It's easy to blame algorithms and AI for corroding our information ecosystem, but our guest this week argues that we have a just as much, if not more of a role to play in creating the environment we want to see.
Ray Block Jr. is the Brown-McCourtney Career Professor of Political Science at Penn State and the Michael D. Rich Chair in Countering Truth Decay and RAND Corporation. He joins us to discuss the new report, "Rebalancing the Information Ecosystem and Renewing Shared Societal Commitments for Information Use," published by RAND earlier this fall.
Block's scholarly research includes community organizing and social identity. That perspectives come through in this conversation, which focuses on how social fabric — not fact checking or tech policy —is the key to creating a healthy information environment and, in turn, a healthy democracy.
Episode Transcript
Jenna Spinelle
Hello and welcome to Democracy Works. I'm Jenna Spinelle. Chris, Candis, and Cyanne are on Thanksgiving break, so we're going to jump right into the interview today. I'm joined by Ray block, who is the brown McCourtney career Professor of Political Science here at Penn State and the Michael D rich chair in countering truth decay at RAND Corporation. Ray, welcome back to Democracy Works.
Ray Block Jr.
Thank you. It's been a while. It's nice to be back on the pod.
Jenna Spinelle
It has been a while. And I think the last time you were on the show, you were not in the role that you occupy now at RAND. So I wonder if we could just start there, tell us a little bit about what you're up to, what truth decay is, and why it's something that Rand is interested in studying.
Ray Block
So yeah, last time I was on the podcast, it was 2019 I had barely got here to Penn State I still had that new Penn Stater smell. So I do a lot of public facing research, and before coming to Penn State, I was sort of sneaking off to do it, you know what I mean, like, I would put it on my CV, but I wouldn't blare it on the trumpets. And I was doing applied work. A lot of that work was co authored, and a lot of that work was community facing, you know. And all of that stuff turned out to be things Rand wanted. You know what? I mean, it's like the fact that I had a profile that had both academic outlets represented and community oriented outlets represented turned out to be a selling point for the work that I'm doing at RAND. So really, what I'm doing is I'm still a faculty member, but I am now free to pursue these community engagement sort of projects and apply that understanding to what I'm doing there. So the thing that RAND gets that they wouldn't get from another scholar is that I care a lot about political organizing. I care a lot about social inequality, and I use a political organizing and social inequality lens to make sense of a lot of things that fall under the banner of truth decay. I'm going to be talking about this in terms of something more global, and what I mean by that is the information ecosystem, and I'm stealing some of that terminology.
Ray Block Jr.
We didn't make this up. You know what I mean? My co authors and I, we didn't, we didn't invent this term, but the term fits, because we're talking about really delicate relationships between lots of things, and you can think of those things as being producers of information, consumers of information, and platform, slash outlets for information. But that's nebulous, because producers can become consumers, and consumers can't become producers, and there's an overlap between all of that and the platforms that exist for people to communicate. We simply believe that information is social. In other words, in order for information to transfer, there are people, and people are sending and receiving and making sense of things, the place where all of that is happening is what we're referring to as the operation ecosystem. And like any ecosystem, they're delicate, and when things become off in the ecosystem, it can have rippling effects throughout all of the many parts of that ecosystem. We believe that information related issues in the ecosystem can be thought of as threats to the ecosystem. We care about those threats, and we care about giving ideas of that might help us to do something about those threats. It just so happens that with the background that I just told you about, I can't help but think about our social fabric when I think about what we do about those information threats. And so a lot of what I do feels a lot like depolarization work. A lot of what I do feels like political and community organizing, and a lot of what I do sort of takes the lens from what we know in those spaces where people talk about organizing and where people talk about the social fabric, the social contract, the social covenant, stuff like that. Those things inform how I see the world, and those things inform what me and my co authors are doing on this topic.
Jenna Spinelle
So thinking about that, that ecosystem metaphor, that that you so aptly described there. You know, ecosystems can go back and forth. As you said, there are different factors that can make them healthier or unhealthier. So how would you assess the overall health or the state of the information ecosystem? Or, you know, what was, what was your assumption on that going into this, this work and this paper that you wrote.
