How it has changed the way I use media…
Before tackling this capstone essay, I went back to our Week 2 materials to revisit Dr. Richard Paul’s “Critical Thinking in Everyday Life: 9 Strategies.” When I started this class, I made it a personal goal to try and incorporate many of these strategies into my daily life in order to hone my critical thinking skills and bring them up to a level that is appropriate to a doctoral scholar.
Out of curiosity, I decided to click on the link that gave me a biography on Dr. Richard Paul. Something that I noticed now that I did not notice before I started taking this class was that the information page on Dr. Paul was quite vague. It stated that he has received “four degrees” but it failed to go into detail about what the degrees were in, where he got them from, or when (what year) he got them. A few weeks ago, I decided to blindly follow the strategies of someone whose expertise I never decided to question or investigate. 
Now, that being said, I do believe that Dr. Richard Paul is legitimate, and I will continue to incorporate these nine strategies into my daily life. However, something that I have learned from this class is that you must ALWAYS verify the credibility of the information that you read, take in, and quote. Furthermore, this goes beyond the internet. This rule of thumb applies to any sort of media or medium that one procures information from. Anyone can write a book. Anyone can write a blog or start a website. Anyone can be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, which I think is something that everyone learned from viewing the Martin Luther King Jr. website. The age of self production of information is both a blessing and a curse- we all become our own gate keepers and news makers, but not everyone who opens the gate or writes the news is free from bias, and this is an issue that we need to address through critical thinking skills.
How it has changed my own professional practice…
Because I am not yet a full fledged Media Psychologist, I can only imagine how it will change my professional practice. However, I do know that it will and already as changed how I encourage my friends, family, and fellow scholars to engage with media. My usual reply of “well, just Google it” has now become “Well, you could just Google it, but make sure that it is valid information. Who wrote the site? Is it legitimate? Do you have all of the information? Did you verify it with a secondary credible source? Make sure you check a couple different sites, and just because it’s at the top of the search page doesn’t mean that it’s a good source!”
In my last blog, I made reference to the “tepid romance between social media and critical thinking.” I believe that this will be a theme for me in my future practice as a Media Psychologist. Being connected is wonderful, but part of what I want to accomplish is helping people understand the difference between being connected and being too connected. I believe that it is a complicated game of give and take that requires critical thinking skills.
As human beings, we want to be connected to those around us, and we want new and advanced ways to make our crazy and complicated lives much simpler. New advances are great, but at what point do we rely upon technology so much that it acts as the third element in our human communications? In our eternal quest to become more connected, can we actually push ourselves further away from human interaction? As a Media Psychologist, I want to help people understand that there is a fine line, and we can learn how to approach it carefully by way of critical thinking skills. Before we adapt a new technology we must carefully evaluate it from a critical perspective to judge if this particular technology will actually help us- or will it add yet another task to our complicated daily to do list? Will it actually accomplish what I want it to do? Will it make my life simpler or will adding that extra step make my life more complicated? Before people wholeheartedly adapt, I want to help them react.
How critical thinking will inform my ongoing research and scholarly development during this Media Psychology doctoral program…
First and foremost, I will put everything that I read or take in under a scholarly microscope. I will always verify the credibility of the information that I incorporate into my research and writing. This is important on both a scholarly and personal level. On the scholarly level, I want the work that I produce to be credible. I want my peers to take me and my work seriously, so I owe it to myself and the scholarly community to make sure that I use valid and credible information and sources. On a personal level, much like on the scholarly level, I owe it to myself to do my best with this program, and part of doing my best includes producing the best work that I am able to produce. 
I want what I do to become a drop in the pool. When I produce scholarly work, it is placed into the scholastic universe, and who knows who will read what I write. Who knows who will quote what I wrote. Another topic that we discussed in this class was the dissemination of truth on the internet. If I am going to produce scholarly work and “put it out in the world” I want it to be truthful.
If anything, this class has taught me that I need to have the highest standards for my work. I need to utilize critical thinking in not only my scholarly work, but my day to day life.
And, for a final thought, digest this…
All cartoons from www.cartoonstock.com, a paid subscription service.
I tend not to think too long and hard about what is happening when I watch a commercial on television, or hear an ad on the radio. Perhaps this is how advertisers want it to happen- If I hear an advertisement for Crest toothpaste, the jingle or hook line is tucked away in my subconscious level and it will be the first thing that I recall while standing in the toothpaste isle in Target.
