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Hello and welcome to another episode of Warm Take Wednesdays with Dr.
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Alex.
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I am Alex Iantaffi.
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I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist, certified sex therapist, author, and podcaster.
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I have been recording the podcast Gender Stories for almost 100 episodes since 2018, and I've been starting this YouTube series just kind of late last year.
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So today I would like to talk about how sometimes we conflate popularity with expertise.
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and how social media has really kind of blurred the lines between popularity and expertise.
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And I think it's always a good week to talk about this topic, but especially this past week, there's been a lot of conversations about how therapists should behave online, even a very popular therapist on the internet, having made some remarks that several people considered insensitive, inappropriate, harmful, and even unethical.
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I am not gonna get into to the merits of that situation.
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I'm actually really want to focus on how the discourse should really be about how a social media impacted our perception of who is an expert and really influence our collective ability to distinguish between popularity, the number of likes, the number of followers and actual experience and expertise.
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And expertise can mean many things.
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doesn't have to mean academic knowledge necessarily, although in some areas it's very helpful to have scholarly knowledge.
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It can also be lived experience and other ways of kind of which we can gather knowledge.
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So first of all, I want to talk about how even when we're talking about expertise, I don't want to pretend that expertise is neutral.
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For example, Miranda Fricker who is a British philosopher, named the phenomenon of epistemic injustice.
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And what epistemic injustice means is that some of us are viewed as more credible because of our own positionalities, which means what gender we are, the color of our skin, how we're racialized, our socioeconomic status, right?
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Do we have more money?
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Do we have less money?
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And also kind of how attractive we are.
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All of the things that we know from research really influence how we are perceived.
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So knowledge, production, and expertise, is no stranger to that.
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That's why there is this concept of epistemic injustice.
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And I really encourage you to read Miranda Fricker book by the same name if you're interested in this concept and you haven't come across it before.
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This also means that some of us are viewed as having less expertise and being less credible because of our own positionalities, because of our gender, because of our race, religion, our socioeconomic status, whether we are considered to be conventionally attractive.
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So whether we have pretty privilege or not sometimes is called and so on.
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So even what we consider to be expertise is not neutral.
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Some people are just gonna be perceived as more credible, as more experienced, as more trustworthy than others because of our innate biases which of course are not separate from how we interact with one another in the world.
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Like I said, there is this concept of epistemic injustice that really captures this idea.
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For this episode, I really want to focus on how social media in particular both challenges and reinforces this idea of epistemic injustice and how it complicates things even more because of that blurring of lines that can happen between popularity and expertise that I mentioned at the beginning of the episode.
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So first of all I want to do a little bit of a thought experiment.
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So if you want to, consent first.
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So if you like, I would like you to kind of soften your gaze or close your eyes if you want and think of an expert in your field or maybe it's a skill you would like to develop like learning to crochet or learning how to bake bread.
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So it can be either kind of scholarly expertise, work expertise or a skill.
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or craft that you would like to develop.
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So when you think about an expert in that particular area, who comes to mind?
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And who comes to mind might be visual or it might be a verbal description.
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Not all of us have the capacity to kind of imagine things in our mind's eye.
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And so as you're thinking about this imaginary expert in the area that you have selected, what characteristics does this expert have?
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How old are they?
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What is their skin color?
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What is their gender?
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How are they dressed?
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Just take a moment to think about that.
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You can even pause this video if you want to, if you're not watching it live.
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And then as you realize what characteristics this expert has, I want you to take a moment to reflect on whether who came to mind as an expert in this field surprised you or not.
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It might have surprised you, it might not have surprised you.
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It might be exactly what you expected, right?
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So whenever I've done this, I usually do this when I train therapists and I invite people to imagine what an expert therapist might look like, right?
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And most people notice that who we imagine as an expert is really shaped by some innate biases, right?
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There are certain professions or certain skills that we associate with specific genders, for example, or people who look a particular way, whether that's close, whether that's connected.
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Sorry, it's a little bit later in the day than I usually do those lives So whether that's connected to a how they're racialized, how old they are, how they're dressed, and so on and so forth.
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So in some ways, social media has kind of helped us bypass a little bit this kind of traditional idea of what an expert looks like, right?
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Before, expertise was mostly conveyed through academic credentials, through academic standing, how many books or how many papers somebody might have out.
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But social media has really enabled us to transmit knowledge through a range of platforms.
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And it also enabled us to acquire knowledge through a range of platforms, such as YouTube, for example, Instagram, TikTok, or any social platforms, social media platform that we are using.
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This has actually been incredibly helpful for many marginalized folks, such as myself, but also for Black and Brown and Indigenous folks, disabled folks, know, and queer folks like myself, neurodivergent folks and so on and so forth, because all of a sudden, there's been kind of a lower barrier of entry to gain an audience, right?
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Whereas before you might have to be selected to present at a conference or a publisher might have to pick you to write a book or you might have to go through a process of peer review to publish a paper in an academic journal.
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Now you can literally just get your phone out and go live in front of an audience or record the video and upload it and go in front of an audience.
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And this in some ways has really kind of leveled the playing field in some ways, but not in every way.
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And we'll see why I say not in every way in a moment.
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Even though people might have an easier access to those platforms, that doesn't mean that the way that our brains work has changed.
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So all of those innate biases that I mentioned before still exist.
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Who we consider to be more or less credible, who do we consider to be more or less trustworthy with information is still shaped by the sound of our voice, whether we have an accent or not in the dominant language of the country where we live, right?
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example, I lived in an Anglo dominant country and my accent is not an Anglo accent.
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This is going to have an influence on how I'm perceived, right?
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And we could say more about that.
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So.
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In some ways, social media has kind of enabled us to be exposed to a much broader range of uh people's expertise, but it's also making it a little bit harder, I would say, to have discernment when it comes to knowing who is an expert and who's only popular and who's both an expert and popular, because those things can also coexist.
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If you know me, you know I'm not one for binary thinking.
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It doesn't have to be an either or.
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It can very much.
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be a both-hand.
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So there can be expertise and popularity, but there can also be expertise without popularity and popularity without expertise, as well as both of them coexisting and every other configuration that's possible in between those three different states.
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So in some ways, more than ever, we need to understand how do we differentiate between things that are just information that's just popular and information that has solid foundations.
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And popularity, this is important because popularity doesn't just drive the algorithm and who you get exposed to, but also it creates reality to some degree.
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It shapes our thoughts and feelings, you know, and popularity is also inextricably connected to capitalism.
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The more people follow you, the more opportunities you have to monetize your content.
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Now, that doesn't mean that people with huge platforms have more money.
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I know folks with large platforms who don't actually have access to wealth at all.
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But more followers, larger platforms can open up doors.
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It can give entry to more exclusive events, for example, and networks of contacts and people.
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It can also lead to better book deal and more book sales and so on and so forth.
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So in some ways, popularity is is inextricably linked to also to the reality of living under late stage capitalism.
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And a lot of people really see kind of creating content as an additional way to kind of bring in revenue and maybe kind of change the way they work, right?
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But.
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As well as kind of increasing the possibilities for income, increasing the possibility for knowledge production and acquisition and transmission, I also wonder if kind of that level of popularity also gives us the illusion of expertise sometimes, right?
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If somebody has like a million followers, you do start wondering, well, there must be something there, right?
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Can a million people be wrong?
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A million people is a lot of people, right?
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If half a million people follow this person, right?
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They might have something valuable to say, especially if that popularity goes along with certain credentials, for example.
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And now credentials are tricky, right?
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Because somebody can be a therapist like me, but not be an expert in a specific area.
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For example, several months ago, somebody who is a very experienced therapist said something that was really inaccurate on social media about gender, but people who didn't know any better trusted him because he has a large uh base, very popular, and somebody said, oh, I found this guy because Esther Perel mentioned him, and so I thought that he was a trustworthy source of information.
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So even expertise is so complicated because it can be vast and not any one person can be an expert in everything, right?
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And so how can we not kind of be influenced by the number of followers somebody has, by how large their platform is?
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And also how can the person with that large platform not be influenced by the fact that they have hundreds of thousands or even a million or 2 million followers, right?
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That's also going to impact the way that we perceive ourselves when we have such a large following.
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This can also lead to people overestimating their own knowledge and skills.
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This is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, for example, in psychology.
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There were two uh researchers, Dunning and Kruger, that kind of looked at the relationship between confidence and competence.
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And so they found that sometimes when people have less skill, they overestimate their level of competence.
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And one of the hypotheses is that when you are less skilled, you have less knowledge, you don't know what you don't know, right?
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So you might overestimate how much you know and you might feel very confident even though your level of skill and knowledge doesn't match that confidence.
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The opposite is also true.
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You can be incredibly skilled and knowledgeable but feel less confident because you know how vast the field is, you know how much there is to know and how much you don't know because the field is so vast and so you maybe underestimate your level of knowledge and skill.
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And so it kind of goes in both directions.
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People with less skill and knowledge might feel more confident.
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People with more skill and knowledge might feel less confident.
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And that's a kind of Dunning-Kruger effect.
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Sorry about that.
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So why is this relevant when we're talking about this topic of popularity and expertise?
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Well, you know, one of the things that I was thinking about when I was reflecting on what I wanted to cover for this episode and taking some notes and doing some research was how has social media impacted the Danne Kruger effect, for example?