Ray Block Jr.
A whole lot of worry, right? I'm the kind of person that I'm too hard headed to give up, but a lot of this looks troubling. I'll just be the first to tell you, there aren't many threats to the ecosystem. There was a period of time when my focus was on like stopping. Threats from being too threatening. I would say that the proverbial toothpaste is out of the tube at this point, and the goal now is to figure out, what do we do going forward as people who care about democracy, how do we in a world where these threats have reared their ugly heads and have done their nasty work? How do we go forward? And I think a lot of this fortunately, because what democracy is is what people decide it is right. People make it work. It's that Republic, if you can keep it idea. You know, I think that my co authors think that human interaction and preserving certain norms and standards when it comes to human interaction are extremely important. I am not saying that fact checking isn't important.
Ray Block Jr.
I am not saying that the education and psychological mechanisms by which we become better consumers of information, those things still apply. In fact, ran has done a ton of work in that area, and I've done some of that work outside of ran as like a person who just cares about social you know, social factors, right? Those things are important. I also don't think that we should overlook the fact that institutions can play a big role. Now, it's probably not the wisest thing to wait for regulations for speech. I don't think that's the best way to go anyway, but it's not me to say that government intervention can't be a potential solution to this problem. We, me and my co authors, just think that the way forward is more up to us than I think a lot of people would care to believe. And that means that at the ground, from the ground up, and at the local level, and the decisions we make as people in neighborhoods and people living in communities, those things can actually help us out, partly because that's where the trust is highest, and the reservoir of trust is there so that we could use community organizations as a place where some of this stuff can get hashed out, where we can learn to be less polarized, where we can develop higher standards for information, How we receive it, and how we share it.
Ray Block Jr.
And these things can possibly scale up, like the things that happen in neighborhoods can become evidence of what's possible in places that are bigger than the neighborhood. In other words, we're just thinking about this from a community perspective, trying to align that work with all of the great work that's being done on individuals, that information, strengthening that civic education, that media literacy work, right, and trying to tie that stuff to future conversations about policy if possible, and about institutions if possible.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, so it's interesting you bring up, you know, media literacy, I had a conversation a few weeks ago on the show with some folks from the pointer Institute and the National Association of media literacy educators and the News Literacy Initiative folks working directly in this space. But there's been sort of a shift. And I think you you alluded to this, like in, you know, after the 2016 election, there was a really a big focus on fact checking, and we can, just as you said, we can fact check our way out of some of the threats to democracy, but that's really kind of gone. The pendulum has swung in the other direction. Not that we're necessarily abandoning fact checking, but there is this more focus on our day to day interactions.
Jenna Spinelle
And it's sort of like the line that gets thrown around social media is not real life. I mean, that's what have been a joke line for years. But I feel like, what, what you're saying, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that, no, it's really not and we and one potential path forward is to lean into that and remember that how we show up offline for each other is not the same, and shouldn't be the same as how we might show up online in the various spaces that we occupy there.
Ray Block Jr.
Yeah, and I'll go back to what, um, something I mentioned earlier, information is social. So if information is social, misinformation, disinformation, false and misleading, like, you know, you name a catchphrase, right? Those things were social too. And as someone who cares a lot about social interactions, I have a hard time divorcing any conversation about fact checking, for example, in media literacy, from a conversation about what communities people are in, because the communities you are in are really important to us, and I believe that what some people might view as flawed facts are actually stories that are very important to certain communities. Like you know, you could take Flat Earthers, for example, you could take any conspiracy inspired community as an example. It's not so much that the evidence is there or not for the people that identify with the group. What's important is that that story is meaningful for the group, and regardless of the truthiness of the story, the stories are so powerful and so meaningful that I think as people who are interested in studying and learning about. Involved in helping society. We can't afford to be dismissive of those social dynamics. I think social dynamics, peer pressure, community dynamics, those things. I just think that stuff is really important and it adds to, rather than competes with, some of the stuff that we know on the social psychology side and the media literacy side and the fact checking side.
