Celebrity Tweets and Fake Reviews - Further Proof that we need Higher Education to Foster Critical Thinking Skills

Rio Ferdinand, recently involved in 'Sponsored Tweets' debate. Image via Wikipedia

Last week a chocolate bar maker was heavily criticised for sponsoring celebrities including Rio Ferdinand, Katie Price and Cher Lloyd to post Tweets which were part of a campaign to promote their products.  The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones raised concerns via his blog, citing the recent ruling on the activities of 'Handpicked Media' by the Office of Fair Trading that ' "consumers should understand when they are reading paid-for promotional content"(OFT, 2010).

Add to this today's news that the online travel advice company Tripadvisor - one of the pioneers of Internet business models based on User-Generated-Content (UGC) - has been criticised by the Advertising Standards Authority for using marketing copy that suggested that reviews were genuine and 'concluded that the claims were misleading' (ASA, 2012), and by recent criticism of Amazon's policy regarding rewards for customers for positive reviews (Time, 2012; New York Times, 2012).

Not only does this raise ethical and  legal questions, but it also has broad implications for businesses, consumers and, I would suggest, for educators too.  The  problem could be tackled in a number of ways.  Industry regulation (as provided by the ASA) and government intervention are, of course, important to consider, but so are the issues of the ethical responsibilities of marketers and our abilities as consumers to determine the validity of the messages we are presented with.

This, for me, is further proof that we need the skills developed through Higher Education more than ever.  Final year undergraduate students and postgraduate students across the country will be only too familiar with the phrase 'critical analysis and evaluation' - this is one of the key abilities we seek to develop in our students, and it is a crucial life skill for understanding and surviving in a consumer society.  We need to make sure students can tell the difference between fakes and the real thing, we need them to be able to make sound judgements based on the evidence they have and to have an understanding of their own biases and those of others.  The link between these thinking skills and our ability to decode and understand the marketing messages we receive is important, and in the context of the latest figures from UCAS showing that applications to Higher Education are down 7.4% so far in this recruitment cycle (UCAS, 2012), (although these figures need to be contextualised - or critically analysed if you prefer!), it is worrying that we may find ourselves with fewer people who have highly developed critical thinking skills.

There is no quick solution here (without a damaging knee jerk), and I do believe we need to consider putting in place the policy and regulatory environments that encourage businesses to tackle these issues - without censorship - but don't forget that we as consumers should also be able to make sound judgements about our purchases, and have the freedom share our views with others.

This is where Higher Education can help...

What do we need when the dust settles? Critical thinking, and above all, philosophy.

Image source: Will Lion

Why is this happening to our society?  Everyone seems to be asking that question, and many are filling in the pause after it with their own interpretative explanation.   I don't have an answer, and wouldn't presume to be able to explain it, but what I do have is a series of thoughts on what I've seen and heard (as represented by a media under question), and these thoughts have led me to question my own position on fundamental aspects of human nature and society.  Morality, ethics and the role of the government  are the things people are talking about on our streets today, and I'm glad. Glad that people are thinking, glad that they are arguing, questioning, giving their opinions.  This is what enables our society to balance itself, and it's this critical, multi-perspective thinking that I and my colleagues in higher education seek to help our students develop.  This, is philosophy, and we need it now more than ever.

Perhaps seemingly counter-intuitively, in order to illustrate the importance of breadth and depth of critical thinking,  I'm going to start with a reference to science. Events taking place in our cities have particularly reminded me of the work of Milgram, who, in the 1960s, conducted a series of experiments aimed at determining how willing individuals would be to inflict pain on others when instructed to do so by authority figures.  Very willing was the overwhelming answer, to the shock and disgust of many of those involved and the wider public when the results were published.  

Milgram's work suggests that when placed in a situation where we consider ourselves to be subordinate to a perceived authority figure, we 'switch off' our moral compass and do as we're told, no matter how unpalatable the consequences.  This, along with the Asch experiments of the 1950s on group conformity (which showed the willingness of people to consciously give an erroneous response to questions in order to conform to the responses of the wider group), seem to me to provide some superficial insight into the behaviours we have been seeing in our cities in recent days.  Are we seeing an extreme negative example of  Janis's 'Groupthink' here - where group pressures lead to questionable decision making?  Group conformity, the exploitation of this by organised criminals and gang hierarchies, and this removal of a sense of morality through the ability to rationalise the activity as a response to 'social problems' blamed on government, the police and other authority figures are, it seems to me, all in the mix here.

I could, of course, also refer to the rather obvious example of  Golding's Lord of the Flies. Like the experiments above, this was first published in that post-war period of questioning and attempts to understand the horrors of war and the senseless destruction of human life in the Holocaust, and with this in mind there are all sorts of directions in which this particular comparison could lead us...the involvement of children in these activities, the underlying influences (socio-economic, cultural, political, or individual), and in a broader sense, the question of how this reflects our own place in history (the shock of 9/11 and other terrorist acts, the tumbling dictatorships of the Middle East, the loss of confidence in our political and economic leadership, loss of faith in the media and the police) are all relevant here.

