This is the problem with ex post facto consent being used to justify these sorts of invasions. What if it’s not given? The world floods into your life anyway. What had been private is now uncontrollably crowdsourced. Your consent becomes a trifling detail in a story about you that suddenly belongs to everyone else. It doesn’t matter otherwise.

Merriam-Webster defines “meme” (pronounced “meem”) as “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture,” originating in the same root as “imitation.” Richard Dawkins is credited as having coined the term in The Selfish Gene (1976). Memes are the units that transmit ideas, behaviors, styles and usage within a culture through a

Image-based memes are easy to create and easy to spread, though whether they will go viral is never a given. If you create or post one, remember to pay attention to the source of the image. Your best bet is to start with an image or clip that is already labeled for reuse or is in the public domain, meaning out of copyright protection altogether. Google Images search tools provides such a filter, or try the Creative Commons search for work licensed for reuse via Creative Commons licenses. When you see a meme going around, give a thought to the subject of that meme image, whose life may forever be changed.  

Growing up in Dallas, I didn’t identify as Mexican or American, though I’m both. In Spanish we have a saying that goes, “No soy ni de aqui ni de alla.” It directly translates to, “I’m neither from here or from there.” For me, a first-generation Mexican-American, it means never feeling Mexican or American enough. It means belonging to two beautiful cultures yet not fully identifying with either.

“She still has a lot of trauma to unpack.” AdvertisementWith an immigrant mother and an American-born white father, Sara spent much of her childhood struggling to find a sense of belonging. “The community I grew up in is mostly white and conservative, so there weren’t many people who looked like me, let alone who could relate to my experiences as the daughter of an immigrant,” Sara said.

Once I became a published author, and I began to do presentations at middle schools, high schools, and colleges, I found myself becoming an advocate for higher education. In my talks I always made sure to encourage those young kids to never give up on their dreams, and I would share with them my personal story—a story that ultimately ends in triumph, despite all the odds against me.

“I felt undervalued,” Reyna Grande told “American Dirt” author Jeanine Cummins on an episode of “Oprah’s Book Club,” “because the publishing industry does not have the same attitude with our immigrant stories that they did with your story”

I hoped that “American Dirt” would generate more discussion about the border and the anti-immigrant mentality that has dominated our society for too long. And it is doing just that, but in an unexpected way. It is raising awareness about another kind of border — the walls that the publishing industry puts up for Latino writers.

Rather than look us in the eye, many gabachos prefer to look down their noses at us. Rather than face that we are their moral and intellectual equals, they happily pity us. Pity is what inspires their sweet tooth for Mexican pain, a craving many of them hide. This denial motivates their spending habits, resulting in a preference for trauma porn that wears a social justice fig leaf. To satisfy this demand, Cummins tossed together American Dirt, a “road thriller” that wears an I’m-giving-a-voice-to-the-voiceless-masses merkin.

One of the things I’ve been trying to convince people for the past year and a half is that the only viable literacy solution to web misinformation involves always checking any information in your stream that you find interesting, emotion-producing, or shareable. It’s not enough to check the stuff that is suspicious: if you apply your investigations selectively, you’ve already lost the battle. Once you accept that, certain things become clear. Your methods of checking have to be really quick. They have to be habitual, automatic. They can’t be cognitively expensive. And those who teach media literacy have to be conscious of this trade-off between depth and efficacy and act accordingly. What do I mean by that? Let’s use an analogy: which technique do you think would prevent more car accidents? A three-second check every time you switch lanes A twenty-second check executed every time you think a car might be there There are some hard problems with misinformation on the web. But for the average user, a lot of what goes wrong comes down to failure to follow simple and quick processes of verification and contextualization. Not after you start thinking, but before you do. I can’t get these processes down to a two second mirror-and-head-check, but I can get them close. What follows are some of the methods we teach students in our work. It will seem like there is a lot of stuff to learn here, but you’ll notice that it comes down to the same strategies repeated in different contexts. This repetition is a feature, not a bug.