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How does having a million followers impact our sense of confidence and competence, right?
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If it increases our confidence, does it also increases our sense of competence, whether the sense of competence is backed up by facts or not, right?
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And this is not just a fun intellectual exercise.
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I mean, don't get me wrong, uh I am an AuDHDer I can go on a lot of interesting side quests when it comes to intellectual exercises, but I'm particularly interested in this topic because I believe it has real life consequences.
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And what do I mean when I say it has real life consequences?
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For example, people's attitudes towards COVID-19, know, the pandemic, the vaccines as well, was really heavily influenced by what people were saying on social media, as well as in the media, of course, as well as what the government was saying.
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And so some kind of anti-vaccine folks, for example, also known as anti-vaxxers sometimes, were very confident and are still very confident in stating their case.
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And if they have large platforms, or even if they have more legitimate platforms like traditional media platform, they might be seen as trustworthy sources of information.
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And so when you combine this confidence with the popularity and the credibility that somebody might have because of their positionality.
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So for example, being cisgender, being white, being straight, being a man, know, dressing in a way that gives them status and so on and so forth.
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So forth, when we combine all those things, it can be dangerous because we can take things that are just opinions or just a belief as facts, for example.
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And this does have real life consequences.
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At one point, this was oh over 20 years ago, because it was when my uh oldest child...
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was very very young, kind of an infant, there was a paper that speculated that there was a connection between some vaccinations and autism and a lot of parents were uh stopping vaccinating their children um in fear of their children then developing autism.
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Now there is a lot to say about the way that we view neurodivergence, especially autism and all the stigma associated with that and we're not gonna go on that side quest because otherwise this episode is gonna be real long.
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But you can see how um combining...
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that kind of uh illusion of credibility, you know, this was a peer-reviewed paper, for example, with somebody being seen as credible because of their own positionalities, you know, as man, for example, can lead to really devastating results, like fewer parents and caregivers giving vaccinations to their infants and toddlers.
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And that has real-life consequences.
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Now, that paper was recanted and the author himself said that the research wasn't sound, that correlation doesn't mean causation.
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And I really wish that more people knew this correlation, things just happening at the same time doesn't mean causation.
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And like I said, I'm not gonna go on the side quest of kind of unpacking that paper.
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But this is why I wanna talk about this topic of conflating kind of popularity with expertise because of those very real life consequences.
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Personally, I know that how my own position, my own positionality is impact my credibility, for example, right, for a number of reasons.
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And we could talk about that, but I'll give you some very brief instances.
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You know, as a trans person, often when I talk about gender, I might be viewed as biased because that is my identity.
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However, I also have a whole doctorate in what used to be called women's and now would be called gender studies.
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So I'm not just speaking from kind of a lived experience position.
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I'm also speaking from kind of scholarly research and academic education.
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And not that my lived experience is not valuable, but it is not the only type of knowledge and expertise that I have.
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As a trans person, especially as a trans masculine person, I'm often infantilized or perceived as kind of having less experience than I do.
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For example, I have a couple of decades of clinical experience as a therapist and I have about three decades as an educator and a scholar, right?
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And so the way we're viewed really impacts the way we're perceived.
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As a disabled person who transitioned from having less visible disability to having a more visible disability for using like a cane or a Rollator or sometimes a wheelchair, I've really noticed how people treat me differently when I'm using a mobility aid.
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For example, healthcare providers who don't know me start speaking slower to me or louder until I disclose what my job is or what my level of education is.
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This is very similar in educational settings or at the ER.
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And there is a lot of literature, by the way, to kind of back up those experiences.
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Those are not just my personal experiences.
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I'm giving you examples because I think that real life examples can really help us make sense of what the numbers tell you in those and tell us in those peer-reviewed papers.
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So let's go back to this idea of what happens when we mistake popularity and positionality for expertise because popularity is also linked to positionality for example right if we have innate biases where we perceive men to be more knowledgeable than women for example I know this is very binary but often that's kind of how dominant culture works if we perceive white people to be more competent than Black and Brown people, for example, or Indigenous people, right?
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um That as real life consequences.
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If we perceive people with an Anglo accent, if we live in a dominant culture where that is kind of the language that is perceived as the official language, in air quotes, uh that people with that accent are going to have more credibility and people with an accent that indicates that they speak English as a second language, they might be seen as kind of less credible.
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And like I said, there is plenty of peer-reviewed research that backs up those ideas.
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But it also means that because of all of those factors, we can easily end up being misled, right?
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Because not only we might attribute less expertise to people who have earned it over a long period of time, sometimes decades, we can also attribute more expertise to people who are perceived as knowledgeable, but are actually still fairly new in a field.
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For example, you know, on social media platform, I've noticed that there are therapists with pretty large following.
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You know, we're talking 10,000, 20,000, sometimes 30,000 or more followers.
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That's a significant number of people, right?
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And some of those therapists have actually not been in independent kind of practice for very long.
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They've not been independently licensed for very long.
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You know, I was just scrolling this morning and I saw somebody with a fairly large platform was positioning themselves as having expertise in the therapy world and they had been actually practicing full-time as an independent, independently licensed clinician for less than a year.
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Now that is not very much expertise in my opinion.
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I'm sorry and if you disagree you're welcome to tell me why in the comments.
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I'm always open to feedback.
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as long as it's constructive feedback, if it's just kind of...
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ah kind of attacking me personally for how I look or how I sound, I usually just delete those comments, just so you know, by the way.
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So I'm saying all of this because again, if we think about that Dunning-Kruger effect that I mentioned earlier, you know, it can be really easy to see how this can be so not only misleading for the public, but also misleading for the people who have such large platform platforms themselves.
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Right?
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It's been a long day, sorry, but I really wanted to get this episode out.
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So what can we do instead?
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Right?
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I still believe that it's really important to be able to discern when somebody has the credential to speak about the things that they're speaking about.
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Right?
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So first of all, I think we really need to engage our critical thinking and that is hard because the education system, at least where I live now in this so-called United States, doesn't really prioritize or nurture critical thinking very much, in my opinion.
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And this is not because of teachers, by the way.
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This is because of systemic issues, including lack of funding and so many other issues, which again, would lead us down all different side of rabbit holes.
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So we might wanna kind of move back when we em notice information out there in the wild and kind of evaluate where is this information?
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coming from?
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What are the credentials that this person has?
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And like I said, credentials don't have to be just kind of book knowledge or academic knowledge, although in some areas it's really important to have some academic knowledge and some book knowledge.
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uh But it can also be lived experience.
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I don't want to be a colonizer when I talk about knowledge, but I also don't want to be an anti-intellectual because I do think that kind of learning a skill, learning a field does require a number of things from us.
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So a lived experience is great and sometimes is enough alone and sometimes it's not, right?
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So we might want to move back and think about what are the credentials that this person has.
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We might also want to think about media literacy principles.
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I think the media literacy principles can really help us reflect on the information that we're taking in.
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But also if we are creators, it can help us think about what is it that we are doing and how are we engaging with the material that we are kind of disseminating, right?
00:25:58.433 --> 00:26:05.859
And so the first thing that media literacy principles remind us of is that media is constructive.
00:26:05.859 --> 00:26:09.511
It's not like factual and objective at all times.
00:26:09.511 --> 00:26:17.008
It's knowledge that has been selected, interpreted, mediated and communicated in specific ways.
00:26:17.008 --> 00:26:19.430
And that is true of all knowledge, by the way.
00:26:19.430 --> 00:26:22.362
It is not just true of media knowledge.
00:26:22.362 --> 00:26:41.183
As a researcher, for example, I know that even when we see numbers that come from quantitative research that often is seen as part of the golden standard of research, we have percentages, we have numbers, we have done a survey that reached maybe 20,000 people.
00:26:41.404 --> 00:26:53.413
There is still bias in that knowledge because somebody has decided what topic to study, first of all, and how to to construct the questions in the way that they're being constructed, right?
00:26:53.413 --> 00:26:59.727
And that influences the knowledge that is being produced and disseminated through those numbers.
00:26:59.727 --> 00:27:03.640
So I would say that no knowledge is truly neutral.
00:27:03.640 --> 00:27:07.402
And when it comes to media, again, kind of media is not neutral.
00:27:07.402 --> 00:27:15.086
Media is knowledge that has been selected, interpreted, mediated, communicated through particular lenses, right?
00:27:15.106 --> 00:27:25.733
And that is important because not only is media kind of constructed, but media also influences what we perceive to be real to some degree.
00:27:25.733 --> 00:27:29.037
And I think now more than ever, we're seeing this, right?
00:27:29.037 --> 00:27:43.246
Media can really shape how we view everyday reality, how we view what's happening on the global stage, as well as how we understand what's happening in kind of local communities.
00:27:43.326 --> 00:27:54.134
And again, there is so much more to say about that, but I'm trying to make those episodes shorter because not everybody loves a one hour or hour and a half of me just talking to the camera.
00:27:56.076 --> 00:28:05.497
So media, just like all knowledge, would say, contains ideological messages and is created according to values and beliefs.
00:28:05.497 --> 00:28:07.576
And so we need to remember that.
00:28:07.576 --> 00:28:20.076
And if we are content creators, we also need to ask ourselves, what are the values and ideological messages that I may or may not be disseminating through the content that I create?
