Sometimes people criticise people’s critical thinking skills but what I get surprised about is how a piece of information can be not comprehended or addressed because of something not related to the statement but about the person or an issue outside of the information in a context that may be real or not be real. For example, a few years back I posted a quote that was quite amusing and perceptive. It was a quote by a retired politician about a politician who at that time was in power.

When I posted the quote I didn’t get any comments on the actual quote itself but about the person who made the quote. I won’t use the term they used because it is pretty much the worst offence anyone can do. There is no evidence to say the person who made the quote actually has committed serious offences or has any criminal record at all. In fact, they have no criminal record.

It wasn’t the fact that the person had slandered the ex-politician because that is normal and people will have any number of reasons to slander politicians. What got me was that there was no attempt to comprehend the quote itself. I would say that yes there is a critical thinking issue, and it isn’t that they hadn’t comprehended the information in front of them but at the same time the ability to comprehend is relegated to a backstory that is more important than engaging or comprehending information.

People talk about the problems of context in social media and have for a while, the issues with critical thinking and misinformation. They all feed into each other and relate because there is nothing to say that an augmented document is fake or real. Yet people can’t and don’t want to talk about what is right in front of them. They choose to disengage and really it is a context issue but the backstory whether it is real or not comes first. 

‘Context’ noun

• the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood.

I suppose the context is the backstory but none of these things relates to circumstances, events or ideas. Ideology is probably more suited because of the fact that I have seen so many negative posts about left-leaning politicians. A lot of people call out right-wing or left-wing propaganda but what I am getting at is nothing exists in front of you anymore. The problem with calling it context is that nothing is meant to be understood or comprehended.

I guess it is like consuming content and then parroting it as best as one can. Making the content reach into anything that may be real and making it not real anymore. The content wand, forget about keyboard warriors you instead have content magicians who don’t need reality to function. You just make content forever and ever until the lights go out.