Alarmingly, a Factual Error was Found on the Internet! This little news blurb is from 2002, somehow slipping under the radar for three years before the major news services picked it up.
OK, I’m joking, the Onion is a fake news site. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t abundant factual errors on the Internet. They abound, everywhere. Even here (though I’m hard-pressed to find a link).
But Christy and I were just talking about this yesterday. A side-effect of the Internet is that more and more people will use the Internet to express their freedom of speech. In China, they make no bones about arresting people for expressing opinions on topics the governmet disapproves of. In the US, we satisfy our need for censorship by banning books in the name of “the children” and throwing webmasters of free sites in jail for not knowing that explosives information was on their site.
But this pure, unadulterated ability to, within reasonable limits, set up a web site and say what you want is a fantastic innovation for putting power in the hands of the people, without precedent since the invention of the Gutenberg press. I work with it every day, and yet I still think it is amazing, and the impact far-reaching. I can chat on a message board with anybody, anywhere in the world, for almost free as long as we both have Internet access. And carry on conversations in almost-real-time, the back-and-forth and witty repartee an unending stream without interruption.
Compare that to just twenty years ago, where if you wanted to correspond with someone in Great Britain, your choices were either time-consuming or expensive: post, telegram, fax, or long-distance phone call.
And yet… Sturgeon’s Law applies. 90% of everything is crap.
In this day of instant access to information, how do you filter what you read so that you’re not overwhelmed? Do you rely on major news sites? Blogs? Magazines? Or do you just randomly read, relying on your intuition to guide you as to what to believe and what to write off?