As professionals and educators in information and tech, we at ioCreative are proud to launch Brain Ping: our new blog here to ping your brain with practical knowledge. Now more than ever, it’s essential to teach all online citizens basic skills in critical thinking, information literacy, and navigating the Web.
Ever since the Internet and World Wide Web first started, all of us “netizen” enough to remember when it wasn’t integrated into every part of our lives knew the ideal of the “Information Superhighway.” How groundbreaking did it seem to have endless information at our fingertips? Over the past decade, however, it’s apparent that some roads lead to disinformation just as easily, and the very ways people are conditioned to use this technology (or not know how to use it) can crash society. We are starting this “Weblog,” that vehicle of olden days, to teach some road rules to help the modern web user navigate the built environment.
As a digital marketing, SEO, and branding agency for over 20 years, ioCreative has grown with the World Wide Web. Our team of writers, designers, and information architects has adapted to changes in best practices and educated college students on writing and design principles that have stayed the same. In our idle office chitchat on movies and music, everyday life, and news, though, we often discuss the state of misinformation online. We love the Internet, but its negative impacts on democracy and free thinking have become clear.
Some alarming statistics that have added to our concern:
- The National Literacy Institute reported in 2024 that 21% of all adults in the US are illiterate. 54% read lower than a 6th grade level.
- Gallup reported in 2024 that only 31% of Americans trust mainstream media for fair and accurate news coverage. This trust has decreased steadily since the 2000s decade.
- A 2020 NPR/Ipsos poll found that anywhere from 17% to 40% of Americans believed in common conspiracy theories. Fewer than half of all respondents correctly identified all but two of these beliefs as false (instead of “True” or “Not Sure”).
It’s beyond the purview of this blog to untangle the complex factors leading us to this point, especially when many are failures of the system. Americans have good reason to distrust mainstream media after demonstrated failures to present or frame facts correctly. Some conspiracies turn out to be true — Watergate yes, Reptilians not so much. But who do we trust?
Look no further than Wikipedia warning about threats to “the internet we were promised—a place of free, collaborative, and accessible knowledge.” People who came of age with the Internet lived by a few hard-and-fast rules in school: do cite “.gov” and “.edu” sources, don’t cite Wikipedia. So why the shift to Wikipedia becoming one of the last bastions the public trusts for free, accessible, unbiased information? Simple: this trust has increased with the quality of its human moderation, Neutral Point of View rules, and the ad-free conditions so different from the landscape of sponsored content, content farms with agendas, and even “fair and balanced” news really skewed to “sell” ideology.
By now, many of us have heard Carl Sagan’s scientific prophecy from The Demon-Haunted World:
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
At this crossroads, we can fight the rising tide of ignorance by surfing the web with critical thinking skills the distraction economy discourages. It will involve retraining ourselves into habits of mind, even learning new ones, to take in information and media more slowly and thoughtfully than the endless noise demands. But the answer is reclaiming our humanity in the demon-haunted Web, which we all can and must do as web designers, users, and participants in democracy.
What is User Advocacy?
We are concerned with the ethics of both Marketing and User Experience. These fields are closely related for their interest in users of information products (such as websites), but differ in attracting customers versus optimizing the experience for customers you have. User advocacy is the ethic in UX of giving users a say over design: “if you build it [with user feedback], they will come.” This means using human-centered design: practices that consider how, when, and why humans use a product, and designing with their needs in mind.
User Advocacy overlaps with other forms of ethical advocacy. As the field of User Experience applies to any product or built environment, we can understand how inventions such as “hostile architecture” (or “anti-homeless architecture”) are designed against the user’s interest. Spikes, benches too hard or divided to sleep on, and other such features inconvenience all users of an environment: children and the elderly, people waiting for long periods, and homeless people as the prime target. They only benefit the interests of power — in this case, to keep homeless people out of sight and out of mind. As humanitarians have advocated against hostile architecture, we can use User Advocacy as a framework against all design favoring powerful interests over users’ needs and perspectives.
“Hostile architecture” in action. Credit: “Funny Joke Pictures”
We see this conflict of interest between users and powerful interests in the world of tech too. “Enshittification” became the word of 2024 to describe tech companies’ practice of making product features worse (less user/human-centered) once they had a captive audience. How many of us have seen social media introduce more ads, office suites all become subscription-based, or search engines lose accuracy in favor of SEO manipulations and AI, and accepted this all because we were already using them? In these ways, the web becomes another hostile built environment.