Jenna Spinelle
And you also talk in the piece, which we'll link to in the show notes. By the way, I encourage folks to read the whole thing, but you talk about something called the Civic covenant, which I think fits into this conversation we're having. Can you tell us what what that is and how it's part of this larger story you're telling?
Ray Block Jr.
We think of it this way, so, like, there's a general understanding of it, and that general understanding informs the information environment, you know, understanding of it. So it's the shared social norms and expectations around information. And that thing that I just talked about in that is a conversation about fairness, this conversation about trust. There's a conversation about accountability. You can think of it as, like the social contract that's important for how we make sense of the information that we get, where that information comes from, and what we do with that information, as people who receive it, like, you know, like there is some shared ideas about what to do and what not to do with information that we're trying to get at. We don't call it a social contract, because that term implies government and implies like rules and laws and constitutions and stuff like that. This is fuzzier than that, but I don't think it's weaker than that. I think it's very important and the norms that govern how we are to each other can be applied to how we use information and how we keep the integrity of information, and this is what we are talking about when we discuss the Civic covenant.
Ray Block Jr.
Also built within that is a conversation about people doing things for other people, right? It's the promises we make to one another so that we can live peacefully and efficiently together in our society, the same way that you Mom tacitly make an agreement with your government when you sign up for a social contract where there are things that you owe the government and there are things that the government owes you right and harmony happens when that agreement is met. So these are some of the promises that we've either made to ourselves implicitly, or that we want to be part of our expectations. And I think that focusing on that covenant is one way forward.
Jenna Spinelle
Can you give us an example of what that civic covenant looks like in action, something people can maybe relate to their day to day lives.
Ray Block Jr.
Yeah, so I was lucky enough a couple of years ago. It's in its third year now, but the City of Santa Monica, California hosts a dialog session, and at the time when they started this up, both me and the former CEO, slash president of Rand were able to be there, and it was a nice thing, because I'm named after the person that create like helped to create the space for the position that I currently occupy. So Michael Rich was there. There was a panel, and on that panel, it was hosted at the community college in the area. It was open to the public, and the whole goal was to get people in the same room to talk about things that were important to them. We weren't feeding them topics. We were just there as people who could speak eloquently about certain things.
Ray Block Jr.
And one of the things that I was speaking eloquently about was this budding idea of the information ecosystem the mayor of the city came out, and it was this hours long conversation with people from different walks of life. And I know this sounds squishy to some, but it was one of the best experiences that I can think of in many years, because after that, the goal was that people wanted to continue these conversations. Now, in our piece, we talk about these as being gatherings, community gatherings, right? And they can serve lots of purposes. People can gather so that they can solve a problem, like there might be something going on in your community you need help with doing right collective action stuff. But there's also a possibility for depolarization that can happen in there. Like, people don't have to agree with each other, but they have to be coming from a perspective where disagreement is not like a reason to not work together. And you kind of need to get used to working working with people. Like, so, like, there's some civic skill building happening.
Ray Block Jr.
There's a potential for depolarization to happen, and there's this very real need for people to get together in their communities, to do something about the things that they think are important. It's one of many examples I can point to, but it's one of those things where, like those gatherings and stuff like that are great opportunities to work on the Social. Fabric stuff, while also in service of that thinking really hard about the integrity of the information you're exposed to and that you're sharing like it's not like these conversations have to be separate, but the conversation, to me about information integrity automatically puts me in a position where I'm thinking about the importance of us maintaining and strengthening our social fabric. And I'm not saying that we should go out and touch grass, right? You know? I mean, like, I don't want to be that person. And I also acknowledge that there are reasons why virtual communities are preferable to physical communities. And if I can give a shout out, there's a platform I haven't checked on it in a minute, but at one point in time, it's a platform that I was lucky enough to be in communication with the people that were like creating this platform and like maintaining it called Life is meeting, and the goal of life is meeting was like, there are many goals, but the thing that really stuck out to me is that it was a space online where people who were so inclined could get together, they could argue, they could be playful in their arguing.
