We're a university! Look at that poster,
urging people with skull and crossed bones not to take the vaccine!
And our students were making decisions
about their health, based on unreliable information
that they had not processed.
And it wasn't only our students.
I want you to look at those numbers,
of the number of people in the entire country
who took shots that year. Only 20 percent of Americans,
despite the urging of public health officials, were vaccinated.
Only 37 people in the target groups,
two thirds of those people, never took a shot.
And by the way, Lancet reported later that
a great number of the people killed in that pandemic
were people 18 to 29.
This is serious business, folks.
You want to look at Newsmosis in the voting booth?
You want to look at a study that the University of Maryland did
in which they interviewed voters going into the voting booth,
to vote in the 2010 election.
And they ask them questions, factual questions,
that they thought they should know
before they vote for the people in Congress.
They said to them: "Are your taxes going up or down?"
"Is the economy getting better or worse?"
"Do most scientists believe in climate change
and the warming of the planet?"
And what they found, was that
86 percent of the people did not know that their taxes had gone down.
What they found is that 45 percent of the people, almost half,
did not understand that most scientists even agreed
that climate change was occurring.
And these were people going into the voting booth,
making decisions about the people who were running our country.
All Newsmosis. And the reasons for Newsmosis,
are multiple and painfully obvious.
As a society, we have a problem with information obesity.
We are gorging ourselves on information.
It's overwhelming the amount of information we're taking in,
and we can't digest it all.
And what happens, what do psychologists tell us?
When we get too much of anything, we shut down.
So we're shutting down at a time
when we're supposed to be even more attentive.
And when we choose news, we're choosing customized news.
We have the technology. "I only want news about this subject
I only want news about that subject.
I don't see anything else." And there's a blurring of lines.
What's news anyhow?
What's real news, and what's stuff that's pretending to be news?
Who's a journalist and who isn't a journalist?
And the news is being spread not by major news organizations anymore,
by increasingly, it's being spread on social media
from one person to the other person.
There's no filter, and it's going out.
Who's the most dangerous person to get an email from?
An email about the latest outrage,
and I'm sure you get these in Washington,
asking you to do something.
It's not a stranger. It's not a scammer.
It's your mother. Yeah, you know why?
You trust your mother.
And when you trust people you get emails from,
your critical thinking skills go down.
So all of these things, I want to show you.
And I also want to show you the kind of choices we're making.
What poor information choices!
I want to take you back to August of this past year, the 26th.
And I want to show you two stories that were in the news.
One was what was going on in Syria, the chemical attack,
that had only been three or four days before,
and one was: Miley Cirus twerking. (Laughs)
Now, the information diet that day was pretty healthy.
If you looked at the news that were available for consumption,
there was a lot more about Syria.
But now I want to show you what we consumed.
When we look at the data for what we consumed that day,
it was not the same.
Or if you take a look at this story,
which is about the fact that the Apple iPhone 5
with the finger identification,
all that information goes right to the NSA,
and this was on news outlets.
Is it news?
Wrong. It's a fake news story put out by a website
called the National Report that fooled everybody.
And people were talking about it as if it was real.
So what's the solution?
If all of this is going on, what's the solution?
And we think we are on close, if not really there,
to finding a solution.
The cure for Newsmosis.
And this is this idea that we've been teaching for five years:
News Literacy. Okay?
And what is News Literacy really about?
It's about teaching our students to be
critically, aggressively,
skeptically, actively,
engaged in the news.
In processing what they see and read.
And it comes down to answering three or four basic questions.
And I'm telling you this today,
because I want you to think about these questions
when you leave here.
And I want you to talk to your family and your relatives
and your friends and your colleagues about these questions.
Here are the three questions I want you to answer
every time you engage with the news:
One: Who's giving me this news? Where is it coming from?
Who's the source? Is the source independent?
Is the source accountable?
Two: What do I know about what I know?
How do I know what I know?
When you watch a story, read a story,
receive a story, any kind of news,
what's the evidence in the story to support the conclusion?
I don't care how you feel about it,
I don't care what you think about it,
I want you to be able to process the evidence in that story.
Three: What don't I know?
What information is missing?
And you need to ask these three questions
before you can determine if the information is actionable.
What do I mean by actionable?
I mean is the information sufficient
for you to make a decision, reach a conclusion,
take an action,
share this information with anybody else,
or should you stop?
You can do those three things,
and you will be inoculated against Newsmosis
with the following caveat.
There is one more caveat.
You need courage.
You need the courage to be willing to accept information
that challenges your own belief system.
You need the courage to be open to information
that you don't like, or you don't want to see.
And if you don't have that courage,
and all you want is information that reinforces your belief system,
your political beliefs, your biases, your understanding of the world,
you will never be inoculated against Newsmosis.
But if you can answer all of those three questions,
and you have courage,
you're absolutely on the right track,
and that's what News Literacy is trying to teach all of our students.
And I think we're making some progress.
So we've done some studies,
and we look at our students who take News Literacy,
and almost 10,000 have taken News Literacy at the university,
and we look at students who have not taken News Literacy,
and we find a significant difference. So after the semester,
the students in News Literacy consume more news,
they critically evaluate more news,
they vote at higher rates,
and they're more engaged.
We follow them a year later.
Not everything stays the same,
but there are still gaps between those students
and some of the other students,
in some of these critical areas.
I want to show you what one recovering victim of Newsmosis
has said about News Literacy.
There's by the way a photograph of DE Miller,
who is the director of News Literacy,
and here's what the student said:
"News Literacy has not only made me think, but it has made me think twice."
Twice.
We are never going to slow down the news cycle.
We are never going to slow up the flow of developments in news.
It's going to get faster and faster. You can't do that,
but you can change the way you think about the news.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
(Cellphone ring)
You may take out your phones.
(Applause)