By SHANNON O. WELLS

Something that gets lost in the recent wave of digital technology fever, particularly with the rapid rise of artificial and generative intelligence affecting myriad aspects of daily life, is that, well, some in the younger generation are finding ways to resist the onslaught.

“Young people right now, they’re pushing the drive back to analog, pushing the drive toward the quote-unquote ‘dumb phones’ and figuring out new ways to (do) a reverse reading on, ‘What is tech supposed to do for us vs. what (the tech industry) wanted it to do?” noted Sam Woolley, associate professor and endowed chair of disinformation studies in the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences’ Department of Communications.

“So, without all of us becoming Luddites necessarily, how do we learn to live more symbiotically with this space?”

Woolley shared his insights as a panelist for the 2026 Senate Plenary, on April 20 in the William Pitt Union’s Lower Lounge, on the theme of “Bridging Gaps to Universities as Engines for Civic Fluency.”

He responded to a question about the influence of navigating the vast, complex ecosystem of news and information on students’ ability to adopt a sense of, and engage in, civic fluency.

“I think information that we see is a great place to begin (and) should be a base point,” Woolley said, emphasizing the need to think about how to work with students. “To be honest about the fact that the information landscape that exists right now is not probably going to change tomorrow, and Gen AI is rapidly changing the way the information landscape exists and how we experience it.”

Robin Kear, liaison librarian with the Hillman Library System and recent past Senate Council president, also stressed information literacy and the ability to “recognize credible and reliable information authorship.”

“Lateral thinking is a skill that has been a little clouded by just the speed of sort of malicious information — not just disinformation, but deliberate misinformation,” she said. “Searching laterally trying to find origins of rumors, of information that you find on social media, is difficult, especially now.

“We try to show students — through scholarly conversation, finding academic information — that there is good quality information out there: ‘You should read it for yourself. You should evaluate that … and transfer it to your social media ecosystems, your other information ecosystems.’

“But the speed and velocity of the amount of information is greatly increased.”

Speakers at this year’s plenary, which drew a modest but engaged audience to the William Pitt Union, included Chancellor Joan Gabel and Provost Joe McCarthy. Senate Council Vice President Julia Meade, associate professor in the Department of Pediatrics and Human Genetics, introduced the plenary panel.

In addition to Woolley and Kear, it included:

• Moderator Kris Kanthak, Senate Council president and associate professor in the Department of Political Science

• Calum Matheson, associate professor and chair in the Dietrich School’s Department of Communications

• Andrew Lotz, teaching professor and academic advisor in the Department of Political Science, director of undergraduate studies and assistant dean for undergraduate students

The afternoon plenary followed a morning event called “Navigating the Information Landscape: A Civic Fluency Forum,” in partnership with Citizens and Scholars, which also focused on what Kanthak called the “important role of civic fluency.”

“I wanted the plenary conversation to explicitly center on shared governance and to explore the questions of how we as a community can help guide how Pitt is — and can become an engine for — civic fluency,” she said at the April 23 Senate Council meeting. “I think it did, and I expect that lots of smart people are already thinking about our next steps.”

Expressing appreciation for the effort behind the plenary, Gabel called this year’s topic “an important frame — a subtle and nuanced one.”

“When we talk about civic discourse and fluency, I think we get wrapped up in definitions. I think it varies … but at the same time, the idea of making people who disagree talk to each other is one thing, but having the tools to do it in a way that’s likely to yield a productive outcome — whatever that might be under the circumstances in which we find ourselves — is another.”

Although the ability to communicate and share effectively “across that disagreement” is a longstanding core academic value, she acknowledged that “in the fluency space, the idea of effectively participating starts to become a realistic expectation, and something that I think we can all benefit from, no matter what phase of life.

“But certainly, on behalf of our students as they enter into the world as it is today, I think it’s critically important.”

‘A tough term’

Responding to Kanthak’s opening question about defining civic fluency and how it relates to bridging philosophical and communications gaps at universities, Cal Matheson admitted that fluency is “kind of a tough term in some ways.”

“It’s a newer evolution. It’s designed to capture a lot of pieces of our orientation toward public life that we’ve sort of explained in different ways — in a fragmentary fashion, maybe — before,” he said. “It’s an attempt to create a more united and simple and elegant way of understanding this … I’ve described (civic fluency) as the capacity to participate in public life within a democracy.”

