This is sadly true. Together with people tending to believe what they hear on social media is more likely to be true than what comes through more established media. Also in one of my particular areas of interest, history, people believing new ideas almost only because they are new regardless of the established record, and learning their history from entertainment films. Saving Private Ryan is not a documentary.
I think social media gives people the chance to spread information and to subject that information to the scrutiny of millions of others. If somebody finds info they can then tell others. IMO It is infinitly superior to the established media (if by that you mean MSM and TV) because that is information AT YOU and in the case of the UK very much from only one side of an argument. I agree with you on History from films especially when Holywood has a habit of completely distorting it. With history, as you will know, you have to do a lot of reading on any one event to get a decent perspective. Reading A book is rarely enough and depending on who it's written by can be very misleading. TV documentarys can be very helpful just as long as you use them as a beginning to your understanding and not as a definitive finish.
"This is sadly true. Together with people tending to believe what they hear on social media is more likely to be true than what comes through more established media." Social media and comment boards are the Internet equivalent of daytime TV. For any bit of nonsense you wish to put out there, the number of times tis propagated will dwarf by orders of magnitude the number of times a correct refutation will be.
Spurf Social media is just as able to disseminate false information as mainstream media, possibly faster due to the speed with which it can forwarded. Once ideas are planted and people hear it from disparate sources it becomes fact to many, whether on not it is true. Social media deals in sound bites and snapshots. Considered lengthy opinions do not get attention. When I was at university my group was split into four. Each small group was given a series of 10 photographs about the miners' strike. We were tasked with providing a 2 minute news broadcast from differing perspectives, BBC, ITV, NBC and Russian World News. From identical limited data given to us all came four widely varying versions of events due to effect we wished to have on our audience. It showed that without full access to all information none of us are able to discern the truth. These days not many people have the time to do their own research and make their own decisions, but rely on conclusions given to them by others. Possibly the only time the Sun said something accurate was when it ran the headline "it's the Sun wot won it" referring to a General Election result
Exactly. Nothing spreads faster, or gets distorted more quickly than a rumour masquerading as fact. Personally, whilst media reporting is not always accurate and can be biased, I think it is more likely to contain elements of true fact that something than has been disseminated via social media.
"Nothing spreads faster, or gets distorted more quickly than a rumour masquerading as fact. Personally, whilst media reporting is not always accurate and can be biased, I think it is more likely to contain elements of true fact that something than has been disseminated via social media." The difference between the Internet operations and traditional media wings of big entities (such as the BBC) are clear. The speed and ease of output on the former means the degree of due diligence tradtionally done by / expected of the latter goes out the window in the race to say anything first.
Well yes, all the major media outlets have an Internet presence. That, of course, will disseminate info faster than the traditional newspaper. I think the race to be first exists in both platforms nowadays.
"I think the race to be first exists in both platforms nowadays." But the due diligence process on the Internet form seems to be more lax,
Quick question: Does anybody believe that the current parties and/or the political system are looking out for their best interests or that of the country?
Of course it can but most of the YES campaign has been about LINKS from government stats, company balance sheets, offic of nat stats, as well as linking stories in the media so that people could check the facts and come back. With regard to time we have a complete strata of society working to one end and it's worked fantastically well. The media is just the tool the information depends on how you use it.
I can send all government stats or specific company stats. In other words you can send or receive the bare facts from the source, without interpretation and that is the value.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-29342142 A good example of the BBC this is reported 2 days AFTER the referendum And this one 2 days before http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-29277361 This and many others are examples of suspicious reporting by the BBC. Now we can circulate all this on the net and millions can see it. That is the value of social media.
News is that a 19 year old British jihadist from Brighton has been killed in the bombing..........................good riddance to the little prick.
Islam is causing paranoia. I read that an English girl was turned down for a student position because she was "Too English." That didn't make me chuckle, it made me yell, doormat England.
