Tag: personal narrative

Internet Accountability

On September 15, 2020

Written by: Devan Murphy

Edited by: Jennifer Baily

Due to the pandemic, most of us are spending more time in front of our screens. Honestly, I spend a lot more time on social media than I used to, and it has affected my mental health. No, it isn’t the dreaded FOMO (fear of missing out). It’s the posts from some of my friends and family that have shattered my perception of the people I thought I knew. As I scroll, I see an accumulation of conspiracy theories about COVID, unwillingness to help protect others by wearing a mask in public, and little empathy or consideration for the essential workers and medical professionals putting their life on the line while we sit at home. Although the internet is a valuable tool with a wealth of information and a method for connecting people, it can also be used for the complete opposite—disseminating falsehoods and driving a wedge between communities.

This weighs heavy on my mind and heart as people who helped raise me and shape who I am today share and legitimize misinformed views on the pandemic. But the information they insist on propagating results in behavior that goes against the very values I learned growing up. To see them posting harmful opinions and incorrect information feels like an attack on my profession. As a student in the Veterinary Student Training Program, I reside at an interface between the medical and basic science fields. To me, this situation is similar to clients who come into the clinic, ignore your professional opinion, and insist on telling you how to do your job because Dr. Google diagnosed their pet’s ailments for you. In the light of COVID, research scientists are now getting a taste of this frustration dealing with a population that is either ignorant or belligerently dismissive of facts (although climate change scientists have known this pain for a while now).

I do understand how the public could be confused. There is SO MUCH information out there, but this is what we deal with in science all the time. And as graduate students, I think we are exceptionally good at updating our point of view when we receive new data. I remember a conversation with a family member about grocery bags. He was annoyed about paper bags being brought back into fashion. It went something like this:

I don’t understand. We used to use paper bags, then they told us not to cut down trees, so we all switched to plastic. Now, everything is “Plastic is bad, plastic is ruining this environment.” So, which is it? We are supposed to go back to killing trees?

I tried to explain that as we get new information, we need to reimagine our behaviors. It is natural for scientists to understand that nothing is simple. There are always things we don’t know; we live on the frontier of the known and undiscovered. As we find new information and uncover confounding variables, we build them into our understanding or understand when to reject them. I wish it was easy as a superhero movie, where the bad guy is easily identifiable. But that’s not the real world. It is messy and problems are multifactorial, and clear straightforward solutions rarely exist. But here is the irony, in this situation, a common enemy does exist! Coronavirus. So, with a clear threat in sight, why are some people insistent on defying health experts instead unifying to defeat the pandemic?

Initially, who knew what to do? Wear a mask, don’t wear a mask? And unfortunately, with government leaders not always being the most reliable sources, downplaying the severity of the problem and being slow to take action, it can be very confusing for someone watching the news to know what actions to take. However, now it is clear this virus is very contagious, deadly, and masks help prevent transmission. Therefore, perpetuating misinformation and bashing public health guidelines is a safety concern.

So, as graduate students, a community versed in critical thinking and evaluating primary literature, is it part of our job to combat misinformation online? Is it our place? And what internal conflict does this pose to call out our family members or friends? Interestingly, I wanted a career in science because I thought it was the unbiased pursuit of facts, untainted by the subjectivity of the humanities. Why deal with people when numbers don’t lie. But numbers can lie. In the worst case, they are purposely manipulated(1), but even in the best of circumstances, statistics without context mean nothing. And without placing these numbers in the proper context, it is easy to misdirect the audience. As recent events have made perfectly clear, science is not devoid of these conflicts. Our science is funded by taxpayers to help the public, therefore, getting involved to make science interpretable and usable to the public is implied in that paycheck.

Leaders and officials seem to be catching up on the relevance of internet accountability. The United Nations started an initiative to provide reliable information about COVID(2) and some social media sites like Twitter began fact checking posts(3). But to do this, you need to critique the information. Scientists do this all the time with peer review, disclosing conflicts of interest, and discussing the limitations of their work. However, it takes time to go through and fight/debunk all of the misinformation. In contrast, it takes NO effort to make stuff up to support a false narrative. I’m lucky enough to still have my job, and I honestly don’t have the time to refute all the misinformation I come across. To some extent, it must be the responsibility of the individual to self-educate. Again, there is a wealth of information online.

While I strive to stress the importance of accountability online, I acknowledge that this may not be an entirely safe conversation as people feel attacked when you dispute their worldview. So much of science has been tied to politics, which becomes emotional quickly. Being rejected or cut off by loved ones may not be an option. But if possible, in the way that personally works best for you (1-on-1 conversations, public sharing of valid resources, etc.), I think we have some responsibility as a science community to stop the spread of misinformation. That doesn’t mean everyone will listen, but letting this information spread unchallenged, like the virus, is dangerous.