00:28:20.116 --> 00:28:26.029
Media is also influenced by the platform and that also influences reality, for example.
00:28:26.029 --> 00:28:33.974
example, short for media has become increasingly popular because of platforms like Instagram and TikTok, right?
00:28:33.974 --> 00:28:35.035
Usually...
00:28:35.751 --> 00:28:43.655
videos wanna be really brief, you you have to have the hook, you have to get people's attention in those first 10 seconds, 30 seconds.
00:28:43.655 --> 00:28:46.426
That has even influenced YouTube, for example.
00:28:46.426 --> 00:28:51.239
YouTube used to be kind of more apt for longer form of videos, right?
00:28:51.239 --> 00:28:54.471
But now shorts have introduced that pace too, right?
00:28:54.471 --> 00:29:03.785
Shorts need to be less than three minutes to qualify a short, a little bit longer than some of the TikTok and Instagram videos, but not that long, right?
00:29:03.785 --> 00:29:18.173
And there is an emerging body of research that actually shows that because we are consuming uh material and media that is in shorter form, our attention span generationally is changing.
00:29:18.173 --> 00:29:20.405
This impacts kind of our attention span.
00:29:20.405 --> 00:29:23.958
I've noticed that my attention span is really different.
00:29:23.958 --> 00:29:25.608
You know, I'm in my mid fifties.
00:29:25.608 --> 00:29:32.953
I used to be able to like sit down and watch a TV episode, watch a movie without doing something else.
00:29:32.953 --> 00:29:34.806
But now I'm like, I'm watching movie.
00:29:34.806 --> 00:29:37.220
And then there's my Oh, my phone is buzzed.
00:29:37.220 --> 00:29:38.671
Who is texting me?
00:29:38.671 --> 00:29:42.364
now there's a notification and I'm distracted, right?
00:29:42.364 --> 00:29:46.116
And this is as somebody who is not kind of a digital native.
00:29:46.116 --> 00:29:54.273
Now imagine kind of newer generations who have only mainly known kind of shorter form content.
00:29:54.273 --> 00:29:56.875
Of course that is impacting our attention span.
00:29:56.875 --> 00:30:02.358
So not only kind of media is influenced by the platform, but also...
00:30:03.230 --> 00:30:11.003
the way the platform works influences the way we pay attention and the way we start thinking, right, as well.
00:30:11.003 --> 00:30:16.732
um And so, you know, part of the big message, of course, is that media is not neutral.
00:30:16.732 --> 00:30:22.729
I've already said that, but repeating is usually pretty good educationally, pedagogically.
00:30:22.729 --> 00:30:24.130
So media is not neutral.
00:30:24.130 --> 00:30:25.871
Knowledge is not neutral.
00:30:25.871 --> 00:30:28.051
And popularity is not neutral.
00:30:28.051 --> 00:30:43.300
Because remember that idea also of kind of the who we consider popular is influenced by our positionalities, know, gender, race, socioeconomic status, attractiveness, according to dominant culture, all those good things.
00:30:43.300 --> 00:30:47.123
And that is why we need critical thinking and discernment, right?
00:30:47.123 --> 00:30:56.789
Because we want to make sure that when we are consuming kind of knowledge, and even when we're consuming entertainment, I would say, we want to engage our critical thinking.
00:30:56.789 --> 00:31:05.519
And so here are some questions we can ask ourselves to engage our critical thinking and also to engage those media literacy principles.
00:31:06.932 --> 00:31:09.212
And also I really want to give a shout out to Dr.
00:31:09.212 --> 00:31:18.436
Bianca Laureano who really introduced me to the idea of like questions that invite us into applying media literacy principles.
00:31:18.436 --> 00:31:25.420
So some of the questions you can ask yourself is who made this content and why they might've made it, right?
00:31:25.560 --> 00:31:32.743
For example, if somebody says something controversial, it kind of causes more people to look at it.
00:31:32.743 --> 00:31:36.526
More clicks, more likes, more comments, right?
00:31:36.808 --> 00:31:42.403
There is even a term uh for people who kind of use rage bait, I think is the term, right?
00:31:42.403 --> 00:31:45.055
So let's ask ourselves, who has made this content?
00:31:45.055 --> 00:31:47.166
Why have they made this content?
00:31:47.386 --> 00:31:51.309
There's a lot of content competing for our attention nowadays.
00:31:51.490 --> 00:31:59.135
And what are the values and beliefs that are kind of implied in this content that are implicit, right?
00:31:59.135 --> 00:32:03.259
They might not be said out loud, but there is an implication.
00:32:03.259 --> 00:32:11.344
There are some values and some beliefs and ideas and ideologies kind of behind everything that we say, right?
00:32:11.344 --> 00:32:21.048
For example, part of my beliefs are strongly shaped by postmodernism, you know, and social constructivism and so on and so forth.
00:32:21.048 --> 00:32:25.210
Other people are influenced by other ideologies, values and beliefs.
00:32:25.570 --> 00:32:34.719
Other questions we can ask ourselves are which audience is this material meant for and why is it meant for this audience, right?
00:32:34.719 --> 00:32:49.345
Is this a piece of media that has been produced for kids, for adults, for a specific subset of the audience, for a specific gender, for a specific kind of racialized population and so on and so forth.
00:32:49.546 --> 00:33:02.211
And also we need to ask ourselves which perspectives and voices are being included, which ones are being excluded, and why they might be included or excluded, right?
00:33:02.211 --> 00:33:07.212
Are people just using kind of arguments that support their position?
00:33:07.212 --> 00:33:19.897
I know one of my nesting partners really doesn't like documentaries because he feels that sometimes some documentarians only use evidence that support the point of view that they're trying to put across.
00:33:19.897 --> 00:33:25.700
And so they don't really give much of a balanced argument, you know, for example.
00:33:26.897 --> 00:33:40.474
And another question that we can ask ourselves is where does the knowledge that it's being transmitted through this media, the knowledge, the opinion, the idea that it's being transmitted, where does it come from?
00:33:40.474 --> 00:33:42.875
Is this an original idea?
00:33:43.276 --> 00:33:49.999
Is this kind of taking some ideas and combining them together in a new format?
00:33:49.999 --> 00:33:51.000
Is this...
00:33:51.442 --> 00:33:55.876
maybe a well-known idea that is being communicated in a new way.
00:33:55.876 --> 00:33:58.439
And none of those things are right or wrong.
00:33:58.439 --> 00:34:04.123
Critical thinking is not about figuring out is this the right knowledge or the wrong knowledge.
00:34:04.123 --> 00:34:05.064
Is this?
00:34:05.228 --> 00:34:06.567
true or false.
00:34:06.567 --> 00:34:10.427
mean, sometimes it is as simple as is this factual or not?
00:34:10.427 --> 00:34:11.768
Is this true or false?
00:34:11.768 --> 00:34:14.907
But often knowledge is a little more complicated than that.
00:34:14.907 --> 00:34:35.487
And so it's really about, like I said, engaging that critical thinking, letting ourselves not just be passive consumers of media, but also engaged critical consumers who are able to ask ourselves and each other and content creators too.
00:34:36.362 --> 00:34:49.773
So once we start asking ourselves more questions, we become more discerning, but also we become more, interestingly, can also become more compassionate.
00:34:49.773 --> 00:34:52.614
And let me break down what I mean by that.
00:34:54.494 --> 00:35:08.769
In some ways, we live in a world where we are being sold this illusion that all of us are 15 minutes away from attention and fame.
00:35:09.090 --> 00:35:19.735
In some ways, social media has made large uh platforms and large followings possible for anybody.
00:35:19.735 --> 00:35:21.157
And that is true.
00:35:21.157 --> 00:35:28.981
And that means that we might judge ourselves harshly, especially if we are experts in our field, if we don't have a large platform.
00:35:28.981 --> 00:35:35.606
But the reality is that a lot of things go into having a large platform, like we said, right up to this point.
00:35:35.606 --> 00:35:53.657
And so when we start asking ourselves more questions, when we engage with media more critically, we can also better understand why maybe us or people that we know may or may not have the same level of popularity as people who are saying similar things.
00:35:54.271 --> 00:36:03.771
Sometimes it's also very interesting because people that are maybe less popular, that have smaller followings, can start talking about something that doesn't get a lot of attention.
00:36:03.771 --> 00:36:12.590
But then somebody with a much bigger following picks up that topic and all of a sudden that topic is all over the internet.
00:36:12.811 --> 00:36:16.471
And so the popularity drives engagement.
00:36:17.070 --> 00:36:27.574
And popularity can make, on social media, can make success look so easily within our reach if we just follow the formula, right?
00:36:27.615 --> 00:36:29.836
That is not necessarily true.
00:36:29.836 --> 00:36:31.588
I think that is a myth, right?
00:36:31.588 --> 00:36:42.623
Because we need to remember that it's not just doing the thing, it's not just entering the arena, to paraphrase another very popular therapist on the internet.
00:36:42.623 --> 00:36:46.019
uh That is not enough.
00:36:46.019 --> 00:36:48.079
Many of us have entered the arena.
