Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens

The term "critical ignoring" caught my attention right away. Clearly, I’m not critically ignoring this topic! 🤔 There has been some, but not enough, focus on how we might help people identify misinformation and propaganda. That is a good skill, but you can make that easier if you add a filter of ignoring before that.

Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoring—choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities.

Being thoughtful about what you choose to even engage with, and then applying critical thinking to what is left is the strategy that I've been employing for a while and think works great. This is one of the reasons I love the RSS ecosystem for getting new information. I choose what goes in, so it limits the need to ignore much of anything.

We review three types of cognitive strategies for implementing critical ignoring: self-nudging, in which one ignores temptations by removing them from one’s digital environments; lateral reading, in which one vets information by leaving the source and verifying its credibility elsewhere online; and the do-not-feed-the-trolls heuristic, which advises one to not reward malicious actors with attention.

One of the best reasons to get off of social media? It makes critical ignoring very, very difficult to do.