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0 Final Journey 1

The Journey Between "book consistency" and "the rise of social media and the rise of misinformation"

One item that became apparent to me throughout my research in this class was the spread of misinformation, and the problems faced throughout the rise of the internet. Misinformation has been a common theme within all different types of communication, and has risen greatly with the development of the internet.

The story begins with book consistency. Before the internet, including telegrams, etc, books were the primary form of information transfer. Regarding the definition of a book, a book can be represented as a piece of literature, or possibly a verbal transfer of a story. Therefore, for a book to be passed to you, it had to have been written by someone. In this time, you could not recieve information from someone in a different continent from you. If you were to seek information about a certain topic, you would seek out someone knowledgable about this topic. It was common that the person you would seek out would be an expert, and credible about the information you are searching for.

However, books were also a source of knowledge, rather than seeking knowledge from a person themselves. If you were to study a topic, it would likely be through a book. data integrity was a common cause of misinformation within these books. How are you to know that the book you are actively reading is the book you are intending to read? How are you to know that the person who wrote the book is a credible author? These are all questions that without an answer, can cause the spread of misinformation.

In times like these, the amount of information of available was small. This brings to rise the main issues of these times, which was misinformation often being taken as true, for the sole reason that it was often times the only information available. The professor who ran the @bookLab gave a great argument about the ambiguity of books. A piece of information within a book may be correct, but it could be understood by a reader as something different than the author was intending. Now, if a reader were to pass on this information, say by rewriting the knowledge, or verbally passing it to another, there has now been a spread of misinformation, which can be spread even further by the people who recieved this knowledge.

Now, moving further down the line of technological advancement, we reach the era of fax machines. @coopersmithFaxedRiseFall2015 explained the issue of data integrity with regards to this method of communication. The author gave examples of how fax machine would occasionally mess up letters, such that "‘Mother-in-law dead hurry’ will be altered to ‘Mother-in-law dead Hurray,’ or something like that". Thus, misinformation was spread.

However, much of this misinformation spread was unintentional. This changed with the rise of the internet, and digital privacy.

With the rise of digital privacy, specifically pseudonyms, misinformation began to spread more intentionally. While it was not the case that misinformation was never spread intentionally before this, it was a lot more difficult, as people knew where the information was coming from, and if it was found that a person was spreading misinformation, there could be concequences. Now, spreading misinformation is a common occurance on the internet.

pseudonyms allow for a user on a website to hide their identity under a different name, with many websites making minimal other information public to other users on the site. This means that there is a different sense of free speech, this sense being that anyone can say what they want without it being tied to their physical identity. Therefore, there was a the rise of social media and the rise of misinformation.

The author of the article @publisher11EvolutionInternet2016 said that with the rise of current social media websites, “we can consider the opinions of complete strangers who may never write in traditional print;” (Publisher, 2016, p. 1). Thus explaining that strangers who would not dare to write in traditional print, now will write publicly because there identity can be concealed. As such, not only has the amount of misinformation spread, the extent to which the information is incorrect has greatly increased. Spreading potentially harmful information is something that is now extremely common, as there is little to no concequences for doing so.

And so, through this information, I have come to realize the importance of understanding the spread of misinformation and how it has changed, and now have more respect for taking everything you see on the internet with a grain of salt. With the sheer mass amounts of information available, it is easy to see how misinformation can be spread, and the harm that it can cause. The evolution of the internet has changed how misinformation has spread, and the type of misinformation that is spreading, as well as the outcome when recieving misinformation.

And who knows, maybe this is misinformation I'm spreading to you (its not) :)