00:36:48.079 --> 00:37:10.559
You know, I remember I was attending a virtual conference a few years ago and somebody was using Esther Perel and Brené Brown as examples of therapists who have managed to get very large platforms and how helpful and influential that can be to share so much information with kind of larger audiences, right?
00:37:10.559 --> 00:37:11.900
And that's great.
00:37:12.443 --> 00:37:19.030
All kudos to Brené and to Esther and to many other therapists who have very large platforms.
00:37:19.030 --> 00:37:34.543
But some of us in the chat were also saying, yes, and like, let's not pretend that this is something that's achievable for everybody, because remember epistemic injustice that I was talking about at the beginning of the video?
00:37:34.829 --> 00:37:38.449
The way that knowledge is received is not neutral.
00:37:38.449 --> 00:37:48.608
There are lots of different factors that go into who's being seen as more or less credible, who is being seen as more or less competent and so on and so forth.
00:37:48.648 --> 00:37:59.889
And a couple of people decided to be a little feisty in the comment and said, well, I would like to see you like putting yourself out there in this way.
00:37:59.889 --> 00:38:03.489
And I was like, okay, hold my cup of tea.
00:38:03.489 --> 00:38:11.056
It's like, actually, have seven books out and a podcast and here is like my public platform.
00:38:11.056 --> 00:38:13.268
And I put all of that in the chat.
00:38:13.268 --> 00:38:17.581
And the person was like, uh it's easy to criticize from the cheap seats, right?
00:38:17.581 --> 00:38:20.192
I like to see you putting yourself out there and be vulnerable.
00:38:20.192 --> 00:38:23.454
It's like, whoops, I stand corrected, right?
00:38:23.454 --> 00:38:41.985
And I wasn't trying to, like I said, know, kudos to Brené and to Esther and to all the other folks who have large platforms, but we have to stop pretending that kind of that level of popularity is immune, you know, from bias, right?
00:38:41.985 --> 00:38:53.030
And also we need to remember that just because somebody is popular potentially doesn't make them an expert in absolutely everything, for example, right?
00:38:53.070 --> 00:38:57.592
Which is also fascinating and maybe the topic for a different video.
00:38:59.036 --> 00:39:10.541
And so even if we achieve popularity, right, we need to ask ourselves, do we have the expertise to sustain the level of popularity, the platform that we might have gained?
00:39:10.541 --> 00:39:11.742
Some people do.
00:39:11.742 --> 00:39:14.402
That's why I named Brené and Esther.
00:39:14.402 --> 00:39:15.963
They have the expertise.
00:39:15.963 --> 00:39:17.644
They have the credentials.
00:39:17.644 --> 00:39:20.746
Those are solid people with solid knowledge.
00:39:20.746 --> 00:39:27.389
However, they're also people with very uh acceptable kind of positionalities, right?
00:39:27.389 --> 00:39:33.762
um light-skinned folks, folks who are cisgender, folks who are perceived as abled, right?
00:39:33.762 --> 00:39:38.795
Because it's also not just who people are, it's also how we are perceived, right?
00:39:38.916 --> 00:39:47.001
And so it can be really tempting for so many of us to court popularity and I mean, goodness knows that I'm doing that right now.
00:39:47.001 --> 00:39:57.309
I'm here live streaming on YouTube, this is gonna be recorded, it's gonna be on the platform, I'm gonna edit some shorter videos, throw them on Instagram.
00:39:57.309 --> 00:40:01.304
I sure am trying to you know, grow my following.
00:40:01.304 --> 00:40:09.311
That is absolutely true because as an author and as somebody who's self-employed, it is really important to have a platform.
00:40:09.311 --> 00:40:18.978
And even publishing houses are starting to ask how many followers on social media do you have, even if you have all the credentials necessary to write a book, for example.
00:40:18.978 --> 00:40:22.260
So I'm not saying it's wrong to court popularity.
00:40:22.260 --> 00:40:25.443
A lot of us have to survive under late stage capitalism.
00:40:25.443 --> 00:40:27.085
A lot of us are doing that.
00:40:27.085 --> 00:40:30.367
I'm not asking us to throw away the baby with the bath water.
00:40:30.367 --> 00:40:32.068
I think it's an expression.
00:40:32.068 --> 00:40:47.277
But rather what I'm asking us to do is to slow down, ask ourselves those questions that are connected with media literacy, and notice the impact that popular discourse might have on us, the way we think, and what we believe.
00:40:47.277 --> 00:40:54.342
And also to maybe pay some closer attention to who do we choose to listen to, right?
00:40:54.342 --> 00:40:58.606
Which uh voices are we constantly being exposed to?
00:40:58.606 --> 00:41:01.067
Is our social media an echo chamber?
00:41:01.067 --> 00:41:10.530
Do we only read books, watch movies or TV shows or follow content creators that look or sound like us?
00:41:10.530 --> 00:41:21.115
Or do we really vary the kind of the media that we consume, whether it's on social media, whether it's books, whether it's audio books, whether it's TVs, movies and so on.
00:41:23.005 --> 00:41:31.342
So I hope you've enjoyed this episode uh about how popularity is not always uh the same as expertise.
00:41:31.342 --> 00:41:51.655
It can be, but not always, like I said, and why we need to kind of pay attention to this issue because of the way that it can really shape reality and drive the way we make decisions, drive the way we vote, drive the way we show up for ourselves and each other in community as well.
00:41:52.467 --> 00:41:59.891
And if there is a topic that you would like me to cover in future Warm Take Wednesdays kind of episodes, please let me know.
00:41:59.891 --> 00:42:04.704
Otherwise, I'm just going to have to keep putting out there whatever is on my mind.
00:42:04.704 --> 00:42:11.137
This topic has been on my mind for, oh my God, at least I think it's been on my mind for at least a year.
00:42:11.137 --> 00:42:19.760
But then all the happenings in therapy threads of this week really kind of pushed me to get this topic out there.
00:42:19.760 --> 00:42:24.001
So if there's a topic that you would like me to talk about, please let me know.
00:42:24.302 --> 00:42:41.054
You can leave it in the comments, you can contact me through my website and until we meet again I hope that you become savvy consumers of media whether it's on social media or other platforms and until then take care of yourselves and each other.
00:42:41.054 --> 00:42:43.036
Ciao e alla prossima!
00:00:01.304 --> 00:00:06.115
Hello and welcome to another episode of Warm Take Wednesdays with Dr.
00:00:06.115 --> 00:00:07.097
Alex.
00:00:07.097 --> 00:00:08.244
I am Alex Iantaffi.
00:00:08.244 --> 00:00:13.939
I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist, certified sex therapist, author, and podcaster.
00:00:13.939 --> 00:00:25.946
I have been recording the podcast Gender Stories for almost 100 episodes since 2018, and I've been starting this YouTube series just kind of late last year.
00:00:25.946 --> 00:00:31.647
So today I would like to talk about how sometimes we conflate popularity with expertise.
00:00:31.647 --> 00:00:38.171
and how social media has really kind of blurred the lines between popularity and expertise.
00:00:38.253 --> 00:00:59.807
And I think it's always a good week to talk about this topic, but especially this past week, there's been a lot of conversations about how therapists should behave online, even a very popular therapist on the internet, having made some remarks that several people considered insensitive, inappropriate, harmful, and even unethical.
00:00:59.807 --> 00:01:03.118
I am not gonna get into to the merits of that situation.
00:01:03.118 --> 00:01:28.346
I'm actually really want to focus on how the discourse should really be about how a social media impacted our perception of who is an expert and really influence our collective ability to distinguish between popularity, the number of likes, the number of followers and actual experience and expertise.
00:01:28.346 --> 00:01:31.040
And expertise can mean many things.
00:01:31.040 --> 00:01:38.500
doesn't have to mean academic knowledge necessarily, although in some areas it's very helpful to have scholarly knowledge.
00:01:38.500 --> 00:01:44.140
It can also be lived experience and other ways of kind of which we can gather knowledge.
00:01:44.140 --> 00:01:53.980
So first of all, I want to talk about how even when we're talking about expertise, I don't want to pretend that expertise is neutral.
00:01:54.000 --> 00:02:01.400
For example, Miranda Fricker who is a British philosopher, named the phenomenon of epistemic injustice.
00:02:01.623 --> 00:02:17.713
And what epistemic injustice means is that some of us are viewed as more credible because of our own positionalities, which means what gender we are, the color of our skin, how we're racialized, our socioeconomic status, right?
00:02:17.713 --> 00:02:18.748
Do we have more money?
00:02:18.748 --> 00:02:20.395
Do we have less money?
00:02:20.556 --> 00:02:23.189
And also kind of how attractive we are.
00:02:23.189 --> 00:02:28.801
All of the things that we know from research really influence how we are perceived.
00:02:28.801 --> 00:02:33.835
So knowledge, production, and expertise, is no stranger to that.
00:02:33.835 --> 00:02:37.627
That's why there is this concept of epistemic injustice.
00:02:37.627 --> 00:02:46.593
And I really encourage you to read Miranda Fricker book by the same name if you're interested in this concept and you haven't come across it before.
00:02:46.593 --> 00:03:02.913
This also means that some of us are viewed as having less expertise and being less credible because of our own positionalities, because of our gender, because of our race, religion, our socioeconomic status, whether we are considered to be conventionally attractive.
00:03:02.913 --> 00:03:07.485
So whether we have pretty privilege or not sometimes is called and so on.
