Is the internet re-writing history?

wotsthat

Here's a piece about how willing people are to believe things they see on the internet.

Pupils were asked to rate various sources of information - the government, Twitter, the Guardian newspaper, their family - according to how much they trusted it. The results were telling.

Closest to the heading 'Trust' the pupils placed Youtube; somewhere near the heading 'Distrust', they placed the government.

What I find interesting is how parallels can be drawn to some of the debates on here.

Some ideas on here are so fantastical that it's difficult for a normal citizen to disprove due to lack of access. Because they can't be disproved they become, in some eyes, 'true'. Some of the conspiracy theories around silver can be slotted in here.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15097139

Pimperne1

wotsthat wrote: »

Here's a piece about how willing people are to believe things they see on the internet.



What I find interesting is how parallels can be drawn to some of the debates on here.

Some ideas on here are so fantastical that it's difficult for a normal citizen to disprove due to lack of access. Because they can't be disproved they become, in some eyes, 'true'. Some of the conspiracy theories around silver can be slotted in here.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15097139

Having watched some nutter the other week trying to place the blame for 9/11 on the US Government I decided to join a "Conspiracy Theory" website:

http://forums.randi.org/forumdisplay.php?f=64

I wanted to ask a few questions but haven't gotten round to it yet but the initial ones were:

"If the recordings to loved ones by those on the doomed aircraft were simulated where are the people now".

"If what happened at the Pentagon wasn't an aircraft strike but a missile strike then where is the missing aircraft and its occupants"?

"Even if the Government was responsible then why not just fly the aircraft into the Pentagon anyway rather than go through some massive telephone call/missile hoax".

There was also a massive hoax orchestrated in 2004 regarding house prices and many gullible people believed it.

Going4TheDream

The internet is great tool for many things , but anyone that believes anything from any source without checking further is a fool, decision making comes from personal experience, values and being able to assimilate often large and often complex pieces of information, and a willingness to accept concrete facts, after which opinion can be formed. I suppose if you tell your self something enough without that process you will eventually believe it to be true.

Really2

Going4TheDream wrote: »

The internet is great tool for many things ,

Arguments with strangers, Shopping, !!!!!! and errrr......:D

Degenerate

Really2 wrote: »

Arguments with strangers, Shopping, !!!!!!

What more could you ask for?

pinkteapot

What kids need to be taught these days is how to research something; the importance of assessing a source's credibility, verifying claims by comparing multiple sources, etc.

In the good old days (and I'm talking when I was at school in the early 90s) it was so much simpler. Textbooks were pretty much the only source, accompanied by some additional reading. Textbooks could be trusted to be broadly factually correct (if sometimes biased in certain subjects). Now it's a lot easier for kids to look something up on Google rather than hunt through the indexes of library books. There is good information on the internet, but you need to know how to find it and check it.

Proper research skills are essential once kids get to university.

julieq

Very good point: what a great many people are lacking is critical thinking skills, and it's very easy on the internet to find a group of like minded people who will agree and reinforce almost any position in a feedback loop. In that way the Internet feeds the creation of clusters with extreme views. What that creates ultimately is a ready set of groups which are easy to manipulate.

Actually specifically taking a contrary line to established received wisdom in that sort of situation and being able to argue on an evidence basis is a key life skill in a world that's clustering around faith and belief in a very broad sense. Anyone with those skills will take better decisions on balance and get a better life, because they're not being pulled along by essentially social constructs into false positions. That social element is behind the importance of the "like" button incidentally, it allows a social consensus to support an idea irrespective of how well it can be measured objectively against ideas of truth.

I'd definitely put HPC into the group I'm criticising. That grouping specifically ridicules and excludes contrary opinion by fairly well established techniques of demagoguery and social control. But it's not the only one and not the most dangerous: in general it's people of one idea muttering nonsense to themselves and the only people it's hurt are those who buy into the faith. By comparison it's far more dangerous for example that there can be a major political party creating the idea there is some sort of "predatory capitalism" based on a consensus view of for example banking, leading to the myth that by taxing the rich we can all have what we want in terms of social provision without having to pay anything towards it ourselves. I'm sick of hearing that "bankers caused the recession, not nurses in the public sector". In fact banking errors created a shock to the system which could have come from other places, and that in turn exposed systematic overspending in the public sector which actually is the root cause of the problems continuing today. Unless that message is understood, the correct responses will be difficult to implement because the populace will vote out those trying to implement them.

I honestly see no way out of this process until people learn critical thinking. It's depressing but at least someone has noticed the problem now.

vivatifosi

What I find most ironic is that there is more good, factual information on the web than people ever had access to before, yet they still look up sensationalist carp. Julie and pinkteapot are right, a big part of it is having the skills to think critically and evaluate sources.

Working in a library, you often see people who have given up using reference books and use Wikipedia instead, which is fine up to a point: the point when you look up anything that people may have differences of opinion about. I think the problem is that a) people are naturally curious, and b) people tend to follow the path of least resistance. So where that curiosity and path of least resistance bump into each other you get lazy net searching and wacky opinions.

julieq

I think the interesting and arguably most disturbing thing about the way opinions are formed now is the role of social media, and the interlinking with "celebrity" culture in a broad sense. I use twitter a lot, and like most people probably I follow a few public figures in the arts. Many of them fairly frequently state opinions on, for example, the effects of public sector cuts or retweet links or partisan material from followers, often unthinkingly I suspect, and what interplay there is tends to be between celebrities holding similar opinions which becomes very obvious in the feed. Because of the social media part of this, this will be followed often by supportive messages from many of their followers which shouts down any dissenting message in a pretty brutal way. I'm not exactly reticent in an argument, but I very rarely argue on twitter.

So you have what ends up being uninformed celebrities - usually shielded from economic realities - stating things which become accepted truth by very large numbers of people. In many respects, celebrity culture is the new religion in a far deeper sense than I think many people realise, and this will have very far reaching effects on our lives. Because ultimately talent in music or art does not give any deep understanding of economics or politics.

chris_m

Pimperne1 wrote: »

Having watched some nutter the other week trying to place the blame for 9/11 on the US Government.....

I saw something similar, possibly the same programme.

"there was no wreckage on the Pentagon lawn after the impact"
"So how come the FBI collected rather a lot?"
"Oh, there was a C130 flying above Washington at the time, they probably threw some out of that"

Unbelieveable !!!!

And the Danish "professor" who did a report showing that 4 tiny fragments out of billions "proved" that thermite was used to bring down Tower 7. "It's been read thousands of times but no-one's refuted it."

I'll bet they haven't - they probably haven't finished laughing yet :rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

Former_Spice

Links below to some of the more credible sites that question the offiiial account of 9/11 with the destuction of the third WTC skyscraper as a key point of evidence. Search building 7 on youtube for the video's of it including the one with 8 million plus hits, try to tell yourself that's office fires and not a ripple of explosives blowing it up.

www.ae911truth.org/
www.firefightersfor911truth.org/
www.militaryofficersfor911truth.org/