Certainly it’s a boon to thoughtful people who understand how to evaluate information. But it also seems to be driving all kinds of craziness such as conspiracy theories about the Newtown shootings, the Boston Marathon bombing, flight MH370, and of course 9/11.
Certainly there have always been conspiracy theories, but there seem to be more now. It seems like there’s some group with some kind of crazy theory for just about anything that receives prominent news coverage.
Will the long term effect of the internet be a more enlightened humanity, or simply a more confused humanity? Which trend will win?
In the long run, enlightenment will win. Just like with the printing press, or radio, or television, or other improvements on distributing information – sure, they allowed a lot of craziness to be spread, but the knowledge and wisdom that was spread far outweighed it.
I think this has to do with scale. There have always been crazy people, and always been nutty CT’s, long before the internet was ever thought of. The only difference today is that there are a lot more people, and they have access to a larger audience to propagate their nutty theories.
So, to the question…are we more enlightened or more confused. I don’t think it’s even a contest…we, as a species are MUCH more enlightened than at any time in our history. Think about it. Today, you can hop on, say, this message board, and have a discussion with people literally all over the world. Even the nutty stuff that is put on this board is still educational, when it’s being examined, debated and in most cases debunked. It’s highly educational to see how perspective shift on a given topic between someone from the US, someone from Canada, a person from the Middle East, various Europeans, and various people from different parts of Asia or Africa.
Not only that, but the sheer amount of data available, and the tools today to search it are astounding. With access to a smart phone or a computer tied to the internet, one can simply do a search on a question and pour through the answers. Kid asks a parent 'what’s the capital of Turkmenistan. Answer: Ashgabat. But…you can also tell the kid all sorts of details about it, it’s total population, languages spoken, history, population size and density, ethnic make up, products exported and imported…hell, I’m looking and there are even a few restaurants listed and places to buy stuff. You really have to have lived decades ago to see how remarkable this actually is, and even then you have to really sit down and think about it, since having this data at our fingertips has become second nature.
I routinely am confronted with people’s “knowledge” that they have gleaned from the Internet without also checking to see if it is indeed accurate. While I like Wikipedia, Buzzfeed,Cracked.com and occasionally Listverse, most of them suffer from numerous errors in fact and interpretation. To use them solely as reference sites, is a mistake in assessment.
Until the Internet starts to edit itself and make certain that the facts it promulgates are indeed, facts, then it will be a useful tool , but not a replacement for going to the library and doing proper research.
Agreed. No reason it can’t be both. As a matter of fact it’s likely to be both because the more of the information most people are interested in will create a blurrier picture, not a clearer one.
That, and the fact that by being able to connect with each other, conspiracy theorists have the illusion that they’re not in the minority. Say if, way back when, Joe was certain that the Lincoln assassination was orchestrated by the government. He would have a small sample of people in his town to talk to, and they would all say he was wrong. Now, Joe can go online and find a website dedicated to Lincoln conspiracy theories (OK, I don’t know if those actually exist, but I bet there’s a site somewhere) and spend his time online in an echo chamber where everyone agrees with him. When you bring the crazy together, you strengthen it.
Your average library has far greater resources in it than the Internet in its current iteration,yes. The Internet has a staggering number of opinions and a paucity of facts.
Trivially true, but only because the library also has Internet access. But there is very little factual information that exists anywhere at all, but which is not on the Internet.
Why? Everything that is in any library in the world is available on the internet…plus a lot more. Is it that you don’t trust your own ability to judge, and you just want a fixed set of ‘facts’ to tell you what’s true?? Because that’s what you get with any single library (assuming you want your library isolated…because, if not, the irony would be that it would be connected to the internet anyway, and Chronos pointed out).
I truly can’t understand where you are coming from, or why you think that a library will aid you in research better than the internet. It boggles the mind how anyone could think that, to be honest.
[QUOTE=Ibn Warraq]
I think people who believe there are more conspiracy theories now than in the past then I suspect the person is far too nostalgic for the past.
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Exactly, save that there are simply more people now than in the past, and they have access to more information today than at any time in the past. Which means that events that someone in, say, Europe (or China, India, etc) might not have even heard of in their lifetimes they now have access too (I’m thinking of the 9/11 Truther stuff), so you are going to get a few more percentage points of nutty believer types simply because more people are exposed to more now than in the past.
Well, it’s been winning pretty handily for centuries now, and the victories seem to be accelerating, so I don’t see any reason why that trend would change. I think a lot of folks in these kinds of threads view history through extremely rose colored glasses.
I’ll second the idea that it hasn’t really added to confusion, it’s just made confused people more prominent. Where 9/11 truthers usually would’ve been confined to trying to convince a few unlucky patrons at the local bar, written letters to the local paper that would’ve been thrown out by the editors or, at worst, gotten on the Art Bell show at 3am. Now they can get SDMB accounts and make themselves harder to avoid.
But I don’t really see much evidence they’re actually doing much to convince people that weren’t already prone to CT in the first place.
I noted in one of the recent anti-vaxx threads that, despite the perception that there was a growing movement of anti-vaxxers, actual vaccination rates in the US haven’t really changed. The actual group of non-vaccinating people hasn’t grown, they’ve just gotten louder, while at the same time not really convincing anyone.
It was said that “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”* In the modern world I do think that one’s sources of information from the web need to be constantly updated and checked, and the ones that are being misleading should be dismissed or be used sparingly.
Because I have seen a few relatives, friends and posters gradually falling for the woo and hate; if you are a follower of sources that include woo or hate the reality is that you will absorb a lot of it, even if you claim that you can avoid the nonsensical parts or claim that you are only watching them for “fun” what happens is that later you end up using the same bad arguments from those sources and even end up telling yourself that those are “your arguments”.
