Description
It is hard to avoid being inundated with a flood of information and digital content. In the face of this overwhelm, it is tempting to seek ways to simplify. But the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen cautions against the “seductions of clarity”, in which our desire for inquiry-terminating feelings of clarity and fluency stand in the way of genuine understanding. Instead, he argues, we need ways to gesture roughly at the world, inviting further reflection when we can neither conclusively answer a question nor leave it behind. In a recent New York Times editorial, Katya Ungerman invites us to think of information technologies through the lens of folklore, where interactions with fairies may require us to look for subtle tells of their inhumanity, mythical beings may do exactly what we ask instead of what we want, and time can slip by without our noticing. Doing so can help arm us against the enchantments of a world that is not as it seems, while still empowering us to be clever and careful in our interactions with it, whether we enter or its creatures intrude into our own world. I build on this invitation, connecting lessons from folklore to research on self-radicalization in search technologies, as well as cognitive vulnerabilities that may be exploited in our interactions with large language models. These metaphors can help us navigate the information ecosystem while taking note of dangers in a way that does not foreclose further inquiry.| Period | Jun 5 2026 |
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| Held at | Lake Superior Libraries Symposium, United States |