You are viewing a single comment's thread from:

RE: Fake News & the echo chamber - Day 11 [Freewrite]

in #freewrite6 years ago

I wish I could wrap my fish and chips in some Facebook. All jokes aside though, I'm more interested in figuring out the reasons why people take it for face value and emotionally, rather than looking at it like information to be filtered through the individuals lens, critically. I could go at it from the angle of continually being bombarded with information. The information highways was what they referred to the Internet as, and with this glut there is so much that is just trivial and distracting that people forget to think critically about it. Instead they react emotionally with a comment on social media and in a day (or even less) it's on to the next thing. So is fake news just the result of this shifting demographic who is discovering information that the the inventors of the term, the "mainstream" media, want to censor? Politically I'd say yes and mainly due to the Drumpf's use of Twitter. Years back I imagined the next election to be a social media election (i glamorized this with the image of American Idol) and I wasn't half wrong. When the conventional media is against you and the internet is in almost every home, it makes sense that he has 53.5 million followers (ranked 18th). As for the question. In an ephemeral sense I don't care, but when it comes to the confusion and polarization we're seeing today I'm concerned.

Sort:  

It may simply be a function of age, although I think not, that there's now seems to be so much information, in the sense that computer science people think of information, that no one can adequately figure out what is factual, roughly speaking, and what's just white noise amplified to the point of being deafening. On the other hand, there's new cross-disciplinary thinking about historical fact, and about our deep history, that would qualify as knowledge no matter how much white noise there is presently. And as someone with some useful research training, I can say with certainty that I can now find factual, unbiased information on any subject I'm interested in trying to understand correctly in minutes, about things that used to take hours or days in a library. In other words, I'm stumped.

You have that foundation already that many younger people don't have. Think about a Millennial in University now, who grew into this technology and way of "researching", it must be so different for them when they search for information and wonder what's right or wrong. In other words, I guess we're all stumped!