Interview with Joe Ciriaco

The use of source criticism in everyday life is something that Joe Ciriaco deems as useful from day to day.

Source criticism is defined by many as a set of skills that allows for healthy skepticism when it comes to the nature of sources and human sources. Earlier I interviewed Joe, a senior here at Morningside University, about any useful skills of his and he decided that this skill is source criticism.

“Practice. You have to read that over time and you start to see themes and patterns that are similar. People have similar motives and as humans we can kind of understand how people think over time,” Joe said when asked how he acquired this skill. At Morningside Joe is a History major, so a lot of his studies have to do with history and the criticism of it.

Since Joe uses this skill in his field of study, I asked him when he plans to use this skill and in what type of setting. “I think it could be used any time you talk to someone.” Joe describes this skill as being a burden sometimes in a sense that it can be tough to have a normal conversation with people because of being over skeptical. Day to day life and in the media are the biggest places that Joe plans on using source criticism in order to ‘understand what’s in front of you’ and be able to avoid gullibility.