Where Are You Getting This Information From?

by The Monkey on 11/25/07 filed under Myths & Wives' Tales

Just Because Someone Says It Doesn’t Mean It’s True

If credible information is so abundant, why are people ready to believe anything?

I sit in Office Space style cubicles at work again, which makes overhearing conversations both easy and frequent. By my fourth day on the job, I identified a gentlemen one department (and one row) over who enjoys impressing his co-workers with his ‘knowledge’.

One day, he argued that the moon was moving towards the earth and would eventually collide with our planet. His co-workers responded with an array of comments like “I don’t want to be around that day.” I couldn’t’ believe they bought into this claim.

From one row over, this conversation caught my attention from the start. I thought it was common knowledge that everything in space, including the individual entities in our universe, were moving away from each other. I didn’t know why anyone would agree with the guy. I decided to check my facts before making a fool of myself.

Well, it took me roughly ten minutes on Google to come up with this many sources that claim he’s wrong. In fact, it took me longer to code those hyperlinks for this post than to find them on the web. This time my skepticism turned out to be right.

Where Are You Getting This Information From

Am I being too hard on this one guy? Probably. Is it unfair to associate this one guy’s attitude towards people in general? Absolutely not!

There is a ton of information out there. We are constantly bombarded with information from the web, TV, radio, and the guy sitting on cubicle row over. But is it all good information? There are a few types of websites that serve up bogus information on a regular basis.

• Wikipedia is constantly under fire for the validity of its information since contribution guidelines are usually relaxed. I won’t even get into the edit wars. The content suffers. Many colleges frown upon students who cite it in papers.
• ARS Technica reports that 80 percent of blogs contain offensive words. What does that say about their content? Are blogs a credible source of information? Or just someone’s little spot on the web to keep a personal diary?
• There are a ton of sites that simply offer up what readers they want to hear. Two examples are Peta.org and PETA Kills Animals. I’m not saying that these sites contain false information, but they often (conveniently) leave out information that contradicts their point.

And these are just websites, one media type.

Pick and Choose

With tons of information coming at us from every direction, many people have a filtering system. One of my UAT professors referred to this as the brain’s crap filter. In theory, this filter sifts through content and weeds out false or uninteresting information.

However, I’m realizing that not everyone has a strong crap filter. Regardless of age, some people are impressionable. A small group of co-workers recently illustrated this to me. The youngest person in this group has at least 10 years on me. What was intended to be small talk turned out to be a terrible first impression for me.

So How Good Is Your Crap Filter?

Well…?