Saw someone on Facebook bemoaning how "the entire internet" fell for the claim that the Turkish government was using "agent orange" against its citizens in the Gezi Park uprising.

The spread of mistruths is not a reason to distrust everything you see reported on social media (nor to decry it as a "menace to society"). It's a reason to do better about parsing the information and its sources.

Just like threatening chain letters and Bigfoot hoaxes, we're supposed to grow out of this kind of dupedom.

I see the growth taking place before my eyes in the Turkish use of social media. It helps to have skillful journalistic people covering the news. (Here's a new Twitter list of English language tweeters on Turkish current events by cultural journalist Robyn Eckhardt for a one-click follow of 20+ accounts. Here's my Turkey protests Twitter list with more than 80.)

The first mention of agent orange I saw was associated with the debunking of that claim, on the twitter feed of NPR's Andy Carvin.

Becoming (social) media literate is a process, and especially messy in a crisis.

But many people have already been through major crises while using social media (for instance, Carvin pioneered the crowdsourcing of citizen journalism during the Arab Spring as I, Jillian York of Global Voices and TIME pointed out in April 2011), so to portray us all as rubes -- and social media as "untrustworthy" -- is inaccurate.

Social media is a tool. It's up to us to use it wisely. As web anthropologist Stowe Boyd says, "The single most important decision we make in a connected world is who to follow."

Writers abroad now have a spot to gather on Expat Saturdays for writing and publishing tips at repat Kristin Bair O'Keeffe's Writerhead, and expat publisher Jo Parfitt is hosting the Writers Abroad radio program for Women's International Network.

Inspired by a 17th century Ottoman traveler Evliya Celebi, The Book of Travels is a virtual exhibit that aims to highlight the "sharing of ideas between Muslim and European individuals and societies."

Brooklyn-based jewelry designer Sara Pfau's work aims to explain why "marking, separating, naming plays into a primal urge for self definition according to location." (See illustration for this post, it's Pfau's work.)

When you're strange: author Paul Theroux muses at the New York Review of Books about how otherness is viewed as an affliction in most cultures around the world -- and throughout history. Check out this intriguing excerpt from his new book The Tao of Travel: Enlightenment from Lives on the Road.

On a related note, we wonder, is culture only skin deep? Even if we think that culture is like clothing -- when we take off our costume we're all the same underneath, right? -- a new study reveals that cultural differences are detected deep in the brain.

What does it mean to think globally? Educational psychologist Linda Elder stresses the need for a critical thinking revolution in order for us to survive, and sustain the planet. "Our lives our interwoven in ways we don't even understand." It's no longer enough to be skilled at thinking about our own vested interests -- "sociocentric thinking". We need global critical thinking, to ask "what's in this for everyone relevant to the situation?"

Luckily for people like us, having cultural intelligence is a way to increase our creativity, but also a way to innovate long term impacts.