00:03:07.485 --> 00:03:12.968
So even what we consider to be expertise is not neutral.
00:03:12.968 --> 00:03:29.376
Some people are just gonna be perceived as more credible, as more experienced, as more trustworthy than others because of our innate biases which of course are not separate from how we interact with one another in the world.
00:03:31.104 --> 00:03:36.977
Like I said, there is this concept of epistemic injustice that really captures this idea.
00:03:36.977 --> 00:03:58.366
For this episode, I really want to focus on how social media in particular both challenges and reinforces this idea of epistemic injustice and how it complicates things even more because of that blurring of lines that can happen between popularity and expertise that I mentioned at the beginning of the episode.
00:03:58.366 --> 00:04:06.730
So first of all I want to do a little bit of a thought experiment.
00:04:06.730 --> 00:04:09.100
So if you want to, consent first.
00:04:09.100 --> 00:04:25.562
So if you like, I would like you to kind of soften your gaze or close your eyes if you want and think of an expert in your field or maybe it's a skill you would like to develop like learning to crochet or learning how to bake bread.
00:04:25.562 --> 00:04:30.927
So it can be either kind of scholarly expertise, work expertise or a skill.
00:04:30.927 --> 00:04:32.947
or craft that you would like to develop.
00:04:32.947 --> 00:04:40.310
So when you think about an expert in that particular area, who comes to mind?
00:04:41.170 --> 00:04:45.581
And who comes to mind might be visual or it might be a verbal description.
00:04:45.581 --> 00:04:50.673
Not all of us have the capacity to kind of imagine things in our mind's eye.
00:04:51.276 --> 00:05:03.745
And so as you're thinking about this imaginary expert in the area that you have selected, what characteristics does this expert have?
00:05:04.725 --> 00:05:06.507
How old are they?
00:05:06.708 --> 00:05:08.369
What is their skin color?
00:05:08.369 --> 00:05:09.970
What is their gender?
00:05:09.970 --> 00:05:11.451
How are they dressed?
00:05:11.451 --> 00:05:13.971
Just take a moment to think about that.
00:05:14.653 --> 00:05:19.656
You can even pause this video if you want to, if you're not watching it live.
00:05:20.254 --> 00:05:33.350
And then as you realize what characteristics this expert has, I want you to take a moment to reflect on whether who came to mind as an expert in this field surprised you or not.
00:05:33.350 --> 00:05:35.918
It might have surprised you, it might not have surprised you.
00:05:35.918 --> 00:05:39.574
It might be exactly what you expected, right?
00:05:39.774 --> 00:05:52.012
So whenever I've done this, I usually do this when I train therapists and I invite people to imagine what an expert therapist might look like, right?
00:05:52.033 --> 00:05:59.718
And most people notice that who we imagine as an expert is really shaped by some innate biases, right?
00:05:59.718 --> 00:06:14.160
There are certain professions or certain skills that we associate with specific genders, for example, or people who look a particular way, whether that's close, whether that's connected.
00:06:14.160 --> 00:06:24.458
Sorry, it's a little bit later in the day than I usually do those lives So whether that's connected to a how they're racialized, how old they are, how they're dressed, and so on and so forth.
00:06:24.458 --> 00:06:34.223
So in some ways, social media has kind of helped us bypass a little bit this kind of traditional idea of what an expert looks like, right?
00:06:34.223 --> 00:06:47.613
Before, expertise was mostly conveyed through academic credentials, through academic standing, how many books or how many papers somebody might have out.
00:06:47.613 --> 00:06:56.338
But social media has really enabled us to transmit knowledge through a range of platforms.
00:06:56.338 --> 00:07:10.269
And it also enabled us to acquire knowledge through a range of platforms, such as YouTube, for example, Instagram, TikTok, or any social platforms, social media platform that we are using.
00:07:10.269 --> 00:07:32.824
This has actually been incredibly helpful for many marginalized folks, such as myself, but also for Black and Brown and Indigenous folks, disabled folks, know, and queer folks like myself, neurodivergent folks and so on and so forth, because all of a sudden, there's been kind of a lower barrier of entry to gain an audience, right?
00:07:32.824 --> 00:07:47.273
Whereas before you might have to be selected to present at a conference or a publisher might have to pick you to write a book or you might have to go through a process of peer review to publish a paper in an academic journal.
00:07:47.273 --> 00:08:00.168
Now you can literally just get your phone out and go live in front of an audience or record the video and upload it and go in front of an audience.
00:08:00.168 --> 00:08:08.930
And this in some ways has really kind of leveled the playing field in some ways, but not in every way.
00:08:08.930 --> 00:08:12.112
And we'll see why I say not in every way in a moment.
00:08:14.172 --> 00:08:22.355
Even though people might have an easier access to those platforms, that doesn't mean that the way that our brains work has changed.
00:08:22.355 --> 00:08:26.778
So all of those innate biases that I mentioned before still exist.
00:08:26.778 --> 00:08:44.046
Who we consider to be more or less credible, who do we consider to be more or less trustworthy with information is still shaped by the sound of our voice, whether we have an accent or not in the dominant language of the country where we live, right?
00:08:44.046 --> 00:08:49.903
example, I lived in an Anglo dominant country and my accent is not an Anglo accent.
00:08:49.903 --> 00:08:53.719
This is going to have an influence on how I'm perceived, right?
00:08:53.719 --> 00:08:55.721
And we could say more about that.
00:08:55.902 --> 00:08:56.783
So.
00:08:57.587 --> 00:09:20.619
In some ways, social media has kind of enabled us to be exposed to a much broader range of uh people's expertise, but it's also making it a little bit harder, I would say, to have discernment when it comes to knowing who is an expert and who's only popular and who's both an expert and popular, because those things can also coexist.
00:09:20.619 --> 00:09:24.221
If you know me, you know I'm not one for binary thinking.
00:09:24.221 --> 00:09:26.501
It doesn't have to be an either or.
00:09:26.501 --> 00:09:27.581
It can very much.
00:09:27.581 --> 00:09:28.923
be a both-hand.
00:09:28.923 --> 00:09:44.793
So there can be expertise and popularity, but there can also be expertise without popularity and popularity without expertise, as well as both of them coexisting and every other configuration that's possible in between those three different states.
00:09:45.173 --> 00:10:00.317
So in some ways, more than ever, we need to understand how do we differentiate between things that are just information that's just popular and information that has solid foundations.
00:10:00.317 --> 00:10:11.566
And popularity, this is important because popularity doesn't just drive the algorithm and who you get exposed to, but also it creates reality to some degree.
00:10:11.566 --> 00:10:20.273
It shapes our thoughts and feelings, you know, and popularity is also inextricably connected to capitalism.
00:10:20.273 --> 00:10:24.696
The more people follow you, the more opportunities you have to monetize your content.
00:10:24.696 --> 00:10:29.239
Now, that doesn't mean that people with huge platforms have more money.
00:10:29.239 --> 00:10:35.363
I know folks with large platforms who don't actually have access to wealth at all.
00:10:35.423 --> 00:10:41.628
But more followers, larger platforms can open up doors.
00:10:41.628 --> 00:10:48.972
It can give entry to more exclusive events, for example, and networks of contacts and people.
00:10:48.972 --> 00:10:54.666
It can also lead to better book deal and more book sales and so on and so forth.
00:10:54.666 --> 00:11:03.121
So in some ways, popularity is is inextricably linked to also to the reality of living under late stage capitalism.
00:11:03.121 --> 00:11:13.950
And a lot of people really see kind of creating content as an additional way to kind of bring in revenue and maybe kind of change the way they work, right?
00:11:15.792 --> 00:11:16.477
But.
00:11:16.477 --> 00:11:31.544
As well as kind of increasing the possibilities for income, increasing the possibility for knowledge production and acquisition and transmission, I also wonder if kind of that level of popularity also gives us the illusion of expertise sometimes, right?
00:11:31.544 --> 00:11:39.599
If somebody has like a million followers, you do start wondering, well, there must be something there, right?
00:11:39.599 --> 00:11:41.789
Can a million people be wrong?
00:11:41.789 --> 00:11:44.571
A million people is a lot of people, right?
00:11:44.571 --> 00:11:48.475
If half a million people follow this person, right?
00:11:48.576 --> 00:11:56.942
They might have something valuable to say, especially if that popularity goes along with certain credentials, for example.
00:11:56.942 --> 00:11:59.065
And now credentials are tricky, right?
00:11:59.065 --> 00:12:05.690
Because somebody can be a therapist like me, but not be an expert in a specific area.
00:12:05.690 --> 00:12:32.303
For example, several months ago, somebody who is a very experienced therapist said something that was really inaccurate on social media about gender, but people who didn't know any better trusted him because he has a large uh base, very popular, and somebody said, oh, I found this guy because Esther Perel mentioned him, and so I thought that he was a trustworthy source of information.
00:12:32.303 --> 00:12:42.248
So even expertise is so complicated because it can be vast and not any one person can be an expert in everything, right?
00:12:44.094 --> 00:12:52.467
And so how can we not kind of be influenced by the number of followers somebody has, by how large their platform is?
00:12:52.467 --> 00:13:03.832
And also how can the person with that large platform not be influenced by the fact that they have hundreds of thousands or even a million or 2 million followers, right?