Do these events create a situation in which we are more likely to behave in destructive and negative ways?  Are we all seeking a sense of direction, order and leadership amongst the chaos?  Can chaos in fact lead to its own form of stability through self-organisation?   For example yesterday saw citizens organising themselves to clean up their neighbourhoods after the damage of the previous night.  Is this what Kant meant when he referred to self-organization?  Is this a complex, self-organising system which, in the absence of leadership and direction, is achieving a balance by itself?

Questions, questions...but who will answer them?

I could continue here ad infinitum, trying to get to grips with this myself - twisting and turning this complexity over, but this would be mere speculation, and with respect to those positivists out there, and to the empirical research to which I refer above, I'm not going to continue without evidence...

What I do believe, however, is that this highlights the importance of one thing, and it's something that's currently under threat from cuts to higher education and a lack of engagement with the topic. Right now, we need philosophy and philosophers.   What we are seeing relates to the fundamental questions philosophers have been asking for milennia, about ethics, politics and logic, and so our society needs people to read, think, reflect and debate these problems we are facing, so we can make the right decisions on how to act - and not just those from a small section of society for whom philosophy is an open book.   We need people from all backgrounds and communities to value, nurture and respect the role of philosophy in our society, and to do this we need to engage more young people with the subject and above all keep philosophy departments in Universities open.

If you are reading about these issues, watching them on the news, and discussing them, you are already engaging in philosophy as well as politics.  And just like politics, philosophy should be something for the massess not just for the elite. 

Adventures in Transmedia - because real doesn't exist any more.

Inspired by No Mimes Media's amazing transmedia campaign for The Dark Knight...and the work of Simon Brookes at Portsmouth University on alternate reality games for education, I recently did a little micro-transmedia experiment of my own...

The whole idea of an immersive, crossmedia, semi-real experience as a way of engaging students with learning makes sense to me on so many levels. Engaging students with learning is something it can be pretty difficult to do when you're constrained by the environment in which you are scheduled to teach.  For me, that's quite often a lecture theatre which places me centre stage and students seated in tiered rows; trapped for an hour with no means of escape (poor things).  So, creating learning experiences that work in a lecture theatre and that are participative and interactive for a large group is something I spend quite a bit of time trying to achieve.

For me, transmedia has amazing potential as a 'teaching and learning strategy' (as the teacher educators would call it).  The possibility of creating a narrative that students buy into and participate in in class, and that gets them thinking about topics, solving problems, trying out approaches and gaining experience is a win - win.  In my experience, students learn best when they're absorbed in a task, and they love the sense of achievement they get from problem solving. 

So, I set about doing a test of what I'm going to call a 'micro-transmedia' experience at a recent internal conference, with an audience of students, faculty and business people, just to give it a go really.  What a brilliant experience it was.  My story unfolded over the 20 minute session, and the whole room participated in one way or another in solving the problem.  After all the preparation, it was like tapping the first piece in one of those amazing domino trails you used to see on Record Breakers (showing my age).

I used a combination of actors (recruited from my colleagues - with much arm twisting and promises of chocolate), found objects (including a borrowed iPad - which I was a little nervous about disappearing...), letters, tweets, YouTube videos and the web.  Some of the material can be seen on Twitter here: www.twitter.com/app5isalive and here:

The scenario is designed to introduce a session on IP, and so the narrative was based on an IP theft.  It worked really well, and I'm convinced that it will work even better in a 'students only' environment. However, I think these micro-versions need to be used sparingly in order to maintain interest, and indeed this game dramatised a situation for impact.  I can see huge potential for longer versions, however, that are embedded in the curriculum and assessment where a more 'realistic' experience is created.  The opportunity to provide students with practical experience while reducing risk to businesses, students and the institution is one of the key benefits I see in developing alternate reality environments.  For me, this provides the best of both worlds - the real experience of a live project, along with the ability to try, fail, test, and experiment in a safe 'sandbox' environment that you get with traditional computer-based business simulations.   

Today's students are engaged in activities that cross the boundaries between reality and fiction at all times:  Reality TV, gaming, social media, fashion, music, sports, books, films, theatre; our lives are one big mash-up of constructed semi-realities and personal perceptions of what is real and what is true.  This is how many of us live today, in a constant state of tension and negotiation of what is true for us, for others, and in the context of the messages we absorb from these media. It seems only right to engage with this in creating learning experiences that allow our students  to try, to test, and to construct their own version of reality...

More about this later, but if there are any educators or marketers out there who want to find out what I did...and what I've got planned next, tweet me @lgsmu.