Oxford dictionary's word of the year for 2016 was "Post-truth". This year, "Fake News" became a culturally viral phrase. In class, my students fretted about the legitimacy of their sources. It seems the trust in scholarship has declined, but I don't like comparing history to present because the context can be misleading. Misleading juxtapositions, phrasings and presentations can lead to convoluted opinions that can have very real consequences in life. 

Through my work I've come to recognize that through dialogue, we can craft or at least manipulate our reality. Through attempting improved perception, we tend to act differently, perhaps better in many situations. Misleading material can impede this process and make it so easy for our audiences to maintain paranoia, extreme distrust and conspiracy rhetoric on their own corners of the internet. 

Prior to 2004 and the launch of Facebook, I would argue that we were mainly consumers of content. Only few of us created and even fewer created material to be consumed by the masses. Today, where there are endless platform options for creation, we have all become media makers. But very few makers create with their audience and after effects in mind. It feels irresponsible to know we can endlessly push content, but take little pride in its audience impact. It has gotten so bad, the culture surrounding content creation is distrustful. There is an entire website dedicated to locating and archiving shitty headlines from all over daily. It's scary to me how misleading we allow our content lure's to become all in hopes of a news rating that's profitable. It makes sense, but it breeds all these other fringe issues that largely affect the whole. 

This is clearly a super large can of worms, one I'll likely visit in a more professional manner. What I'm attempting to guide you towards (my dear few readers), is the idea that as we move forward in our own careers, whether directly involved in profitable or for-fun content creation, we must maintain a responsibility for the things we create. 

I don't mean giving up on being recklessly artistic (go for it, go crazy, get all the bio-degradable glitter out) I just mean, if you're out there as an English or communications major, any journalists or young writers or musicians or artists, whatever it may be: Be Responsible. Think of the impact you have on your audiences. Remind yourself, if you're vegan, vegetarian, a millennial, LGBTQ+ identified, there is something in your heart that burns for something better in this life. You all have an idea of what this ideal society is. Language, our content, all of it, matters to that outcome. Although you may feel small, responsibly creating things that better our lives is a commendable, honorable choice. Make articles that challenge misleading headline culture! Make art that forces people to address themselves! Make music that screams about these issues! Throw shade! And throw it well! 

It's an ongoing joke in several of my core rhetoric classes that everything is a circle. Each time someone asks me a question about this or that, I struggle not answering with, "Well, it's an information system...a circle...again, which means it's both" Every time I bring up the circle we all laugh because it's truthful in part. 

Rhetoric has taught me to see nothing as dichotomous - it's impossible. It is never just one reason or another, its a compilation of problems. A timeline's worth of events that accumulate into tension. A good example are the dichotomous arguments we see regularly in American politics. You either take away the guns, or you amp them up. It's either the democrat's fault, or the republican's. It's either "handouts" or no support for the poor, etc. We know these, we've heard them for decades. 

Dichotomous logic leads audiences into very easy conclusions - it's them, not me. This encouraged Blame Game leads to a lack of critical thinking and a laziness that extends to the masses in which they do not see the value in small actions within their community and lives to affect the whole. By introducing rhetorical thinking, or even just the basic appeals and awareness of context at an earlier age than college, I really think we can move away from that kind of thinking. 

Kids already ask "why? Why? Why?" all the time! We are apt to shut it down most of the time, but don't always indulge their games. I believe - of course I am not the entire authority here being young, still in school and what not - that introducing rhetorical concepts at an early age would bring about an age of root reasoning and expansive perspective exploration. In teaching those concepts, it can be hard to logically move towards a one answer conclusion because one would have all the tools to think about the other factors in play. 

Dialogue can create reality - it can introduce perspective, widen one, and open the eyes to expansive possibilities in situations where it can be so easy to boil everything down. I hope in the future that my colleagues and I will work to create a curriculum that supports that kind of thinking and wonderlust into elementary schools and beyond. Even if it doesn't work in the way I suppose, students would still be learning advanced critical thinking that could lead them to more aware lives.