That requires knowledge. “Knowing history, knowing the concepts that are necessary, the structure of government, things like that,” he said. “Some part of that is skills — skills of advocacy, skills of persuasion but also, importantly, the necessary skills that help (in) listening to other people, to judging and participating in dialog, developing care for others.”

As with “linguistic fluency,” we can learn the vocabulary, grammar and language, and yet “not truly be fluent unless you’re comfortable participating in that environment,” Matheson explained. “Civic fluency is kind of capacity to comfortably live in the world of public life.”

Robin Kear responded to Kanthak’s question about differences between contemporary civic fluency and the “old-fashioned idea” of using the library to absorb the knowledge of history, political science, government and community that fuels civic engagement.

“I would say the library writ large, the whole library ecosystem — principal libraries, public libraries, academic libraries — are very worried about having information available to their citizens,” Kear said. “… Having access to credible and reliable information, of course, is still a priority and value of libraries, and what we do in our academic library here, of course, and setting the stage for lifelong learning.”

Libraries also are a space for “intellectual freedom,” meaning there are “many, many kinds of ideas to find in a library, and if you cannot find an idea that you disagree with in the library, that’s a problem,” she noted.

Kanthak asked Andrew Lotz to discuss his experience teaching about “proportional propaganda.”

As an example, Lotz said when other speakers at Pitt’s Provost Academy sessions emphasize how students can “use their voice,” it’s his role to say, ‘Hey, here’s all the ways people try and take (your) voice away.’ And that’s kind of what my focus is … all the strategies to remove a voice from people, or more precisely, to change your sentiments so that when you speak you use the words that they want you to use.”

The way we tend to get our identities, linguistic (ideas) and understandings of the facts of the world is shaped in such a way that “you end up saying what I desire you say, as a propagandist,” he explained. The change he observes with students is, “I think they’re sharper at telling when another person is doing it, who’s been influenced.

“They’re a little sharper, like, ‘A-ha, they over there! I see the pathway of their language being influenced by their shadowy agents and not, ‘I’m also saying pre-canned things that my side wants me to say — or that my employer wants me to say, or my government wants me to say,’ or whatever the case might be,” he said.

“It’s that self-understanding that becomes really a fascinating part of the conversation, I think.”

‘Purposefully overwhelming’

While the term “disinformation” — or “fake news” as its more casually known — is all over today’s media and conversational landscape, the practice, as Woolley explained, “has been around since time immemorial.

“We think of disinformation as the purposeful spread of false information, but organized lying has been a feature of human civilization since tracked history,” he said, noting that disinformation became more refined during the mid-20th century Cold War era. “It grows out of Russian use of disinformation as a term, very specifically, as a mechanism to undermine Western democracy.”

What’s changed since then, Woolley suggested, is “our technological systems, our media systems.

“We had some wonderful students in the (morning forum) talk about velocity. Information travels much more quickly. … It’s purposefully overwhelming. It’s purposefully built to be addictive,” he said.

Recent lawsuits in California and New Mexico are holding social media companies liable for designing platforms meant to be addictive or allowing certain content that “previously would be unthinkable.”

“So, why now? … I think it’s important because we’re in a moment of reckoning, politically, socially, technologically. We’ve reached a head with a lot of challenges related to the morals that guided the creation of not just this University, but also this country and the concept of democracy.”

Critical endgame

In his plenary closing remarks, Provost Joe McCarthy thanked everyone for engaging in what Kanthak called a “top-down exploration of civic fluency.”

It’s somewhat harder to discern the difference between the “top-down version and the shared governance version,” he observed, “because we actually do share governance. We do engage across different facets of the University as effectively as we do (and) end up co-creating events that are very complementary.”

In his own effort to define “civic fluency,” McCarthy concluded it’s an “intentional effort to understand, to seek out through various sources — libraries, discourse and other places — and ultimately engage across differences in such a way that we help deepen our understanding of not only others, but ourselves and ultimately, society.”

What he called the “critical endgame” should not be to the ability to win an argument, but rather to “effectively have disagreements in the first place. This is, as I’m sure we all recognize, increasingly important … We have a lot of political difference, disinformation is rampant, social media and the algorithms are used trying to steer your opinion and of course, now, AI bias.

“It’s really critical that Pitt engages in the civic fluency exercise amongst ourselves and with our students in a really positive way.”

Shannon Wells is a University Times reporter. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.

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