Click, Swipe, Believe: The Feed is Winning

By Don Allen, Journal Of A Black Teacher (2026)

Let me say it plainly: people aren’t reading anymore. They’re reacting. They’re scrolling. They’re believing whatever shows up between a swipe and a double-tap. And the feed, cold, calculated, algorithmically precise, is winning.

I was going to say, "Knowledge is power." But in the past decade or so, we’ve learned to rely more on visibility to convey power. The perceived authenticity of information is sometimes as important as its actual veracity, and indeed, its mere publication. Ultimately, if something is seen, it becomes more credible than if it hasn’t been revealed at all. And in today’s information era, an imaginative graphic or creative clip is all you need to give that information the visibility it deserves to be seen and believed.

As a Black American man, I see this trend having particularly pernicious effects in the Black Community. It’s not that Black People are unintelligent or uninterested in reading. The problem is, the current system rewards speed over substance. When speed wins, reading loses. There is a cultural shift unfolding in which depth of understanding is being traded in for immediacy of consumption. Rather than reading a full article, or even a well-argued thread, or comprehensive report, people are more interested in having that information summarized or distilled into a powerful image, or boiled down to a catchy slogan or memorable meme that can be ingested in five seconds and repeated in ten. Truth has not disappeared; effort has.

It’s easy to pull a quote from a popular meme and start passing it off as insight. Truth is hard. Truth is time-consuming. Truth is context-dependent and messy. By contrast, a good meme can summarize and critique an idea in one neat, bite-sized package. People want easy answers, and the meme supplies them. We must pay close attention to how people distinguish between informed and just knowing the news, especially in an era when more information is available than ever.

I explained in my previous article that we are currently experiencing a phase of temporal recycling in which old content is reused out of context to pass as current events. I came up with that term because I kept noticing vintage clips of scenes and stories from months, even years, earlier, just hitting the scene again, stirring up a lot of indignation from people who have no idea the matter was already dealt with long ago. This is nothing more than awareness manipulated by repeated usage.

And the feed loves it.

The feed doesn't care about truth. It cares about engagement. Whatever gets the most comments or clicks gets the most promoted. Attention has become the currency online. Your attention. Your time. Your focus. Your emotions, extracted, weighed, bought, and sold in the blink of an eye.

So what succeeds in the Internet Age? Not accurate information, delivered in a clear and logical fashion. Not even thoughtful commentary or intelligent analysis. What succeeds is instead the most emotionally engaging, most visually compelling, and easiest-to-consume version of reality.

Images can speak more loudly than detailed reports. A 30-second film can have as much impact as a 300-page report. Much controversy has been caused recently by screenshots of parts of a long-awaited report into staff bullying. Many people have defended or denigrated those screenshots without reading the report itself.

Confidence is going up. Knowledge is going down.

This can be particularly problematic in mostly poor communities of color that are already working to claim more equity, representation, and justice. By prioritizing the chance to quickly react to “hot off the press” miseducation-bashing polemics over the chance to read long, complex, well-researched essays, we may unwittingly be impairing our ability to later advocate, because we are misspending our energies arguing from rancid bite-sized quotes and sound bites rather than from the content of powerful essays.

And then we turn on each other.

When information is not thorough enough, it turns into a matter of life and death. Analysis turns personal when there is no common analytical base. Conversations turn sour, positions harden, when everything is about information that is not enough. That’s how a movement loses.

But it's even worse than that: people don't read because the system is designed not to encourage reading. Long-form content gets pushed underground, thoughtfully written responses get ignored in favor of pithy or bite-sized ones, and we end up with a culture where captions substitute for comprehension.

We have trained a whole generation to expect instant understanding.

The real cost is that we're losing our ability to think critically, to analyze, and to engage in meaningful discourse with complex thoughts and ideas. Because we're used to having everything packaged up for us in a convenient headline, clip, or meme, we stop asking questions. We stop digging. We stop reading between the lines - because we're not even reading the lines.

This is not just a matter of poor education but a reflection of a culture in peril.

Here's why democracy fails: democracy depends on informed citizens. Not entertained citizens, not reactive citizens, but informed citizens.

Information is becoming lighter, swifter, and more emotional, making it easier to manipulate than ever before. Not through underhanded tactics or conspiracy theories, but through simple convenience. Thoughts and observations can be passed off as fact without much scrutiny because they are so damned easy to believe. And if we’re to take the author’s argument at face value, that’s precisely the problem we face in our current information age.

And right now, easy is beating accurate.

So what do we do?

We slow down.

We read.

Recognize that whatever is in your feed is not necessarily the truth. Question it. Investigate its origins. Ask yourself if there is missing context. Acknowledge that there is likely more to the story. Resist the urge to repost before you understand it.

If we don’t win, the feed will win.

But if our favorite feed keeps on winning, we'll lose more than just screen time. We'll also forfeit our capacity for critical thinking, reason, and effective leadership.

Despite the prevalence of "X-Files" memes about the truth not being out, it still isn't.

And if we wish to get at this undercurrent, we will have to read for it.