Fabos (2004) explains how the Internet, like any media of communication, began with a promise to a great educational potential but quickly “succumbed to commercialism and the logic of capital markets” (p. ix). Search engines, for instance, are widely regarded as innovative and useful educational tools that enable students to find, use, share, and expand knowledge. But, “the growing dependence on search engines has led to their increased commercialization” (p. 70), resulting in serving advertisers not users. According to Fabos, the advertiser pays the search engine to be associated with certain key words; the search company provides the sponsored links, which users click on; and users are driven to the sites of advertisers. Fabos further argues that some search engines sell top spaces to advertisers who pay for them, resulting in the increase of commercial sites at the top of search engine lists. These sites “clog up search engine lists with opinioned nonsense and are a main deterrent to students’ finding ‘quality’ information online” (p. 83).
However, a majority of students use search engines to find information. According to Fabos, “A study conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project in 2002 found 85% of students used an online search engine to find information” (p. 69). Indeed, as Fabos argues, many students trust the information they gather from search engines regardless of their quality and believe that what they read on the Information Highway must be fact. With students’ beliefs that what they find online is true, they are “clicking on a huge proportion of commercial webpages that have no bearing on their academic objectives” (p. 81). What makes the situation worse is that students trust the many commercial websites visited via search engines. In fact, many students determine a website’s credibility based on the site’s design, no matter who the content provider is, and they believe that the first two pages of a search’s results list are most relevant (Fabos, 2004). As search engines become more commercialized, students will be accessing an increasingly limited array of information, not the “universe of knowledge”, resulting in a decrease in their research quality.
One method to address this problem is to arm students with critical literacy skills (Fabos, 2004). Critical literacy, a critical attitude toward texts that questions the social, political, and economic conditions under which those texts are constructed (Freire, 2000), shows a great promise to help students to see a webpage as a product of a particular context within a particular political and economic framework (Fabos, 2004). In this view, critical teachers should help students to understand all information within a broader cultural context by enabling them to investigate “how political, economic, and social context shapes all texts, how all texts can be adapted for different social purposes, and how no text is neutral or necessarily of ‘high quality’ than another” (p. 95). For example, students can engage in a discussion about “misinformation, mal-information, messed-up information, and mostly useless information to highlight and reflect upon the procedures and criteria by which people identify information as ‘mis’, ‘mal’, ‘messed-up’, or ‘mostly useless’”(p. 140). As a result, students “uncover how texts are never neutral, unbiased representations, but constructions specific to particular beliefs held at the time of their creation” (Beck, 2005, p. 394). This critical understanding of technology, with which education must be infused, is one that sees in it a growing capacity for intervention in the world, one that must necessarily be subjected to the political and ethical test (Freire, 2004). That is, the role of education is not to support the status quo in a society but to empower students to critically understand their world. Freire (2005) argues that education is a political act; it should enable students to read not only the word but also the world-“the reading of text and of context” (p. 40) because those who fail to “make any concrete connections between what they have read and what is happening in the world, the country, or the local community” are slaves to the text (Yoo, 2007, p. 85).
To achieve the foregoing goal, Fabos (2004) argues that teachers should approach assignments differently. She argues that the type of assignments is behind poor-quality students’ work; it is the fact-based assignments and the constant quest for objective information. That is, “fact-based assignments that lead to objective-style reports do little to help students understand more meaningful issues that directly or indirectly correspond to their social world” (p. 95). Therefore, Fabos suggests using assignments that ask students to work with multiple perspectives and opinions, not objective facts, to help them “understand the non-neutrality of all texts and regard the web as a place for opinions, not objective information, a place where the best developed arguments, not the slickest packaging, should gain their approval” (p. 146). With these kinds of assignments, students become active participants able to reflect on and construct meaning from texts and discourses, rather than being “passive meaning consumers”, by seeing themselves "within the larger historical, political, cultural, and economic structures where [they] exist and to apply their critical awareness beyond the classroom” (Beck, 2005, p. 394).
On the other hand, to help students critically understand that webpage texts are filtered through economic, political, and social frameworks, teachers should first be political thinkers who are able to critically understand the economic, social, and political implications that shape a webpage text. In the other words, in order for students to become critical thinkers, their teachers first need to develop their own critical understanding and to be “able and willing to explore the social, moral, and political implications imbedded in particular texts in particular places and times” (Meller & Hatch, 2008, p. 331). If teachers, as Fabos (2004) found from observing teachers and students at three schools within a well-wired district, embrace “search engines as the most effective and trustworthy means of finding quality web content”(p. 115) ; if they believe that “the worldwide web is a library of facts, and search engines are the most logical pathways to these facts” (p. 103); and/or if they see the web as a neutral and “a decentralized medium that would remain essentially democratic, safe from commercial domination” (p. 117), then they will have few reasons to criticize such “neutral” tools. Therefore, teachers should first be critically aware of the commercial nature of search engines as profit-seeking corporations, aware of “the increasing difficulties of locating content that is not commercial or indirectly influenced by commercial interest” (p. 75), and aware of the “misleading motives of the Internet navigation tools they use and of the constant efforts among for-profit enterprise to bend the Internet toward their ends” (p. 75), then they will be concerned. Therefore, as Freire (2005) argues, teachers should be prepared politically, ethically, and professionally before engaging in a teaching practice to be able help students to think critically about economic, social, and political issues.
In sum, with the web being colonized by commercial interests and with students depending on and trusting commercial search engines, critical literacy become an essential and powerful tool to help students study any text from political, economic, and social frameworks. Therefore, fact-based assignments should change to opinion-based assignments that bring students into multiple perspectives and opinions. As a result, student can realize that a text is never neutral and always contains implicit assumptions on the part of the writer. But, in order for students to be critical thinkers, teachers should be political thinkers able to investigate economic, social and political issues.
References:
Beck, A. (2005). A place for critical literacy. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 49(5),
392-400.
Fabos, B. (2004). Wrong turn on the information superhighway: Education and the
Commercialization of the Internet. New York: Teacher College Press.
Freire, P. (2004). Pedagogy of indignation. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
Freire, P. (2005). Teachers as cultural workers: Letters to those who dare teach. United States of
America: Westview Press.
Meller,W. & Hatch, J. (2008). Introductory critical literacy practices for urban pre-service
teachers. The New Educator, 4,330–348.
Yoo, S. (2007). Freirean legacies in popular education. Journal of Educational Policy, 4(2), 73-
94.
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