Ray Block Jr.
They could, like, you know, find a place where it's safe to have disagreements and be respectful to others that you disagree with. And the payoff of doing this participation online was that it would ultimately lead to a physical meetup. In other words, the ramp up of the online interactions could ultimately contribute to people getting together, and it was like a celebration. So they would have these gatherings. Again, I'm using that word gathering, where folks that were doing this, like, you know, this longitudinal sort of like conversation in life is meeting. Would get together and they break bread, they'd have a glass of wine, or two or three, right? And they would enjoy themselves. And it was this thing where, like, I love the idea of people talking about online communities, not as a competitor to physical interaction, but in this case, as, like, a really important substitute for it, that can actually contribute to it in some kind of way. So to stop talking. I feel like I'm rambling. Gatherings are an example of how this stuff might look in real time.
Jenna Spinelle
And there's, there's a lot of organizations out there, like the one that you're describing. I know John Gastel, another professor here at Penn State. I'm part of the McCourtney Institute. He's part of a group called unify America, which is a similar thing, not, not exactly the same, but, yeah, there's, there's lots of things out there. And I think a lot of people are catching on to this idea that, you know, online spaces can be fruitful places for dialog and discussion if they're set up thoughtfully and curated and all those kinds of things. So that's that's great to see. Do you think it's too easy to scapegoat or to use the algorithm as a scapegoat, like, oh, it's all the algorithms fault that I'm seeing this or that, or not seeing this or that, or that. My uncle is seeing all this crazy stuff on social media or whatever it's on my mind, as we were calling this a couple days before Thanksgiving. But you know, as you said, like information is us. We are information. We're the one that shares it. And so I wonder if, if blaming everything on the algorithm is somewhat of an easy way out of dealing with some of these larger issues that we've been talking about.
Ray Block Jr.
Not only is that an issue, that an issue, but I think it takes us out of the equation, and that's what I'm more worried about, that's what I'm more bothered about. So like, yes, it is the case that it's easier for us as humans to sort ourselves into groups that are kind of kin to us in some way, right? Technology helps that we were doing it before technology, but we can do it in a way that's a lot easier now, right? And some of the devices we use for our technology help it. But if we, for example, just throw our hands up and say it's the algorithm, what that means is we're giving agency up. We are saying that it's no longer up to us to do some things about it, and I don't ever want to go to that place. I think that there are still decisions that we can make as consumers of information and as sharers of information that can contribute to some of this stuff. In other words, if we share verified information and try to stay away from not sharing verified information, these are choices. Those choices can be algorithm independent, but they can make a difference nonetheless.
Ray Block Jr.
You know, local journalism is something that we can support. We can make the decision to keep up with what our news is doing at the local and community level. Like these are choices we can make. Some of these choices are relatively inexpensive, right? These are choices that if many people make these choices and continue to make these choices over time, effects can come from these and those effects can go against the it's just the algorithm kind of argument, and it doesn't mean that we're not being mindful of the fact that we can sort and it's very easy for us to do so with our devices, but there's a certain mindfulness that I'm proposing that we just leave with when it comes to how we get. Information and how we make sense of that information. And I think that mindfulness can exist above and beyond anything that the algorithms are doing.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, that's that's a great point. And and well said. And you know, you talking about local news, makes me think about content creators we're increasingly seeing, whether it's established journalists striking out on their own and becoming independent, or other folks who might not even have journalism backgrounds at all, but acting in that sort of information provider role, I think about here locally in State College, there's, there's a woman who goes by Happy Valley Hannah on Instagram. She is, like the number one source of information about events that are happening in State College, right? She's not a journalist by training, but she goes to a lot of stuff covers events, and so you spent a lot of time in this piece talking about content creators. What role do you see them playing in the information ecosystem, and specifically in this community context that we've been talking about.
Ray Block Jr.
