Our time is unlike any other, we are inundated with information at every turn. TV, internet, new articles, and videos plastered across our screens at every turn. It’s almost impossible not to be bombarded with all of this information. That is why we’re going to talk about being a good consumer of information today.
One of the most important things I was taught in college was how to recognize valid and reliable information. At the time, I thought this was silly. Yeah, Mr. J.J. I get it, you want us to read the whole article. Yes, Mr. Stepniski we wrote down the date of the article. Little did I realize that I was being trained to be a good consumer of information all along.
The importance of this in an age of rapid advancement in technology cannot be understated. And for those of you who think what I’m preaching is silly, as well, think about how you consume your information. You get it from social media more than likely right? Most of us do… Well, when an article is outdated more than a year the information doesn’t seem as pertinent right? If a travel ban happened last year in Cuba, did it get lifted? If it hasn’t, when might it be lifted…. are there more recent articles?
These are just a few of the questions that should go through your head while consuming information. Why is that important? Well, for one misinformation is well… rampant. Perpetuating the misinformation is ignorant, embarrassing and also some what dangerous. Let’s take the murders down in Cancun around 2017 when I last took my trip there.
There was a lot of information going around about people being killed on properties, locals drugging travelers all sorts of information being passed around. As there was a big group of us all going, article after article got shared on social media. Most of it was outdated or had wrong facts in order to gain more clicks with an interesting head line… fewer still were actual articles that had the right information for the right time frame we were going. One person in particular had everyone legitimately scared by an article that at the time was two years old. The amount of attention and comments these posts got were… sad considering it took me all of two seconds to pop the article up see it was from two years prior and exit out of it. But that, my friends, is the power of and importance of recognizing bad information, you will not get lulled in to perpetuating false information if you know what to look for.
So what do you look for? Two important things — the date the article was released and Where it is from. If you cannot find a date, look at the bottom of the website and find out how recent the website has been updated. If it has not been recent, chances are you are reading something outdated. All informative articles should have a time stamp on it near the time with time, date, and location (sometimes just time/date.)
The next important thing is Where you consume your information from. I personally use either Reuters or BBC. They are both middle of the road outlets that are there to
report facts, and will rescind information if they find out they posted something incorrectly. You want something neutral when you are looking for solid information. Something like Fox News or MSNBC has the tendency to lean to their particular corners and sometimes they won’t report certain news at all because it doesn’t fit the narrative of what they are trying to portray to their audience. Remember, these sites run off of how many clicks they get. If they know for a fact that a headline would get more clicks vs. something their audience would not vibe with, why post it? It isn’t going to generate the traction they want on their site, app, or article. Haven’t ever heard of the website you clicked on for the article? Well that’s a big red flag. The article title is “7 Reasons you should hate Europe” and it’s from alien7.com maybe… that doesn’t make a lot of sense to read that, and certainly not share it.
Lastly, I would say the other important thing is to find various news articles on the same topic and see what overlaps. Get your information from Fox News? Maybe take a look at MSNBC and see what they had to say about it as well. I understand, those people might “be the devil” but you would be surprised how much information gets skewed out of your articles simply because you get it from the Rachel Maddow show or from Sean Hannity. You want to take a look at what overlaps, and maybe reading something from someone else’s perspective might give you a different outlook than you already had. Not a bad problem to have.
Outside of these three tips I would say this — this is not a generational problem… This is an everyone problem. I see people of all ages making these mistakes, but I would say on average, I see the older generations making more of these mistakes. This is because this is newer to them and the younger generations are growing up with it. This is still no excuse to perpetuate bad or false information. You have a responsibility when you hit that share button that I feel like most people do not take in to consideration. The fact that completely false articles can gain traction enough to go viral is scary and is a powerful tool used by those in power to insert their narrative in to our lives. It is up to us to debunk these things, and become good consumers of information.
Thanks for reading,
Lis
Shay's Place 