It’s personal! Each of us gets to set up our personal dashboard on digital devices (computer screens, smartphones, tablets and more) with our own color schemes, favorite apps, and background pics. Students may have the icon for their classroom learning management program, shoppers have their favorite apps to stores, and we all have favorite creative apps, health apps or travel and weather apps.

So what’s the big dashboard deal?

In the past, prior to the digital age, sources of information were limited. We had few channels of incoming information, such as radio, television and the books. Research meant heading to the library! Now, the library is in our pockets and so are a million apps that we can personally choose.

My personal dashboard is great, right?

Maybe not so great! This personalization of our incoming and outgoing information (as prosumers: both producers and consumers of content) means that our sources of information are unique and there is no more “shared culture of information”. Each of us lives in our own digital bubble of so-called friends and each of us follows a unique personally chosen never ending stream of information.

And what’s wrong with that? Well, big data companies impact what we see by tracking our preferences, for one thing. If I am seeing completely different information than you are…do we really live in the same world?

Is Confirmation Bias a real concern?

Our personal dashboards are impacting the way we think. Back when we had limited sources of information there were gatekeepers (librarians, researchers, reporters, historians, etc.) who helped weed out inaccuracies and helped us trust information. That responsibility for evaluation has been handed to each of us- or should I say thrown on us like a ton of bricks since the Internet has millions of pieces of information bombarding us every minute of the day. Unless we are alert and aware, we easily fall into confirmation bias and our dashboards are turned into narrow-focused channels that do not provide opposing views. Our “friends” become our information sources and we choose them because they think like we do. Without critical thinking and the debate between opposing viewpoints, real learning cannot take place.

There’s Still Hope

Being alert and aware of our thinking, of our dashboards, and of our personal responsibility for metaliteracy is essential. If we can embrace that personal responsibility, we have hope for our well-being, for empathy toward others, for valuing the need to listen to other perspectives and for the (dare I say) need for compromise. Social media has the tendency to promote emotionally charged shares, tweets and posts. When we are emotionally involved with viewpoints (often viewpoints we know little about), our chosen ideologies become more important than listening to others. Hope for our future and for the generations to follow us may rest on metaliteracy and the willingness to listen, to agree to disagree and to give our dashboards some real thought. Perhaps hope for the future may even rest on deliberately choosing to pause and reflect, to resist the share button, and even learn how to keep silent.