Which do you look for, appearance or substance? Appearance may make something look a certain way to certain people, but it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. As we have been inundated with the headlines we’re fed by algorithms and news outlets that need clicks, the effect of shallow, surface ideas, idle ramblings, and suppositions have insinuated themselves into conventional wisdom.
Less and less information is examined closely before publicly-shared opinions are issued. Once that happens, fact-based presentations carry less weight and it becomes easier to believe misinformation.
It also becomes easy to substitute another’s supposition for fact or delude ourselves and substitute another’s supposition for fact. Social media algorithms prey on the rage factor that often results from this and builds upon itself. Clickety, click, click, click.
Conventional wisdom used to spawn clichés like, don’t judge a book by its cover because we knew that appearance didn’t necessarily represent the substance of the tome. Now, we worry about the time spent on phones.
But isn’t how we spend that time on the phone just as critical? If we limit ourselves to 10 minutes per day, but spend that 10 minutes consuming shallow, biased, misleading information it can still cause harm.
When you’ve done careful, in-depth research and know your facts are solid, it’s difficult to have a conversation with someone who got their information on the same subject from reels. I understand reels are more entertaining, but they’re fed to you by something that doesn’t care whether the content is accurate or misleading.
One result of relying on reels is that medical or psychological terminology can morph into inaccurate descriptions. A person recently described themself to me as an empath, but nothing I know about them and nothing they said would indicate they fit the term I’m familiar with.
They said they believed this because of a reel they had watched. Further examination revealed they were conflating empathizing and being an empath.
According to Psychology Today, my experience was reflective of the influence of a reel similar to one on gaslighting forwarded to Adi Jaffe, Ph.D. that “was well-produced, with clean edits, beautiful shots, and audio. There was only one problem — it greatly distorted the whole concept it was discussing. Instead of defining gaslighting (which itself is not truly a clinical psychology term), the video insisted that when someone close to you tries to sell you on their (presumably different from your own) worldview, they are gaslighting you. But that’s not what gaslighting means at all. Traditionally, when someone tries to gaslight you, they are purposely lying to you about reality in order to make you mistrust your own sense of reality. The whole concept of gaslighting is about a deliberate distortion of truth to gain a psychological advantage over another. Having a different viewpoint from someone else is not gaslighting!”1
These may be only two examples, but I encounter something similar multiple times per week. The proliferation of misunderstanding in a large portion of the population means you I often get caught off guard because people have a vastly different understanding of terms I’ve known for years.
The discomfort this creates for me is unimportant. The disconnect between health facts and fiction created through amplified misunderstanding and misinformation presents a danger greater than we may realize.
Valuing substance over appearance can help guide you to more reliable information and sources. There are licensed professional experts creating substantive online courses (some are free) that deal with the same issues you see in reels. Choose those.
There are professional experts on Bluesky. Find some. Vet them. Follow the ones who are credible. Same with Substack and podcasts. There’s nothing wrong with getting information online. It’s the quality of that information that matters.
To be safe, choose substance over appearance.