Member-only story
Technical Literacy, Technically Literate, and SM-102
A few weeks ago, I wrote a bit about what I’ve taken to calling “technical estrangement,” the idea that the Information Age has exposed us to a lot of technical information that was once restricted to specialists, information we have trouble interpreting. Because it looks strange and not entirely comprehensible at times, it can be immediate fodder for conspiracy theories. I also referred to this as a kind of “ersatz uncanny”: feelings of the uncanny occur where something familiar seems strange, but here what is most often the case is that sense of unfamiliarity is not the result of something malevolent or disturbing as much as it is simply not understanding the specialist context of a given technical item.
A week later, there was a report of how anti-vaxxers are actually, contrary to our perception, incredibly savvy consumers of information. The paper, entitled “Viral Visualizations: How Coronavirus Skeptics Use Orthodox Data Practices to Promote Unorthodox Science Online,” is the work of four researchers at MIT (Crystal Lee, Tanya Wang, Graham M. Jones and Arvind Satyanarayan, and one at Wellseley College (Gabrielle Inchoco), looked at data visualizations among Covid skeptics, finding a surprising embrace of data by science deniers. “Far from ignoring scientific evidence to argue for individual freedom,” the authors write, “antimaskers often engage deeply with public datasets and make what we call ‘counter-visualizations’ — visualizations using orthodox methods to make unorthodox arguments — to challenge mainstream narratives that the pandemic is urgent and ongoing. By asking community members to ‘follow the data,’ these groups mobilize data visualizations to support significant local changes.”
It’s worth reading the paper in full; crucially, the authors are at pains to argue, that just because someone is using scientific data, data visualization, or objective and neutral rhetoric, doesn’t mean they’re well informed. On the contrary, consuming a lot of technical information is useless if it’s intentionally or unintentionally misinterpreted, and when the appearance of rigorous data analysis is used to cover confirmation bias.
This veneer of scientific objectivity as a mask for pre-held beliefs is what I discussed in The Unidentified as being the realm of the “crank,” a term of art…