00:13:03.832 --> 00:13:10.196
That's also going to impact the way that we perceive ourselves when we have such a large following.
00:13:10.196 --> 00:13:15.519
This can also lead to people overestimating their own knowledge and skills.
00:13:15.519 --> 00:13:20.022
This is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, for example, in psychology.
00:13:20.121 --> 00:13:28.807
There were two uh researchers, Dunning and Kruger, that kind of looked at the relationship between confidence and competence.
00:13:28.807 --> 00:13:37.413
And so they found that sometimes when people have less skill, they overestimate their level of competence.
00:13:37.413 --> 00:13:44.071
And one of the hypotheses is that when you are less skilled, you have less knowledge, you don't know what you don't know, right?
00:13:44.071 --> 00:13:52.918
So you might overestimate how much you know and you might feel very confident even though your level of skill and knowledge doesn't match that confidence.
00:13:52.918 --> 00:13:55.239
The opposite is also true.
00:13:55.740 --> 00:14:13.774
You can be incredibly skilled and knowledgeable but feel less confident because you know how vast the field is, you know how much there is to know and how much you don't know because the field is so vast and so you maybe underestimate your level of knowledge and skill.
00:14:13.774 --> 00:14:15.573
And so it kind of goes in both directions.
00:14:15.573 --> 00:14:19.014
People with less skill and knowledge might feel more confident.
00:14:19.014 --> 00:14:22.854
People with more skill and knowledge might feel less confident.
00:14:22.854 --> 00:14:25.754
And that's a kind of Dunning-Kruger effect.
00:14:25.754 --> 00:14:27.094
Sorry about that.
00:14:27.254 --> 00:14:34.594
So why is this relevant when we're talking about this topic of popularity and expertise?
00:14:34.933 --> 00:14:49.937
Well, you know, one of the things that I was thinking about when I was reflecting on what I wanted to cover for this episode and taking some notes and doing some research was how has social media impacted the Danne Kruger effect, for example?
00:14:49.937 --> 00:14:56.822
How does having a million followers impact our sense of confidence and competence, right?
00:14:56.822 --> 00:15:06.469
If it increases our confidence, does it also increases our sense of competence, whether the sense of competence is backed up by facts or not, right?
00:15:06.609 --> 00:15:09.480
And this is not just a fun intellectual exercise.
00:15:09.480 --> 00:15:24.280
I mean, don't get me wrong, uh I am an AuDHDer I can go on a lot of interesting side quests when it comes to intellectual exercises, but I'm particularly interested in this topic because I believe it has real life consequences.
00:15:24.280 --> 00:15:27.423
And what do I mean when I say it has real life consequences?
00:15:27.423 --> 00:15:44.033
For example, people's attitudes towards COVID-19, know, the pandemic, the vaccines as well, was really heavily influenced by what people were saying on social media, as well as in the media, of course, as well as what the government was saying.
00:15:44.307 --> 00:15:55.475
And so some kind of anti-vaccine folks, for example, also known as anti-vaxxers sometimes, were very confident and are still very confident in stating their case.
00:15:55.475 --> 00:16:06.845
And if they have large platforms, or even if they have more legitimate platforms like traditional media platform, they might be seen as trustworthy sources of information.
00:16:06.845 --> 00:16:15.971
And so when you combine this confidence with the popularity and the credibility that somebody might have because of their positionality.
00:16:15.971 --> 00:16:26.174
So for example, being cisgender, being white, being straight, being a man, know, dressing in a way that gives them status and so on and so forth.
00:16:26.174 --> 00:16:38.320
So forth, when we combine all those things, it can be dangerous because we can take things that are just opinions or just a belief as facts, for example.
00:16:40.371 --> 00:16:43.037
And this does have real life consequences.
00:16:43.037 --> 00:16:50.230
At one point, this was oh over 20 years ago, because it was when my uh oldest child...
00:16:50.865 --> 00:17:12.385
was very very young, kind of an infant, there was a paper that speculated that there was a connection between some vaccinations and autism and a lot of parents were uh stopping vaccinating their children um in fear of their children then developing autism.
00:17:12.385 --> 00:17:27.578
Now there is a lot to say about the way that we view neurodivergence, especially autism and all the stigma associated with that and we're not gonna go on that side quest because otherwise this episode is gonna be real long.
00:17:27.800 --> 00:17:32.487
But you can see how um combining...
00:17:33.151 --> 00:17:58.652
that kind of uh illusion of credibility, you know, this was a peer-reviewed paper, for example, with somebody being seen as credible because of their own positionalities, you know, as man, for example, can lead to really devastating results, like fewer parents and caregivers giving vaccinations to their infants and toddlers.
00:17:58.652 --> 00:18:01.363
And that has real-life consequences.
00:18:01.363 --> 00:18:12.286
Now, that paper was recanted and the author himself said that the research wasn't sound, that correlation doesn't mean causation.
00:18:12.286 --> 00:18:20.097
And I really wish that more people knew this correlation, things just happening at the same time doesn't mean causation.
00:18:20.097 --> 00:18:24.377
And like I said, I'm not gonna go on the side quest of kind of unpacking that paper.
00:18:24.398 --> 00:18:35.993
But this is why I wanna talk about this topic of conflating kind of popularity with expertise because of those very real life consequences.
00:18:36.096 --> 00:18:45.109
Personally, I know that how my own position, my own positionality is impact my credibility, for example, right, for a number of reasons.
00:18:45.109 --> 00:18:50.123
And we could talk about that, but I'll give you some very brief instances.
00:18:50.123 --> 00:18:58.346
You know, as a trans person, often when I talk about gender, I might be viewed as biased because that is my identity.
00:18:58.346 --> 00:19:06.029
However, I also have a whole doctorate in what used to be called women's and now would be called gender studies.
00:19:06.029 --> 00:19:11.413
So I'm not just speaking from kind of a lived experience position.
00:19:11.413 --> 00:19:17.218
I'm also speaking from kind of scholarly research and academic education.
00:19:17.218 --> 00:19:25.241
And not that my lived experience is not valuable, but it is not the only type of knowledge and expertise that I have.
00:19:25.563 --> 00:19:34.169
As a trans person, especially as a trans masculine person, I'm often infantilized or perceived as kind of having less experience than I do.
00:19:34.169 --> 00:19:42.643
For example, I have a couple of decades of clinical experience as a therapist and I have about three decades as an educator and a scholar, right?
00:19:42.643 --> 00:19:46.702
And so the way we're viewed really impacts the way we're perceived.
00:19:46.702 --> 00:20:05.806
As a disabled person who transitioned from having less visible disability to having a more visible disability for using like a cane or a Rollator or sometimes a wheelchair, I've really noticed how people treat me differently when I'm using a mobility aid.
00:20:05.806 --> 00:20:16.613
For example, healthcare providers who don't know me start speaking slower to me or louder until I disclose what my job is or what my level of education is.
00:20:16.613 --> 00:20:20.476
This is very similar in educational settings or at the ER.
00:20:20.476 --> 00:20:25.989
And there is a lot of literature, by the way, to kind of back up those experiences.
00:20:25.989 --> 00:20:28.621
Those are not just my personal experiences.
00:20:28.621 --> 00:20:40.848
I'm giving you examples because I think that real life examples can really help us make sense of what the numbers tell you in those and tell us in those peer-reviewed papers.
00:20:41.049 --> 00:21:11.730
So let's go back to this idea of what happens when we mistake popularity and positionality for expertise because popularity is also linked to positionality for example right if we have innate biases where we perceive men to be more knowledgeable than women for example I know this is very binary but often that's kind of how dominant culture works if we perceive white people to be more competent than Black and Brown people, for example, or Indigenous people, right?
00:21:11.730 --> 00:21:14.991
um That as real life consequences.
00:21:14.991 --> 00:21:41.766
If we perceive people with an Anglo accent, if we live in a dominant culture where that is kind of the language that is perceived as the official language, in air quotes, uh that people with that accent are going to have more credibility and people with an accent that indicates that they speak English as a second language, they might be seen as kind of less credible.
00:21:41.766 --> 00:21:47.412
And like I said, there is plenty of peer-reviewed research that backs up those ideas.
00:21:47.818 --> 00:21:54.872
But it also means that because of all of those factors, we can easily end up being misled, right?
00:21:54.872 --> 00:22:13.098
Because not only we might attribute less expertise to people who have earned it over a long period of time, sometimes decades, we can also attribute more expertise to people who are perceived as knowledgeable, but are actually still fairly new in a field.
00:22:13.098 --> 00:22:23.163
For example, you know, on social media platform, I've noticed that there are therapists with pretty large following.
00:22:23.163 --> 00:22:28.346
You know, we're talking 10,000, 20,000, sometimes 30,000 or more followers.
00:22:28.346 --> 00:22:31.416
That's a significant number of people, right?
00:22:31.416 --> 00:22:38.000
And some of those therapists have actually not been in independent kind of practice for very long.
00:22:38.000 --> 00:22:40.991
They've not been independently licensed for very long.
00:22:40.991 --> 00:23:02.625
You know, I was just scrolling this morning and I saw somebody with a fairly large platform was positioning themselves as having expertise in the therapy world and they had been actually practicing full-time as an independent, independently licensed clinician for less than a year.
