True or False week 2

I think we have a problem, perhaps a big one? So this week’s reading was about how we need information forensics. With the internet personal information decimation is cheaper, quicker and easier. However is this information true or false; can information that is wrong be called information? And so digital judgement is need to make sense of information online.

 So lets go back a bit, back perhaps to before text, and what do we get. We see people with information (knowledge) stored in memory, passed through the generations through stories et; essential little or no external memory. Now go forward about 1000 years and we get text, it means that people must have been able to write and read, and also had the materials to write. Anyone who can now read something can learn, but not directly from the source as it is external memory. This creates the diffusion of time and space with information dissemination (Emanuel Castels talks a lot about this in the Information Universe Galaxy idea)  

However go back in history and online the rich have access to knowledge thus

we only have few gatekeepers of information, these are high up people how have the power to control the flow of info to the masses and so they had the power in many respects. You can swing society’s understandings of what the world is like etc. A very good example of this is all of religion – The Roman Catholic Church! (the last comment was personal)

Now let’s get to 21^st Century, the #internet with web 2.0 (from our last reading) can have nearly anyone with access to a computer upload content. And as the internet can be seen as the wildwest one has to ask, was the content that others placed true or false.

There is no publishing house over the shoulders of the internet blogger, so the internet blogger in his bedroom can write anything and get away with it  (to some extent).

And this is the great thing about the internet is the freedom of voice, however this is also the biggest problem!