So anecdotally, I always like, I giggle a little bit when you hear these sort of like legacy media versus new media, media arguments, right? And it always to me, brings me back to the idea that the very argument is suggesting that we need to pay attention to content creators as opinion leaders, if you are. I don't know if a person is reluctant to use the word media to describe social media influencers and content creators right then, don't use the term. What's inarguable is that folks who are in those spaces are opinion leaders. They can serve as opinion leaders. And the democratic theory buff in me is just thinking about the fact that opinion leaders can come from a lot of places. They can come from journalism circles, they can come from media circles, but they can also come from these, YouTube, slash Instagram, slash you name it, right. Like these places are places where we get people that are in a position to have large audiences, and those large audiences seek them out for ideas about stuff, that stuff can be whatever, right? I think we should lean into that. And when I say leaf we should lean into that, the nerd in me is thinking, what do we know about content creators? I know that folks in market research do a lot of work on content creators because they're trying to get a good sense of the landscape of the content creator economy, right?
Ray Block Jr.
That stuff, to me, inspires a conversation about, like, there should be research out there that focuses on the ideas and the practices of content creators, like survey research, for example, that focuses on that sample of people. And apparently that's not a small sample of people, the number of people that can safely and like confidently claim that they are creators. Content creators is a growing number, and old people like me just need to just understand that and respect that. And I think part of understanding and respecting that is to just get some basic questions answered, like, what are content creators working with? What's the environment that they're working with? How does one balance, for example, the need to be professionally viable with, perhaps, like our desire a friend, like my co authors and I's desire for information integrity. Do those things have to conflict with each other? Are there ways that they can actually support one another? And if so, how do we help out to create avenues where people can, for example, be viable in a market that's a very important market for a lot of people, and do so in a way that they can keep their voice and information integrity is the thing that's led with. You know, throughout that whole process, I'm just saying we need to do research on content creators. We need to know what's up with them, and if we know what's up with them, then we might stop assuming things. And I'm worried that some of us, like folks like me and my age group, are assuming nefarious things about content creators when we don't have data to back it up at the moment.
Ray Block Jr.
And so all of us to use the term that the research term, the motivations and the practices of content creators are important. They're also empirical questions that need to get answered with future research. And we're hoping that we'll be in a position at RAND to do some of the work to like move forward on what kind of questions we can answer with this stuff. And we're not stingy. We invite others who are interested in this stuff to do the research in this area too, because collectively, we can learn a lot from content creators, regardless of whether you think they're replacing legacy media. I think it's important to give them the status of opinion leaders and just respect the fact that they can be and that in many cases, they are.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, and I'll just say, you know, anecdotally, I teach a class on content creation and creators here at Penn State, I've had the chance to interview some of them, bring them into my class, and they take their work very seriously in terms of putting out good information. Because, I mean, they're staking their reputation, their business, their livelihood, on this right? And so I think that's that is you're right, something that's sort of. Often brushed aside that, oh, they don't care. They're just posting to feed the algorithm. And I'll say, at least from the folks that I've talked to, that's that's not the case. They really do take it very seriously and care very much about the integrity of the information that they're putting out there. So I'm glad to hear you all are focusing on that. Maybe we can talk more about that offline at some point, I have lots of thoughts on this particular space, but I won't take up any more time of it here.
Jenna Spinelle
So the other sort of leg of this information ecosystem stool, so to speak, is the government, right? And so, as you said, there's you know. So in some ways, the government is disconnected from this conversation, because community spaces can and should exist without that. You know, the government being involved, or without that, that sort of, that formality or whatever comes with it. You know, we're not necessarily talking about school boards or city councils or those kinds of things. We're talking about things that are much more informal. But at the same time, you know, government organizations, especially the local government, have a lot of information to share with folks, some of it's very important and timely and needs to get out. So what? How are you thinking about government's role here and how they can be better players in the information ecosystem?
Ray Block Jr.
