I have been pained to follow some of the worst things that are happening around the world – the conflict in Gaza, Ukraine, Ebola virus and continued issues in Iraq. I have been amazed how information gets passed around instantaneously now. However, this also has the downside that those who report about these events have not had time to fully understand all issues and report objectively. To make things worse, others react to these information instantaneously, without even thinking about it. Some were complaining in social media about why it is a bad idea to bring two american citizens affected by the Ebola Virus, especially Donald Trump!

Information distribution and consumption have always been problematic because of the subjective nature of the very subject. Whereas those who create “information” for the consumption by the others try very hard to be objective and factual, preconceived notions and biases almost always find their ways in. Whether it is news reporters, editors or scholars, this is true though we have had checks and balances in place to reduce the subjectivity and biases. In many cases, personal opinions are clearly identified. However, when an entire news organization has a certain bias right from the top of the organization, as perceived by those who consume the information, regardless of how the information is distributed, the consumers assume a certain bias.

All of these have gotten worse with the advances in technologies. The world wide web and more recently the social media have become an outlet for instantaneous information and this has added tremendous complexities to the information, primarily, trust. Prof Metaxas from the Computer Science department at Wellesley studies the (mis) information propagation in Twitter, which provides an excellent introduction to this topic. 

Many of us have formed opinions on where we are likely to get information that is reliable and is of interest to us based on our own internal criteria. It is so surprising to see how intolerant many of us are to the contrarian information portals. Liberals studiously avoid the likes of FOX News and conservatives avoid the likes of MSNBC and NY Times. Or, we follow folks on Facebook or Twitter who largely tend to share our own interests and generally agree with us on principles. As a result of this, information bias by a poster gets posted to other followers who share it with others, resulting in a snowball propagation.

Though there are serious dialogs and debates in the social media, it is rarely amongst people within a network. In other words, if we gather socially with friends, we may discuss and debate about things that we are highly unlikely to do in the social media (for a variety of added complexities of the medium).  In fact, many a times the debates tend to get ugly and the person who is deemed as the violator of the social media norm is shut out by people unfollowing him.

The very fact that Facebook has only a Like link and not an Unlike button or Inappropriate link tells us that we all should play nice.

This new mode of information dissemination and consumption has resulted in serious disruptions in many industries, especially newspapers and TV. It is impossible to see a TV news outlet these days which does not show twitterfeed during news or their own twitter handles. Despite this disruption, we seem to have very few mishaps. Of course we often get partial or incorrect information that subsequently gets corrected. But, relative to the volume of information that is available, these mishaps seem to be relatively small. I think we all have adopted to this new medium and seem to have developed the checks and balances necessary. We may have enthusiastically followed a person or two and over a period of time, we may find that these people are not appropriate to follow either because we have determined them not trustworthy or that they seem to have an agenda that does not sit well with us.

And then there are search engines which we use. Whereas search engines are getting better and introducing reliability and trust metrics of various kinds to serve the most reliable information, they are subjective too. There are biases introduced such as the frequency of visits to particular types of sites or news items by the user who is searching. And, I am not sure about you, but I hardly go beyond the first page of a search, sorry! There is no single social gathering that goes by without me hearing from someone that “I read that on the web”. You know the problem with this – where on the web?, how do you know it is authentic?

We need to find objective ways to search for reliable information that we want to consume. Our librarians help students find the most reliable and appropriate information. Mostly, this revolves around scholarly works, but the hope is that these good habits are also used when it comes to all information. Because of the vast nature of information that is being generated today, we also need to think about a technological solution to this. Currently, they are mostly crowdsourced ratings, reviews and the likes. But, I am skeptical about some of these. How do I know that the vendors are not hiring people to say nothing but great things about their product?

In terms of all the news around the world that is pretty depressing, frankly, I rarely express my personal opinions on explosive subjects. The problem is that I will never be able to articulate it correctly in 140 characters and I can tell that whatever I say in Facebook using longer text will be misinterpreted by some portion of my followers. I will stick to being “Liked” in social media and discuss the hot topics with friends when we meet, like we have always done!