00:23:02.625 --> 00:23:06.347
Now that is not very much expertise in my opinion.
00:23:06.347 --> 00:23:10.200
I'm sorry and if you disagree you're welcome to tell me why in the comments.
00:23:10.200 --> 00:23:12.171
I'm always open to feedback.
00:23:13.607 --> 00:23:16.798
as long as it's constructive feedback, if it's just kind of...
00:23:16.798 --> 00:23:27.406
ah kind of attacking me personally for how I look or how I sound, I usually just delete those comments, just so you know, by the way.
00:23:27.468 --> 00:23:51.893
So I'm saying all of this because again, if we think about that Dunning-Kruger effect that I mentioned earlier, you know, it can be really easy to see how this can be so not only misleading for the public, but also misleading for the people who have such large platform platforms themselves.
00:23:51.893 --> 00:23:52.282
Right?
00:23:52.282 --> 00:23:55.934
It's been a long day, sorry, but I really wanted to get this episode out.
00:23:56.016 --> 00:23:57.957
So what can we do instead?
00:23:57.957 --> 00:23:58.337
Right?
00:23:58.337 --> 00:24:08.295
I still believe that it's really important to be able to discern when somebody has the credential to speak about the things that they're speaking about.
00:24:08.295 --> 00:24:09.184
Right?
00:24:09.405 --> 00:24:26.637
So first of all, I think we really need to engage our critical thinking and that is hard because the education system, at least where I live now in this so-called United States, doesn't really prioritize or nurture critical thinking very much, in my opinion.
00:24:26.818 --> 00:24:29.009
And this is not because of teachers, by the way.
00:24:29.009 --> 00:24:39.606
This is because of systemic issues, including lack of funding and so many other issues, which again, would lead us down all different side of rabbit holes.
00:24:39.928 --> 00:24:49.894
So we might wanna kind of move back when we em notice information out there in the wild and kind of evaluate where is this information?
00:24:49.894 --> 00:24:51.015
coming from?
00:24:51.015 --> 00:24:53.685
What are the credentials that this person has?
00:24:53.685 --> 00:25:04.683
And like I said, credentials don't have to be just kind of book knowledge or academic knowledge, although in some areas it's really important to have some academic knowledge and some book knowledge.
00:25:04.683 --> 00:25:07.645
uh But it can also be lived experience.
00:25:07.645 --> 00:25:22.814
I don't want to be a colonizer when I talk about knowledge, but I also don't want to be an anti-intellectual because I do think that kind of learning a skill, learning a field does require a number of things from us.
00:25:22.894 --> 00:25:29.814
So a lived experience is great and sometimes is enough alone and sometimes it's not, right?
00:25:29.814 --> 00:25:35.153
So we might want to move back and think about what are the credentials that this person has.
00:25:35.153 --> 00:25:38.874
We might also want to think about media literacy principles.
00:25:38.874 --> 00:25:46.554
I think the media literacy principles can really help us reflect on the information that we're taking in.
00:25:46.554 --> 00:25:58.433
But also if we are creators, it can help us think about what is it that we are doing and how are we engaging with the material that we are kind of disseminating, right?
00:25:58.433 --> 00:26:05.859
And so the first thing that media literacy principles remind us of is that media is constructive.
00:26:05.859 --> 00:26:09.511
It's not like factual and objective at all times.
00:26:09.511 --> 00:26:17.008
It's knowledge that has been selected, interpreted, mediated and communicated in specific ways.
00:26:17.008 --> 00:26:19.430
And that is true of all knowledge, by the way.
00:26:19.430 --> 00:26:22.362
It is not just true of media knowledge.
00:26:22.362 --> 00:26:41.183
As a researcher, for example, I know that even when we see numbers that come from quantitative research that often is seen as part of the golden standard of research, we have percentages, we have numbers, we have done a survey that reached maybe 20,000 people.
00:26:41.404 --> 00:26:53.413
There is still bias in that knowledge because somebody has decided what topic to study, first of all, and how to to construct the questions in the way that they're being constructed, right?
00:26:53.413 --> 00:26:59.727
And that influences the knowledge that is being produced and disseminated through those numbers.
00:26:59.727 --> 00:27:03.640
So I would say that no knowledge is truly neutral.
00:27:03.640 --> 00:27:07.402
And when it comes to media, again, kind of media is not neutral.
00:27:07.402 --> 00:27:15.086
Media is knowledge that has been selected, interpreted, mediated, communicated through particular lenses, right?
00:27:15.106 --> 00:27:25.733
And that is important because not only is media kind of constructed, but media also influences what we perceive to be real to some degree.
00:27:25.733 --> 00:27:29.037
And I think now more than ever, we're seeing this, right?
00:27:29.037 --> 00:27:43.246
Media can really shape how we view everyday reality, how we view what's happening on the global stage, as well as how we understand what's happening in kind of local communities.
00:27:43.326 --> 00:27:54.134
And again, there is so much more to say about that, but I'm trying to make those episodes shorter because not everybody loves a one hour or hour and a half of me just talking to the camera.
00:27:56.076 --> 00:28:05.497
So media, just like all knowledge, would say, contains ideological messages and is created according to values and beliefs.
00:28:05.497 --> 00:28:07.576
And so we need to remember that.
00:28:07.576 --> 00:28:20.076
And if we are content creators, we also need to ask ourselves, what are the values and ideological messages that I may or may not be disseminating through the content that I create?
00:28:20.116 --> 00:28:26.029
Media is also influenced by the platform and that also influences reality, for example.
00:28:26.029 --> 00:28:33.974
example, short for media has become increasingly popular because of platforms like Instagram and TikTok, right?
00:28:33.974 --> 00:28:35.035
Usually...
00:28:35.751 --> 00:28:43.655
videos wanna be really brief, you you have to have the hook, you have to get people's attention in those first 10 seconds, 30 seconds.
00:28:43.655 --> 00:28:46.426
That has even influenced YouTube, for example.
00:28:46.426 --> 00:28:51.239
YouTube used to be kind of more apt for longer form of videos, right?
00:28:51.239 --> 00:28:54.471
But now shorts have introduced that pace too, right?
00:28:54.471 --> 00:29:03.785
Shorts need to be less than three minutes to qualify a short, a little bit longer than some of the TikTok and Instagram videos, but not that long, right?
00:29:03.785 --> 00:29:18.173
And there is an emerging body of research that actually shows that because we are consuming uh material and media that is in shorter form, our attention span generationally is changing.
00:29:18.173 --> 00:29:20.405
This impacts kind of our attention span.
00:29:20.405 --> 00:29:23.958
I've noticed that my attention span is really different.
00:29:23.958 --> 00:29:25.608
You know, I'm in my mid fifties.
00:29:25.608 --> 00:29:32.953
I used to be able to like sit down and watch a TV episode, watch a movie without doing something else.
00:29:32.953 --> 00:29:34.806
But now I'm like, I'm watching movie.
00:29:34.806 --> 00:29:37.220
And then there's my Oh, my phone is buzzed.
00:29:37.220 --> 00:29:38.671
Who is texting me?
00:29:38.671 --> 00:29:42.364
now there's a notification and I'm distracted, right?
00:29:42.364 --> 00:29:46.116
And this is as somebody who is not kind of a digital native.
00:29:46.116 --> 00:29:54.273
Now imagine kind of newer generations who have only mainly known kind of shorter form content.
00:29:54.273 --> 00:29:56.875
Of course that is impacting our attention span.
00:29:56.875 --> 00:30:02.358
So not only kind of media is influenced by the platform, but also...
00:30:03.230 --> 00:30:11.003
the way the platform works influences the way we pay attention and the way we start thinking, right, as well.
00:30:11.003 --> 00:30:16.732
um And so, you know, part of the big message, of course, is that media is not neutral.
00:30:16.732 --> 00:30:22.729
I've already said that, but repeating is usually pretty good educationally, pedagogically.
00:30:22.729 --> 00:30:24.130
So media is not neutral.
00:30:24.130 --> 00:30:25.871
Knowledge is not neutral.
00:30:25.871 --> 00:30:28.051
And popularity is not neutral.
00:30:28.051 --> 00:30:43.300
Because remember that idea also of kind of the who we consider popular is influenced by our positionalities, know, gender, race, socioeconomic status, attractiveness, according to dominant culture, all those good things.
00:30:43.300 --> 00:30:47.123
And that is why we need critical thinking and discernment, right?
00:30:47.123 --> 00:30:56.789
Because we want to make sure that when we are consuming kind of knowledge, and even when we're consuming entertainment, I would say, we want to engage our critical thinking.
00:30:56.789 --> 00:31:05.519
And so here are some questions we can ask ourselves to engage our critical thinking and also to engage those media literacy principles.
00:31:06.932 --> 00:31:09.212
And also I really want to give a shout out to Dr.
00:31:09.212 --> 00:31:18.436
Bianca Laureano who really introduced me to the idea of like questions that invite us into applying media literacy principles.
00:31:18.436 --> 00:31:25.420
So some of the questions you can ask yourself is who made this content and why they might've made it, right?
00:31:25.560 --> 00:31:32.743
For example, if somebody says something controversial, it kind of causes more people to look at it.
00:31:32.743 --> 00:31:36.526
More clicks, more likes, more comments, right?
