As I sit here sipping my homemade wine my mind wanders into the darker regions of coherent thought. Who? Why? When? Where? To answer these questions I fall back onto my most trusted confidant, the one with whom I share my darkest secrets… The one my contemporaries and I refer to as, Ol’ Trusty…
Lets be honest. I’m talking about Google.com.
Which generally leads me to Wikipedia.
Hey, it’s edited regularly and moderated right? I mean as long as you’re checking the sourced and referenced documents it’s really not a bad source of general information. Want to know more about black holes, Wikipedia. What about the Ebola virus everyone is talking about? Wikipedia. How to impress ladies in bed? I shit you not, Wikipedia has the answer. It’s so prolific.. I mean SOO prolific. what does that really mean though? I don’t know. I started this out with no direction so bare with me as we stumble through this thought process of mine.
My point is, if we want to know about something the information is at our fingertips. Literally. type in whatever you want and you’ll most likely find some sort of document. The problem comes when you want to talk about reliability.
Recently I’ve been finding more and more articles expressing opinion rather than factual data(in reference to scientific discoveries and political issues). I myself am an avid reader of internet news. I tend to gravitate towards those focused on science, but I happen upon the ever so increasingly accessible pop culture snippet(I feel dirty and ashamed every time, as I’m falling prey to the system I loathe)…
What was my point? Ending the title of your article with “Studies Say” or having misleading titles in general is a pretty dick move. Same goes for videos on YouTube, but that’s a whole different story(I’m guilty of that at times). If you are reporting on a new discovery lets not state it as fact, or press the issue so much so that you’re jumping to conclusions that cannot be tested. I’d give examples but I’m too lazy to find the articles that brought me to writing this. So I am at this point a bit of a hypocrite in this sense. We’re all hypocrites to a certain extent, but I’ll save that for another random thought session.
The internet is amazing. It allows us to trade information and access information at a rate that is borderline scary, that is unless you have comcast… Because, you know, fuck comcast. However it also leads to that issue of spreading false information. People writing articles to troll society. Fake celebrity scandals and deaths. It’s a living tabloid filled with free porn sites waiting to infect your computer. It scares me that instead of using this amazing creation to better themselves it’s devolved into another… I don’t even know what to call it. There are bastions of hope out there. http://www.Iflscience.com is one of them.
That being said don’t just take what is given, deep dive into the information. Make your own decisions, come to your own conclusions based on the evidence at hand. What do I know? I’m just a 26 year old kid who wants to see humanity take the next step into awesomeness.
A vlog, a blog, a tweet, a post, a tag, a like, a vine, a stream, a share, an upload. This is how we communicate.
A shame…
A hypocrite. <=== that’s me
Be more than the sum of your social media. Now I’m not saying don’t use it, it’s fucking great, but be more than just that. Be a part of society and humanity as a whole.
Holy crap I got off topic. uhmm. Yeah…
Go Hawks!
SomeCallMeCasey 