Many people believe that if it appears in the media it must be true. Countless examples have shown that assumption to be false--the Sherrod case and Muslims praying on the streets of N. Y. C. are examples. Most people are too busy or disinterested to take time to check the veracity. Or the item may conform to their prejudices or biases and they accept it at face value.
This "credibility" factor has been carried over to the Internet, which offers fertile ground for demagogues and scam artists. They can enter your home uninvited, without knocking, and plant propaganda disguised as information. Their nefarious purposes are to get your support for their drive for power, to part you from your money, or to create animosity against their opponents.
When the deception involves forgeries or doctored pictures and captions they
are a danger to the social contract among the people, and between the people and their government. That contract depends on trust, and respect for the rights of others to be different.
Please, my friends and colleagues, when you receive inflammatory Emails, ask why.
What is the agenda of the senders? Check it out on "snopes.com". Don't become an
accesory to a fraud by passing it on without filtering it through a truth test.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Political parties are often duping their supporters with a slanted interpretation of events because they know that "the item may conform to their [members} prejudices or biases and that they will accept it at face value.
Even if Obama says it, dont take it for granted.
It's probably safe to say that anyone with an email account has received "chain mail" from someone they know. Most of us will trust the intentions of the sender, who we know, rather than the source of the chain, who we do not know. That's when we get into trouble.
Even before email however, the same problem existed. In fact, it was a fun game for youngsters called "the rumor game". Someone says something very simple to another then the second person passes the information to a third but with some amount of embellishment. By the time the fourth or fifth person gets involved the information is significantly warped.
Such is the nature of humanity, unfortunately.
What is especially harmful however, is the intentional harm done by the political machinery in democracies. We find it difficult to find enough time to investigate what we are told so we tend to file it away for possible later use.
A fairly helpful resource I have found is PolitiFact.com. The site is obviously biased in favor of the Democratic party but does a decent job to highlighting especially bogus statements made by politicos.
We are still mesmerized by the written word. Any words on a piece of paper make a document.
Alas! As the ease of generating documents has grown out of proportion our ability to recognize the truth out of so many has vanished.
The first book printed was the Bible because no one would dare question it then. The problems started with the first newsprint.
Post a Comment