Seeing the Whole Picture

Why it's important to ask critical questions

These are interesting times. The TikTok age has ushered in a flood of 'snack-sized' content to satisfy the appetites of a generation with increasingly short attention spans. Marketers now need to condense their messages into 30 seconds, supported by a whole industry of tools designed for this purpose.

So, what’s the problem, you ask? These memes and mini videos provide entertainment value and help keep people informed about the terrible atrocities happening in parts of the world.

Well, the problem arises with the editing process. Having grown up in the worlds of media and marketing, one of the key skills you learn is to develop a message and then seek the evidence to support that message. There’s nothing wrong with that, unless the creators are biased, and the recipients are not thinking critically enough in the moment, allowing their emotions to take over by passing on the mini videos and images they see.

The challenge with this process is that misinformation, incomplete information, or blatant lies get spread and become accepted as facts, even though they are not based on any truth. We need to be asking more critical questions: Why am I seeing this now? What is the intention and motivation of the creator? Is this true? What’s missing?

Back in the 1980s, The Guardian UK Newspaper made this point very well. The ad feels very dated now, but take a watch. It’s only 1 minute. :)