Reflection 1- As Relates to Society and Communication

Everyone knows the internet and assorted communications technology is changing our world. (Here, anyway). And if everyone doesn't know that, I'm going to assume they do, for sake of sophistry. What I have yet to hear a precise description of is how exactly it is changing our generation. What does the current situation boil down to?
-Connectivity.
We have more connections to information, to friends, to work, to whatever. If one is an adept, they can find almost anything they want, if they know where to look. But even the question of knowing where to look is difficult. I'll use one example for clarity's sake. Reliable news. My FYP tutor from last year remarked on how terrible our newspapers were, and wondered when the crossover was made, between impartial reporting and opinion-sabre rattling. Presumably, her base sample was Europe, with Le Point and the BBC, and god knows what else for news. And apparently, here, the papers are terrible, with poor reporting and biased columns. Yet to anyone who grew up here, these papers are all we have had. How were we to know they were of poor quality? Assuming they are indeed of poor quality, and that we become aware of this, how then to find reliable news? By what measure can we deem a news source reliable or not?

With the internet, there are a multiplicity of options, all fairly easily available-if you know they're there. But the process of figuring out what source is reliable requires cross-checking- with what sources? Now that your first assumption of what is reliable has been proven or demonstrated to be wrong, by what grounds does something become reliable? Da** near every news source I've seen has had the same pretentions, the same window dressing. "Come here for the news. We promise it's accurate and everything you need to know". And, with the same problem of advertising, we know if everyone is saying the same wonderful things, then someone is da**-well lying through their teeth.

I read in the paper today that Putin is crushing democracy. There are continual threats to jobs, to safety, to children, if the people do not vote Putin. Bosses threaten employees, teachers press children into lobbying their parents, and all the other wonderful hallmarks of a rotten system of democracy. I read this in the new york times, so it has to be true, doesn't it? Surely such a pillar of American visions wouldn't put shoddy reporting on the front page. And yet, I have cause to wonder. The cause is irrelevant at the moment, save that I did not read a conflicting story. Indeed, I have not read any other stories about Putin being a terrible democrat. Or any stories about him at all, recently.

I cannot know the truth from a source if my only sources for comparison require the same judgment of truth, wherein their standards are their peers. And my only source for news is piped into me from distributors in Ontario, or Britain, or France, or America. I have few methods of alternative information.

To return to my point, I have connections to many news sources. If I were to try and compose a pool of comparison for them, I would spend hours every day reading different news sources, just trying to collect enough information for a statistical analysis. With so many connections, my ability to usefully do something is blunted by sheer volume. And yet- Would it be better to have few enough connections to be workable? Would this not be more limited?

Expand the principle. We now have connections to knowledge and experience far beyond what any normal person would in our history. We are, I argue, not suited to the filtering and collating of this much information. We have a glut of feeds from everywhere, and we will individually not see a millionth of the pool on the web. Trying to gain perspective in so much information strains pathways which already run in dreams and half-conscious notions. The crux of the problem is that it has become harder to know anything certainly , but to be capable of knowing as much as one is willing to expend effort to.

It's almost post-modern.