00:31:36.808 --> 00:31:42.403
There is even a term uh for people who kind of use rage bait, I think is the term, right?
00:31:42.403 --> 00:31:45.055
So let's ask ourselves, who has made this content?
00:31:45.055 --> 00:31:47.166
Why have they made this content?
00:31:47.386 --> 00:31:51.309
There's a lot of content competing for our attention nowadays.
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And what are the values and beliefs that are kind of implied in this content that are implicit, right?
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They might not be said out loud, but there is an implication.
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There are some values and some beliefs and ideas and ideologies kind of behind everything that we say, right?
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For example, part of my beliefs are strongly shaped by postmodernism, you know, and social constructivism and so on and so forth.
00:32:21.048 --> 00:32:25.210
Other people are influenced by other ideologies, values and beliefs.
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Other questions we can ask ourselves are which audience is this material meant for and why is it meant for this audience, right?
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Is this a piece of media that has been produced for kids, for adults, for a specific subset of the audience, for a specific gender, for a specific kind of racialized population and so on and so forth.
00:32:49.546 --> 00:33:02.211
And also we need to ask ourselves which perspectives and voices are being included, which ones are being excluded, and why they might be included or excluded, right?
00:33:02.211 --> 00:33:07.212
Are people just using kind of arguments that support their position?
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I know one of my nesting partners really doesn't like documentaries because he feels that sometimes some documentarians only use evidence that support the point of view that they're trying to put across.
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And so they don't really give much of a balanced argument, you know, for example.
00:33:26.897 --> 00:33:40.474
And another question that we can ask ourselves is where does the knowledge that it's being transmitted through this media, the knowledge, the opinion, the idea that it's being transmitted, where does it come from?
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Is this an original idea?
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Is this kind of taking some ideas and combining them together in a new format?
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Is this...
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maybe a well-known idea that is being communicated in a new way.
00:33:55.876 --> 00:33:58.439
And none of those things are right or wrong.
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Critical thinking is not about figuring out is this the right knowledge or the wrong knowledge.
00:34:04.123 --> 00:34:05.064
Is this?
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true or false.
00:34:06.567 --> 00:34:10.427
mean, sometimes it is as simple as is this factual or not?
00:34:10.427 --> 00:34:11.768
Is this true or false?
00:34:11.768 --> 00:34:14.907
But often knowledge is a little more complicated than that.
00:34:14.907 --> 00:34:35.487
And so it's really about, like I said, engaging that critical thinking, letting ourselves not just be passive consumers of media, but also engaged critical consumers who are able to ask ourselves and each other and content creators too.
00:34:36.362 --> 00:34:49.773
So once we start asking ourselves more questions, we become more discerning, but also we become more, interestingly, can also become more compassionate.
00:34:49.773 --> 00:34:52.614
And let me break down what I mean by that.
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In some ways, we live in a world where we are being sold this illusion that all of us are 15 minutes away from attention and fame.
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In some ways, social media has made large uh platforms and large followings possible for anybody.
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And that is true.
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And that means that we might judge ourselves harshly, especially if we are experts in our field, if we don't have a large platform.
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But the reality is that a lot of things go into having a large platform, like we said, right up to this point.
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And so when we start asking ourselves more questions, when we engage with media more critically, we can also better understand why maybe us or people that we know may or may not have the same level of popularity as people who are saying similar things.
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Sometimes it's also very interesting because people that are maybe less popular, that have smaller followings, can start talking about something that doesn't get a lot of attention.
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But then somebody with a much bigger following picks up that topic and all of a sudden that topic is all over the internet.
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And so the popularity drives engagement.
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And popularity can make, on social media, can make success look so easily within our reach if we just follow the formula, right?
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That is not necessarily true.
00:36:29.836 --> 00:36:31.588
I think that is a myth, right?
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Because we need to remember that it's not just doing the thing, it's not just entering the arena, to paraphrase another very popular therapist on the internet.
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uh That is not enough.
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Many of us have entered the arena.
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You know, I remember I was attending a virtual conference a few years ago and somebody was using Esther Perel and Brené Brown as examples of therapists who have managed to get very large platforms and how helpful and influential that can be to share so much information with kind of larger audiences, right?
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And that's great.
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All kudos to Brené and to Esther and to many other therapists who have very large platforms.
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But some of us in the chat were also saying, yes, and like, let's not pretend that this is something that's achievable for everybody, because remember epistemic injustice that I was talking about at the beginning of the video?
00:37:34.829 --> 00:37:38.449
The way that knowledge is received is not neutral.
00:37:38.449 --> 00:37:48.608
There are lots of different factors that go into who's being seen as more or less credible, who is being seen as more or less competent and so on and so forth.
00:37:48.648 --> 00:37:59.889
And a couple of people decided to be a little feisty in the comment and said, well, I would like to see you like putting yourself out there in this way.
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And I was like, okay, hold my cup of tea.
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It's like, actually, have seven books out and a podcast and here is like my public platform.
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And I put all of that in the chat.
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And the person was like, uh it's easy to criticize from the cheap seats, right?
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I like to see you putting yourself out there and be vulnerable.
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It's like, whoops, I stand corrected, right?
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And I wasn't trying to, like I said, know, kudos to Brené and to Esther and to all the other folks who have large platforms, but we have to stop pretending that kind of that level of popularity is immune, you know, from bias, right?
00:38:41.985 --> 00:38:53.030
And also we need to remember that just because somebody is popular potentially doesn't make them an expert in absolutely everything, for example, right?
00:38:53.070 --> 00:38:57.592
Which is also fascinating and maybe the topic for a different video.
00:38:59.036 --> 00:39:10.541
And so even if we achieve popularity, right, we need to ask ourselves, do we have the expertise to sustain the level of popularity, the platform that we might have gained?
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Some people do.
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That's why I named Brené and Esther.
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They have the expertise.
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They have the credentials.
00:39:17.644 --> 00:39:20.746
Those are solid people with solid knowledge.
00:39:20.746 --> 00:39:27.389
However, they're also people with very uh acceptable kind of positionalities, right?
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um light-skinned folks, folks who are cisgender, folks who are perceived as abled, right?
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Because it's also not just who people are, it's also how we are perceived, right?
00:39:38.916 --> 00:39:47.001
And so it can be really tempting for so many of us to court popularity and I mean, goodness knows that I'm doing that right now.
00:39:47.001 --> 00:39:57.309
I'm here live streaming on YouTube, this is gonna be recorded, it's gonna be on the platform, I'm gonna edit some shorter videos, throw them on Instagram.
00:39:57.309 --> 00:40:01.304
I sure am trying to you know, grow my following.
00:40:01.304 --> 00:40:09.311
That is absolutely true because as an author and as somebody who's self-employed, it is really important to have a platform.
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And even publishing houses are starting to ask how many followers on social media do you have, even if you have all the credentials necessary to write a book, for example.
00:40:18.978 --> 00:40:22.260
So I'm not saying it's wrong to court popularity.
00:40:22.260 --> 00:40:25.443
A lot of us have to survive under late stage capitalism.
00:40:25.443 --> 00:40:27.085
A lot of us are doing that.
00:40:27.085 --> 00:40:30.367
I'm not asking us to throw away the baby with the bath water.
00:40:30.367 --> 00:40:32.068
I think it's an expression.
00:40:32.068 --> 00:40:47.277
But rather what I'm asking us to do is to slow down, ask ourselves those questions that are connected with media literacy, and notice the impact that popular discourse might have on us, the way we think, and what we believe.
00:40:47.277 --> 00:40:54.342
And also to maybe pay some closer attention to who do we choose to listen to, right?
00:40:54.342 --> 00:40:58.606
Which uh voices are we constantly being exposed to?
00:40:58.606 --> 00:41:01.067
Is our social media an echo chamber?
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Do we only read books, watch movies or TV shows or follow content creators that look or sound like us?
00:41:10.530 --> 00:41:21.115
Or do we really vary the kind of the media that we consume, whether it's on social media, whether it's books, whether it's audio books, whether it's TVs, movies and so on.
00:41:23.005 --> 00:41:31.342
So I hope you've enjoyed this episode uh about how popularity is not always uh the same as expertise.
00:41:31.342 --> 00:41:51.655
It can be, but not always, like I said, and why we need to kind of pay attention to this issue because of the way that it can really shape reality and drive the way we make decisions, drive the way we vote, drive the way we show up for ourselves and each other in community as well.
00:41:52.467 --> 00:41:59.891
And if there is a topic that you would like me to cover in future Warm Take Wednesdays kind of episodes, please let me know.
00:41:59.891 --> 00:42:04.704
Otherwise, I'm just going to have to keep putting out there whatever is on my mind.
00:42:04.704 --> 00:42:11.137
This topic has been on my mind for, oh my God, at least I think it's been on my mind for at least a year.
00:42:11.137 --> 00:42:19.760
But then all the happenings in therapy threads of this week really kind of pushed me to get this topic out there.
00:42:19.760 --> 00:42:24.001
So if there's a topic that you would like me to talk about, please let me know.
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You can leave it in the comments, you can contact me through my website and until we meet again I hope that you become savvy consumers of media whether it's on social media or other platforms and until then take care of yourselves and each other.
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Ciao e alla prossima!
