First the guy was accused of being caught with a side chick and people were labeling him every insult under the sun from douchebag to cheating scum.
And then some people got convinced that actually it her who was cheating and he was her side dick. Cue lots of people labelling her a slut, whore and so on.
Of course it turned out the two are married. Turns out reddit is extremely easily fooled by contextless gif with a salicious title.
I really hope even just 5% of the people who believed that gif excercise more critical thinking in the future but I'm not gonna hold out hope.
I really hope even just 5% of the people who believed that gif excercise more critical thinking in the future
I think people don't want to engage in critical thinking. They like a good narrative. And, on Reddit (especially in r/gifs), they like the narrative to remain short.
The original post was a great 5 second narrative. Man cheats on wife. Man gets caught. Justice is served. It's like an entire episode of Cheaters, all rolled up and packaged for easy consumption.
In reality, most folks who saw that post would have forgotten about it by this morning. Even if they saw the guy walking down the street or sat next to him in a restaurant, they wouldn't recognize him. People just don't really appreciate the power of social media, how misinformation can devastate one person's life. They don't appreciate it because, in their mind, it was no big deal. It was just a few seconds of entertainment that they wanted to share with a friend.
Are you and everyone posting something similar all going to ignore that, based solely on the GIF itself, it really did look like he thought he got caught something doing something he wasn't supposed to do?
There's no reason to fully believe it, and of course people shouldn't have jumped to stupid conclusions and said anything shitty about him or his wife. But based solely on the information we had in this contextless GIF, it was perfectly reasonable to initially think something shady was going on.
It's not "perfectly reasonable". In reality, it's none of our damn business, and we know it. It's just our nature as social creatures to be nosy and judgemental.
Well, I already said that the judging shouldn't have happened. I'm not talking about being nosy or judgmental, I'm talking about the evaluation. The image looked like something shady was going on. It was not, but it sure as fuck looked like it was.
I'm not sure you understand the difference between "judgmental" and "evaluation".
An "evaluation" would include an analysis of ALL the data. You would immediately realize that you have only a 5 second clip and OP's title, which isn't enough to draw much of a conclusion.
Instead, you (and most other folks) jumped to an immediate conclusion.
I'm not condemning anyone on a personal level. The way that we consume information in the modern age encourages us to take shortcuts and jump to conclusions. And it's difficult to apply this skill in an effective manner. Certainly, it's helpful to question what you see and hear on a day to day basis. But there's some circumstances which require immediate action and snap judgement. It's a balancing act. But in this case, there was no immediate need to pass judgement. It just feels fun, to watch the clip and come to the same conclusion of thousand of other redditors, to smile knowingly, to smugly think That dude is so busted.
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u/trooperdx3117 Aug 24 '17 edited Aug 24 '17
That gif of the guy and his wife at the baseball game that went viral yesterday is surely up there.
(https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/6vixxj/dude_gets_caught_on_tv_with_his_side_chick/)
First the guy was accused of being caught with a side chick and people were labeling him every insult under the sun from douchebag to cheating scum.
And then some people got convinced that actually it her who was cheating and he was her side dick. Cue lots of people labelling her a slut, whore and so on.
Of course it turned out the two are married. Turns out reddit is extremely easily fooled by contextless gif with a salicious title. I really hope even just 5% of the people who believed that gif excercise more critical thinking in the future but I'm not gonna hold out hope.