What a coincidence. I just had this discussion with a few of my friends. We were discussing the ideas that technology seems to be progressing at incredible speeds. From there we crossed over to the discussion of information and the “wealth” of information that we now have access to. In today’s age, we can figure out what’s going on in any remote part of the world at any give moment, a luxury our previous generations did not have.
However, this is exactly where the debates began. It is amazing how much information we have access to, but as you stated, that does not mean we have any more knowledge. If anything, we may actually be dumb-ing ourselves down. We don’t bother learning anything, so it seems, because we can just look it up. And now with the technological push of ‘smart’ phones, we always have access to the requested information. How often have we caught ourselves or someone else saying, to google it if you don’t know. Look at school for example, who even knows how to set up essay formats or bibliography pages anymore, there are websites that are plug-and-play for such small details.
Then to go one step further, we are twittering information on a scale of 140 characters, hoping to try and convey the full message meaning. Information yes, knowledge, not so much!

Most recently, I have come across scenarios where individuals think or speak more than they actually know. It sometimes gets to be an uncomfortable situation. I do believe it is because of technology that it is so easy to go look up illegitimate statistics and come up with irrational conclusions. It is only normal for this to happen. Being in Washington, D.C, our nations capitol, I have experienced a lot of moments where people are basically slandering information because they saw it on a website. We must learn how to take information and put it to use and in turn build our knowledge.

According to TIGAIR, contemporary societies are facing a furious increase in information on all levels of life. “Individuals and organizations engage in a frenetic spiral of generating new pieces of information at increasing speed,” TIGAIR said its their personal website. This simply underscores the topic of your blog: societies are faced with increased information, but not necessarily knowledge. The Global Village is a massive place and it is no wonder citizens confuse the difference between information and knowledge: it is tragic that more than half of our waking moments are spent bombarded in mindless information, which we are beginning to shut out. Is it not interesting that the faster the information increases the more people become inattentive, bored, unsatisfied, hyper, ungrateful….

i agree with jasmine’s comment on this, i feel like we as a society have too much access to random knowledge today because of the internet. we can look up too many things and piece together little bits of information that dont necessarily go together, and just because we saw it online we think that it is credible. take any one of the numerous blogs online these days. many of them report on things stating that it is fact when really it is just opinion, opinion based on things that they read , but opinion nonetheless. if we were careful and learned how to analyze and make informed decision with the information that we are given, then i believe that the internet’;s wealth of information is a great thing. however, if we continue to believe everything we see and tell others about it and state it as fact, then the internet can be a dangerous, slanderous, fallacious thing.

I have to say that I agree with you, that just because there is information available at your fingertips does not mean that it is reliable. Anyone can say anything they want about anything or anyone on the internet. I recently read quite a few news stories about the earthquake that was centered just east of Greentown, Indiana and I found that many stories were reporting conflicting facts. So the question remains: How do you know what information is reliable?

The government has the ability today to connect with us in so many ways today through various media sources; “facts” are available everywhere throughout the web through varied sources. With all this information available to us, how do we as consumers decipher what is factual from what is rhetoric? The White House is able to disburse information in more traditional sources, such as the Presidential News Conference, press releases and briefings, but now has the ability to share information via social media, blogging, Youtube, Twitter, etc. As this information is disbursed from official sources and then disseminated out, opined on, and blogged about, facts become merged with opinions. The ease with which information, facts, and opinions can be spread today makes it all the more important that media sources are clear on what is fact and what is opinion. But it also makes it all the more important that each of us is media literate enough to separate the two and form our own conclusions and opinions based on the information we receive; understanding that there may be a bias from the source and not simply reciting facts we read as gospel.

A lot of people say the Web has most influenced journalism by putting an emphasis on speed over accuracy and quantity over quality. But this post brings up another good point about how the Web is changing journalism: it’s reducing the important role of the gatekeeper. As John Vivian says in The Media of Mass Communication, “news work is a team effort.” Along the way, gatekeepers such as editors help to add context, trim unnecessary information, check the facts and keep the story balanced. But mounting pressure to compete with the Internet (along budget cutbacks in the news business) is cutting out the gatekeepers. Many traditional news outlets now have their reporters blogging and posting videos directly on the Web. As a result, it’s less likely the content has been vetted by a gatekeeper – or even proofread. It’s funny to see how traditional news organizations criticize citizen journalists for presenting unedited information, considering the traditional news organizations are guilty of doing the same thing.

While reading this post, I was reminded of a song one of my son’s favorite cartoon characters (Wow Wow Wubbzy) sings in which he warns “too much of a good thing is not a good thing for anyone”. Thanks to the Internet, we have at our fingertips a wealth of information; so much information, in fact, that it’s hard to focus our attention or spend more than a few minutes digesting each online article before clicking over to the next. We either feel like we have to read every article (or at least some part of each one) or we just have to trust the first source we come across. Of course, the logic behind both of these assumptions is faulty: If we trust just one Internet source, we must blindly accept that this source is 100% factual and bias-free, and if we skim through a number of articles, we don’t read enough to get to the meat of the issue, the latter resulting in the problem described in this post…we know a lot but understand a little. Understanding how stretched audiences feel and how competitive the Internet market is for their attention, journalists often feel rushed to publish their information to the web first, risking accuracy. In addition, providing in-depth articles or investigative reports is too time consuming and costly for news organizations that know their audiences aren’t going to read them in their entirety anyway. In this way, the children’s song lyric I mentioned is true. Information overload on the Internet is not a good thing for media consumers (who learn a lot of facts, but still sport little understanding) or Internet journalism (which folds to the pressures of financial success by giving online audiences shorter, less insightful articles).