(For more information, about spotting misinformation and fighting it, check out Fleming’s article (4) )

Florida and Georgia facing scrutiny for their Covid-19 data reporting – CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/20/us/florida-georgia-covid-19-test-data/index.html.
Online training as a weapon to fight the new coronavirus. https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/07-02-2020-online-training-as-a-weapon-to-fight-the-new-coronavirus.
Twitter fact-checks tweets linking 5G and coronavirus – Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-factchecks-tweets-5g-coronavirus-2020-6.
Fleming, N. Coronavirus misinformation, and how scientists can help to fight it. Nature 583, 155–156 (2020).

Far From Home

By Staff

On September 8, 2020

In main_pub

Written by: Ellen Osborn

Edited by: Ross Wohlgemuth

Many of us leave home in order to attend college. It is a modern-American rite of passage when we throw what physical items we care about into a suitcase and leave the place and people that, up until that point, were our whole world. And yet, the physical separation that is a defining part of the university experience is rapidly overshadowed by the emotional separation formed as we build social networks and expose ourselves to new perspectives. The learning and expanding that occurs at university can reinforce values learned at home, strengthening core convictions about how life works and what matters most. It can also deconstruct, maybe even shatter, parts of you. After a few years, the physical distance separating you from home can still be overcome by modern day travel, but the psychological distance that develops can feel increasingly unbridgeable. In my case, my childhood home is not too far from where I attend university, but the separation I feel from the community that raised me is devastating.

I was a difficult kid. I got into fights in school, did not make or keep friends easily and was aggressively tomboyish. I vividly remember laying on my bedroom floor as a nine-year-old, thinking that I hated everyone around me and did not understand why I was alive. My mom, the exceptional person that she is, decided to homeschool me during those rough years. We joined a small, Christian fundamentalist homeschool group, and through the years, I grew into a completely different person. The people in my new community shaped me; due to their efforts, I began caring for others, making friends and appreciating the value of my life. Because of this personal transformation, I feel a deep sense of love and gratitude toward my home community. I understand their actions were well-intentioned, and the lessons they explicitly and implicitly taught me came from a place of love and concern. In addition to the lessons of love and kindness, they taught me that homosexuality, abortion, evolution and even liberalism were evils in this world. They taught me that a woman’s ultimate purpose in life is to stay pure, marry and have many children. They taught me that California public universities would rob me of my faith and scientists could not be trusted. I believed most of what I was taught and arrived at community college with my guard firmly up.

Despite the anti-science views entrenched in my home community, I was drawn to science. After only a few classes, science no longer seemed to be the amoral machine of secularization whose design was to deceive. Rather, I saw science to be a study of the complex beauty of the world around us. Continuing my education as a transfer student in a biology major, I learned more about nature’s detailed complexity and what I learned was not always compatible with my first worldview. LGBTQ+ people are not immoral; women are research powerhouses in academia; evolution is supported by evidence.

Parts of my worldview needed to be reconstructed in order to accommodate my newly acquired relationships and knowledge. The longer I lived in my new community of friends, classmates and mentors, the more lessons from my upbringing were replaced by lessons from my adult life. This exchange did not occur because I was swept up in the groupthink of an institution; instead, I was developing love and empathy for the people who shared with me their values and beliefs and challenged the narrowness of my worldview. I still loved my home community, but our vantage points were no longer the same. In addition to the physical distance separating us, there was a growing psychological distance created by every lesson I no longer believed.

The 2016 election revealed the immediate consequences of the psychological separation from my home. People I loved and respected were unreservedly saying things I once agreed with but now considered to be wrong. Vitriol and outright insults were leveled by both of my old and new communities. I could feel my conscience pushing me to be a bridge between the divide, but I felt like an imposter in both places. I had, in a way, abandoned my home community both physically and psychologically, and yet I still felt loyal to those people and understood their anger. Ultimately, my feelings of self-doubt and anxiety associated with sticking even a toe into the maelstrom of outrage relegated me to the position of a conflicted observer. Finishing college in a post-2016 world and becoming a graduate student in a STEM field, my observer status persisted.

The events of this year have forced me to reevaluate my role in this divide. Rampant misinformation and prejudice are reinforced by closed social networks. Opponents, including scientists and peers I respect, degrade and publicly reprove these groups, the effect of which is to further feed the machine of mistrust and distaste. As an observer, it seems as if I am already conceding defeat: anything I say will be immediately drowned out by the outrage.

But I do not want to be characterized by defeat. What if I can connect, listen and engage with just one person on the other side, and lessen the outrage they feel? What would happen if we gently correct misinformation when we see it and offer evidence that breaks the cycle of confirmation bias? Could we slowly build bridges that narrow the psychological separation between divided communities? I am just beginning to grasp the enormity of America’s culture war between science and fundamentalism, so these questions could be a result of my naiveté. When I doubt my ability to bridge the gap, I think of Barack Obama, who overcame the institutions framed against him to become the first Black president of the United States, and his quote: “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”

It is painful to parse out the consequences of psychological separations from the people we love, and even more so to take the next steps to try to bridge that separation. Fortunately, it is not just one person’s job to build that bridge; I’ve had many encouraging conversations with other graduate students that are reaching out to their home communities in small but meaningful ways. Even if that is all we can do now, it is a start.

To be continued.