Read and respond to any of the 2 articles belowseparately. In a written response of 200-300 words, answer the following questions:
> What is the article about?> What are your own reactions to and/or assessments of the article's ideas?> What is one unfamiliar word or expression used in the article that you had to look up? What does it mean?
Article 2: attached file (same 250 words response)
2/17/2020 Opinion | Do We Really Understand ‘Fake News’? - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/23/opinion/fake-news.html 1/2 https://nyti.ms/30d1dLF THE STONE Do We Really Understand ‘Fake News’? We think we are sharing facts, but we are really expressing emotions in the outrage factory. By Michael P. Lynch Mr. Lynch is a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut and the author of several books. Sept. 23, 2019 Given how much it’s talked, tweeted about and worried over, you’d think we’d know a lot about fake news. And in some sense, we do. We know that false stories posing as legitimate journalism have been used to try to sway elections; we know they help spread conspiracy theories; they may even cause false memories. And yet we also know that the term “fake news” has become a trope, so widely used and abused that it no longer serves its original function. Why is that? And why, given all our supposed knowledge of it, is fake news — the actual phenomenon — still effective? Reflection on our emotions, together with a little help from contemporary philosophy of language and neuroscience, suggests an answer to both questions. We are often confused about the role that emotion plays in our lives. For one thing, we like to think, with Plato, that reason drives the chariot of our mind and keeps the unruly wild horses of emotion in line. But most people would probably admit that much of the time, Hume was closer to the truth when he said that reason is the slave of the passions. Moreover, we often confuse our feelings with reality itself: Something makes us feel bad, and so we say it is bad. As a result, our everyday acts of communication can function as vehicles for emotion without our noticing it. This was a point highlighted by mid-20th century philosophers of language often called “expressivists.” Their point was that people sometimes think they are talking about facts when they are really expressing themselves emotionally. The expressivists applied this thought quite widely to all ethical communication about right or wrong, good or bad. But even if we don’t go that far, their insight says something about what is going on when we share or retweet news posts — fake or otherwise — online. When sharing or retweeting, we like to think of ourselves as engaging in what philosophers would call an act of testimony — trying to convey or endorse knowledge. Not always, of course; happily, irony still exists. Yet insincere sharing or retweeting is not the norm — as evidenced by the fact that most people feel obligated to signal that retweets aren’t endorsements. That wouldn’t make sense if the default wasn’t that shares and retweets are endorsements. But what if we are just confused about the way communication actually functions online? Clues can be found in both what we do and don’t do when sharing content online. Let’s start with what we don’t do. Current research estimates that at least 60 percent of news stories shared online have not even been read by the person sharing them. As an author of one study summed up the matter, “People are more willing to share an article than read it.” On the other hand, what we do is share content that gets people riled up. Research has found that the best predictor of sharing is strong emotions — both emotions like affection (think posts about cute kittens) and emotions like moral outrage. Studies suggest that morally laden emotions are particularly effective: every moral sentiment in a tweet increases by 20 percent its chances of being shared. And social media may just pump up our feelings. Acts that don’t elicit as much outrage offline, for example, elicit more online, perhaps because the social benefits of outrage still exist without the normal risks. This should tell us that conveying knowledge isn’t the primary reason news stories are shared. As the influential contemporary philosopher Ruth Millikan puts it, the stabilizing function of a communicative act is whatever explains why that act continues to persist. The stabilizing function of yelling “Air ball!” at a basketball player trying to make a free throw is to distract him. It may do other things too — amuse people, or even describe what, in fact, turns out to be an air ball. But the reason people continue to yell “Air ball!” it is that it is distracting. Someone new to the game could conceivably get this backward. They might think that people are warning the player or predicting how the shot is going to fall. Such interpretations would be a misunderstanding the act’s stabilizing function. Something like this is happening on a massive scale on social media. We are like the person just described, new to the game of basketball. We think we are sharing news stories in order to do one thing, like transfer knowledge, but much of the time aren’t really trying to do that at all — whatever we may consciously think. If we were, we would presumably have read the piece that we’re sharing. But most of us don’t. So, what are we doing? I think it is plausible that the stabilizing function of the practice of sharing content online is to express our emotions. In particular, when it comes to sharing political news stories, we often are signaling our outrage and thereby hoping that others will share it. That’s one way that tribes are built and social norms enforced. Social media is an outrage factory. And paradoxically, it works because most folks aren’t aware, or don’t want to be aware, of this point. https://www.nytimes.com/ https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190821082228.htm https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/06/16/six-in-10-of-you-will-share-this-link-without-reading-it-according-to-a-new-and-depressing-study/ https://www.pnas.org/content/114/28/7313.abstract https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0213-3 2/17/2020 Opinion | Do We Really Understand ‘Fake News’? - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/23/opinion/fake-news.html 2/2 Yet it is just this lack of awareness that trolls and other workers in the misinformation industrial complex find so useful. Purveyors of deliberate but disguised falsehoods are keenly aware that when we share, we’re doing something different from what we think we’re doing. Our confusion is what makes us such easy marks. The expressivists’ insight also nicely explains why the term “fake news” itself has changed its use. It has become a vehicle for expressing our hostility, similar to yelling “boo” at a sports game. That’s an irony all too representative of our age of absurdity. Even our attempts to distinguish truth from falsity turn into screams of outrage. Michael Patrick Lynch is a professor of philosophy and director of the Humanities Institute at University of Connecticut and the author, most recently, of”Know-it-All Society: Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture.” Now in print: “Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments,” and “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” with essays from the series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. Weʼd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here s̓ our email:
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