Thank you for giving me a chance to go back to this and so like, I don't want the message that anyone gets from the perspectives piece to be that we're not interested in the role that the government can play. There are some practical and reality based reasons for why local level efforts are what we prioritize, and that's partly because of my lens as a person who thinks a lot about community service and community efforts, right? But the government's role is an essential role. It's an essential role because of a lot of important things. For one, right? I believe in my co authors and I agree on this, that the role of the government is to sort of enable conditions that allow for a healthy information ecosystem. Now, the role of government, we believe, is not to control content, you know, and so regulation conversations are just not the kind of conversations my co authors and I are, I guess, keen to have, and we're keen to have other conversations that have to do with like local institutions and trust at the community level and stuff like that. But there is a role that the government can play at the federal level, at the local level and at the state level.
Ray Block Jr.
And if you just think about this in terms of logistics, so like investments in broadband, for example, public media and libraries and outlets to facilitate civic education, those are all things that the government can play a role in that would do a lot like it would go a long way towards helping us to get our social fabric right and our information integrity strengthened. You know, another thing I think about a lot is that, like, even though conversations about regulation aren't the kind of conversations that my co authors are not going to have, conversations about transparency and media literacy and support, if possible, for local journalism, those are conversations that can be supported by efforts by the government too, even if you're not talking about regulating free speech in some kind of way you're talking
Jenna Spinelle
I want to just pause on this for a second, because it's caught my eye in the paper too. So the idea, are you just saying, the idea of a local government supporting an organization doing local journalism. I know there have been other scholars who have gone down this path before, and I think been met with a lot of resistance, like, that's the government putting its thumb on the scale of the news that people get, and those kinds of things.
Ray Block Jr.
I think what we're thinking about mainly is that, like, insofar as the government can help to facilitate some of these things that make information exchange more equitable and more efficient, we are firmly in agreement that government efforts in those areas can be useful, right? We're not focusing on that stuff. In other words, like we sort of issue the rabbit hole, because we're thinking so much more about community level involvement and connections between community level involvement and individual decisions and hopefully social change, right? But we're not completely dismissing the role that the government can play, and we know it's hard, right? We know it's hard. There are realities to this that make it more difficult. There are free speech considerations to be worried about, and there are just natural slownesses built into our government that actually keep our democracy stable, that make it less likely for major changes to happen quickly. And so like in light of all of that, we still think that the role of government can be. It can help out with some of the infrastructure. For example, it would be great if policies that push transparency were to result from it, regardless of whether they do. We still think that the government can play some role in this kind of stuff.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah. Well, and even like. Giving groups that want to have gatherings a space to hold them as somebody who plans events and does things in their community, it's often hard to find a space to do it if you're not part of a church or something along those lines, or you don't have the money to pay to rent a meeting room in a hotel or something like that, and so we in town here. I don't know if you've been to three dots downtown. So that's a space that the borough of state college funds, and it's a community meeting space. There's also, it's also an art gallery, and they have music there, and all kinds of things. But I think that comes to my mind as you were speaking as an example of of the government kind of leaning into giving, giving the community a place to gather and to have those those events and facilitate those connections that lead to a healthier social fabric that we've been talking about.
Ray Block Jr.
I need to go check out three dots too.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, it's really cool. So you know, as you were talking about, a lot of this stuff takes a long time, and your your piece ends with sort of a meditation on the call for urgency, right? Like this is this work is slow, but also urgent, which might seem like two things that are in contradiction with one another. So I wonder if you could talk about how you are balancing those two things, the need to act with urgency, but also knowing that urgency is not going to necessarily mean quick in any in these cases.
Ray Block Jr.
So to play with the analogy, so like any eco a physical ecosystem, it takes effort to maintain it and sustain effort to improve it, and those sustained efforts might not look so awesome, or you might not see like the progress immediately, but being committed to continuing those efforts will ultimately play a good role in the health of that ecosystem. It's the same thing here, and unfortunately, the things that we're describing in our piece have deep roots, right? The solutions are tough, and that means that we have to be equally creative and tough in terms of how we approach it. And that means sustained effort. It also means that we have to start those efforts immediately. I use the urgency idea partly because I don't think that we have the luxury of being casual about these threats to the information ecosystem. I am not a historian. I'm not going to pretend, right?
