Information Overload-Caveat Lector

It seems to me today that the Information Highway known as the Internet is doing its job to the proverbial nth degree. That means we, if we are the plugged in sort, are subject to so much information that it is difficult to figure out what’s real, what’s unreal, and what really matters.

At any given nanosecond we are pummeled with whatever information the media gods think will give them the highest ratings. So, we get everything from police shootings and drug deals to potential flu endemics and little Johnny’s runny nose. Those who feed the Internet aren’t really trying to enlighten their audiences as much as they are trying to bring back old “customers” and generate new ones, that is to garner ratings. More hits on the site means more money from advertisers.

Funny how things like that never change, isn’t it?

The media machine—so called journalists—spend their time finding new and exciting fodder for their web monsters and little time or care goes into checking the facts, or what politicians call “vetting.” So, like the commercial says, “Everything on the Internet is true because I read it on the Internet. Bonjour!”

Even what appears on the Internet under seemingly legitimate sites, which will go unnamed to keep me from getting sued, needs to be processed through one’s own veracity meter to weed out the stink factor. How often has an organization in its desire to be the first one to get the message out had to retract their statements later on? I would say it’s a daily occurrence.

The drive of the media to be the fastest with the mostest pushes aside things like accuracy, fact checking, and confirmation. Where in the old days of newspapers, getting two or three supporting statements was considered normal, today justification to print a story in paper or digital form seems more driven by how many readers will this bring to our site.

That’s not to say such things have never happened before.

Perhaps one of the more famous newspaper “Ooops Moments” came in 1948 when the Chicago Tribune printed a banner headline that stated Dewey Defeats Truman, referring to the presidential election that actually went to Harry S. Truman over Thomas E. Dewey.  But the polls all seemed to indicate that Dewey would win the election, and the Tribune took what I am sure someone thought was a small gamble, and printed their now infamous headline.

Those things have happened and continue to happen. There are also egregious errors in the print and digital media that astound the eye and ear. In my very first job at a newspaper working for The Bradenton Herald we had an error standard that we tried to meet. We tried not to have more than three mistakes on any given page of the paper. You might not think that three mistakes are very much, but for us it was the gold standard. Things like typographical errors, bad mathematics, double-entendre headlines that can be construed differently from the writer’s intent are common in newspapers. They even have websites with collections of media mishaps, just Google newspaper errors and see the collection that comes up online just for last year alone.

My point here is that people make mistakes. And mistakes happen mainly because we are prone to error. When it comes to the Internet the problem is that everything gets on the Internet. So you can never live down something like the Tribune’s Dewey headline. Like Las Vegas what happens on the Internet stays on the Internet. The problem is the Internet is never closed and anything posted there tends to stay there—FOREVER!

Which of course brings us back to the one person who has ultimate control over what they read, see, or hear on the Internet—you! It seems like common sense to filter the stuff on the information highway through some kind of baloney meter, but some people tend to be more gullible than others. That’s what keeps Ponzi schemes and other frauds in business. How many times have you heard about someone getting bilked by responding to an email or losing their life’s savings because someone took advantage of them?

It happens all the time. And, now with the great equalizer, the computer, it’s even easier to take advantage of people and rob them of their life savings. So, not only is the Internet a bad place to get news, it’s also a bad place to put your faith in people.

So who can you trust?

Well, nobody really. The media has its own agenda. Whether you are a fan of CNN or Fox is driven by which angle you prefer. Both present the news, but the writers today tend to put their own opinions into their work.

You can be sure that a certain writer is going to make the story fit his special agenda. And, it’s not only in BIG media; you can also find it in the smaller newspapers, too. So you have to be sort of a filter to decide what is news and what is spin, or opinion mixed with news. For those who remember him, there are no Walter Cronkite’s out there providing just the facts and allowing us, the readership or viewership, to formulate our own opinions. The media believe that the general public is too dumb to form an opinion, or at least the one they want you to form, and are more than willing to lead you down their path.

To steal Cronkite’s sign off, “And that’s the way it is.”