We aim to educate on skills that help users find their own way when the systems we use online will not. From search engines to browsers to social media and other feeds, we can all find ways to “surf the web” (like in the old days!) smarter instead of wiping out.
What is Real in the Age of AI?
Since OpenAI publicly launched ChatGPT in 2022, and other generative AI models followed suit, the tech world has exploded with interest in integrating it everywhere. Is AI “the future” as they say? What does AI mean for the state of creative jobs, (mis)information, and the public’s ability to discern reality from distortions?
We’ve all seen the ads — you “need” Grammarly powered by AI to get through college and work. Etsy says “Keep Commerce Human” for everything a machine can’t do. Coca-Cola has remade their iconic Christmas ads with AI, no doubt for more ragebaiting publicity than when they launched New Coke or first removed the cocaine. (Legally that’s a joke.)
“A Thneed’s a fine something that everyone needs!” Credit: © Dr. Suess
We recognize that AI is not going away, and it has positive uses. AI diagnostic tools have detected tumors other screenings missed and may hold the key to improving cancer treatments or finding a cure.
But using AI is no substitute for developing reading, writing, and critical thinking skills. Universities have already classified it as plagiarism and academic dishonesty because it only scrapes existing data without citations or original work. AI writing assistants are prone to hallucinations that treat common mistakes or data poisoning as correct (a loss for Descriptive Grammar).
And with AI consuming more water and electricity than Denmark, something is rotten in the state of tech. Current models are so unsustainable that we must carefully weigh the efficacy of casual and commercial use.
We are well past the point that AI and bots pass the Turing test: the point where most humans find its answers indistinguishable from another human’s. The term “Dead Internet Theory” has recently become mainstream to describe conditions where there are more bots than human users online. We’re not at that sci-fi point where there are no humans online (I’m writing this therefore I am!) but we need to train human intelligence to identify machines more than ever.
With developed creative and critical thinking skills, people can offer problem-solving and groundbreaking ideas no machine can emulate. We value this not only for standout marketing but for the want of an informed populace that can weigh their choices (from consumerism to democracy) free from deception.
This blog aims to provide searching, misinformation identifying, and critical thinking strategies and tactics that can help you cultivate these skills.
How Do We Stay Human?
The dreaded “Digital Dark Age,” told around virtual campfires as the disappearance of online records, becomes a more real possibility every passing year. Even when strongholds like the Internet Archive seem so permanent, events like the 2024 hack taking them offline for days reveal how fragile our educational resources truly are. As AI replaces user-centric Web 2.0 with machine-generated content and “users”, we’ve got to stay human with guerilla efforts to preserve content and critical thinking skills to discern quality of information.
At ioCreative, we recently completed a passion project to restore our lead designer’s collection of fonts (started in the 1990s!) into modern file formats. These were from that wild west age of Clippy-ridden Microsoft and Web 1.0, from endless novelty Wingdings to rare decorative fonts that can set brands apart today. Without efforts like these to preserve data lost to incompatibility (all at big tech companies’ whims), we might never remember our digital history or envision a more free, creative future.
As human web designers and users, we can all champion Human-Centered Design to put what humans want over what machines absorb that we want. In addition to the edge over competition with originality that can’t be generated, human-centered practices let us preserve the human soul of this Web we’ve built. We can follow and protect the ethics for the humans that experience it.
Accessibility in web design is a prime example of an ethical practice that needs human insight. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) sets standards for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) —- but we’ve got to cut past the jargon and sea of abbreviations to make information usable for everyone at all levels of design. When sites like ours add accessibility settings with add-ons like AccessiBe, we make a start at helping everyone break down communication barriers. The next step is building accessibility into every new thing we create.
People don’t always understand the place of ethics in tech and writing. Did the people who released untested AI to the public at the height of a disinformation crisis understand? But every product (including “information products”) has an ethical dimension in both what it says and how it’s used. Unclear technical jargon about “O-rings” led to the Challenger explosion; clear technical writing (the “Ethic of Expediency”) about Nazi cattle cars aided genocide. And Plain Language is a standard to prevent government documents from obfuscating information with jargon.
A small company like ours has to think ethically about which clients we support and how we market their work. So, too, must individuals think about the environmental, social, and economic impacts of their consumer behavior — and the collective must advocate to hold big business accountable.
Stay tuned to this blog, and we’ll provide regular guides on how to be more mindful as a web user, consumer, and even a creative mind yourself. We’ll discuss AI and Fake News discernment, Sourcing Information, Alternative Search Engines and Browsers, Search Tips, Ethics, Accessibility, and more.