Ray Block Jr.
But every new technology that comes along creates opportunities for information shenanigan, right? So like when the printed text came out, then it allowed us to share information faster than we had a we were able to do before, and with that, became possibilities for shenanigans. Right when radio came out, it allowed us to share information in a way that we weren't able to share it before, and that created more long, more lanes open for shenanigans, right? When TV came out, same story, when the internet came out, same story, right? It just so happens that we are in a place where all of those previous technologies exist, and they're also being augmented by emerging technologies, stuff that I can't even keep up with right now. And all of this is happening in a world where artificial intelligence is facilitating these older technologies and creating new possibilities too. We need, as a society to be mindful of the fact that the challenge is by virtue of being stacked on top of these other challenges bigger than it was before. But we also can rest assured in some ways, and this is the thing that I go to sleep with all the time that we've managed to get around the advent of new technologies in the past, right? So we actually develop standards around what can be printed.
Ray Block Jr.
For example, when radio came out, there were standards around what could be said and what couldn't there's an evolution to that, obviously, but like we found ways to get in front of these challenges before. In addition to us being in a world where all of these technologies exist, we are also in a world where we are wiser because of all of these technologies that exist. And I think that the challenge is a big one, but I think that we as a society are equal to the challenge. Again, it's going back to, like democracy being about people, right? We are probably the most technologically savvy group that we've ever been, and we need to be the most technologically savvy group that we've ever been, because the problem is more technologically savvy than it's ever been before. And I like those odds. You know what I mean. So in my mind, we do this work because it's urgent. It's really important. You might not see the benefits of it in your generation, and that's okay. If we don't do anything, there's a guarantee that. Future generations will see the problems that we left for them by not making ourselves diligent in the efforts that we should be doing now.
Jenna Spinelle
And on that point. Ray, just to close us out here, what are some things that listeners can do or can think about to try to implement some of these big picture concepts into their day to day lives.
Ray Block Jr.
So we can strengthen our ecosystem through everyday choices, right? So I mentioned earlier, so like, um, information exchange, right? Being mindful of what you share and being mindful of the sources of the things that you share. Like this isn't something that we've made up, but it's, it always applies. It's always good advice, right? Supporting local journalism and participating in community activities, I just think is super important. That's a bias of mine that I'll never get over, and I'm going to recommend that to people too. We also our co op by co authors, and I think about information mindfulness. And what I mean by that is be like a researcher, and think of all individual pieces of information as being something that occupies a continuum of perspectives. Those perspectives can be left of center, right of center, whatever, right.
Ray Block Jr.
But like if you think about every piece of information as fitting somewhere in a bigger story about things that are related to that topic, then that systematic way of thinking about stuff might actually help you to engage in what I'm going to call more mindful information exchange, right? And this is the thing that I think is the most important. Don't ever give up on the idea that small efforts at the local level aren't important. I think they add up. Collective small actions can reinforce the Civic covenant. Collective small actions can ultimately strengthen democracy from the ground up.
Ray Block Jr.
And democracy is what we do. It's not something written on a piece of paper. It's not a building, right? Those things help to symbolize and to commemorate what democracy is, but ultimately, it's what we do, the decisions we make, and have that kind of impression on what's going to happen in the future. And I'll never give up on people. I think people are awesome, and I think that democracy is awesome. And so these are, insofar as those are two biases that we have, I want to say that I will never give up on my end when it comes to what to do, and I encourage other people to be hard headed like me, too.
Jenna Spinelle
No, that's great. I agree with you, Ray. I will also never give up on people, and I think you and I share the same sense of hope in a lot of these ways. So thank you again for this work. I know it's sound like the first of more, many more things to come from you and your colleagues at RAND. So we'll keep keep our listeners posted and link to this, this initial paper, and we'll see where things go from there. But Ray block, thanks for joining us today. Appreciate your time.
Ray Block Jr.
Thank you so much for this opportunity.