One of the great advantages of a more connected world is that it is extremely easy to access information via the Internet.
The disadvantage of this phenomenom is that you probably should not always rely on the information you read online. In this age of user-generated content what we tend to have is truth by consensus or what I sometimes like to think of as the 'stupidity of the crowds'. Web2.0 buzz words aside there are real instances of people taking information from a blog or a tweet from Tweeter and quoting it as fact. Some people make it even worse by making educational (submitting projects and assignments) or financial decisions (hot stock tips) based on said information which may or may not be accurate.
This is all done simply because enough people say some piece of information is true. Surely it must matter who says this informaton is true, take for exampe a site called cumul.us which is a wiki weather site that allows you to collaboratively decide what the weather will be like or if it's snowing outside, why should I believe anyone's recommendation or suggestion unless they are qualified meteorologists or at the very least - God.
Google doesn't help all that much because it revolutionised the way webpages were found by basing the pages on rank, the ranking is attained by calculating how many people link to that page and the keywords used therefore if enough people link to a page it gets a higher rank and therefore must be true or NOT. Information on who made the links and would help to really filter for relevance. Having said that Google is the best search engine in the world ever! and is omnipotent because it is all-seeing and all-knowing.
Speaking of facts (which you can choose to believe or not to believe) Wikipedia is apparently only slightly less reliable than the Britannica Encyclopedia with only four errors to Britannica's every three. Wow!
That is soo strange considering how people flock to Wikipedia as a way to influence facts and even history. Politicians are not immune to this as evidenced by the really cheeky way the conservative party in the UK tried to change facts on Wikipedia entries to score cheap political points. The irony is if I had gone to chekc on the history of Titian that very day before the altered facts were corrected I would have been a casualty of misinformation.
Anyway it will rain tomorrow - probably.
Subscribe