"People keep telling me that we’re living on an Information Superhighway. But that’s not true.
"The flow of information today is more like a river. A very polluted river.
"Folks have been dumping their crap into our information flows for a long, long time....
"Some of them do it just for kicks.
"It’s gotten worse lately. A whole lot worse. Just look at the polluted streams of information in your own life, and try to find a single safe space where the data stream is fresh and clean.
"Some of us have stopped even trying....
""In the last 12 months, the garbage inflows into our culture have increased exponentially. As a result, nothing is harder to find now than actual information—which I define as 'knowledge based on demonstrable or reliable facts.'
"The result is a crisis of trust unlike anything seen before in modern history.
"Do you think I’m exaggerating?
"Let me ask you a question. If your job was to destroy access to reliable information in our society, how would you do it?
"You would start with the 30 steps outlined here: '30 Signs You Are Living in an Information Crap-pocalypse.' ... Consider [it] as a checklist to determine the health of your own information sources....
"The gold standard is trust, not information. A single trustworthy voice is worth more than ten thousand bot-written articles.
"Our society as a whole hasn’t figured this out yet. But nothing prevents you from taking prudent steps on your own. Find those trusted voices—nurture them, support them, and spread the word.
"They are our cleansing agents. They are the pure streams in a polluted ecosystem. They are our emerging counterculture—still fragile now but gathering momentum. Soon enough, others will join us. In the meantime, don’t swim in those dirty waters."~ Ted Gioia, from his post '30 Signs You Are Living in an Information Crap-pocalypse'
Tuesday, 4 July 2023
"People keep telling me that we’re living on an Information Superhighway. But that’s not true."
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You might also consider this tale of woe from a writer dealing with the modern world, where many/most long-form non-fiction pieces are actually set up in advance as bait for a Hollywood option:
This is more or less how most editors I know describe what they want these days. One—clearly hoping to land stories that would get bought for film since he was hardly offering enough money to make writing a feature for him worth it otherwise—recently sent me a call asking for “ripping yarns, stories of true crime, of loves lost and won. Rivalries in sports, tech, and entertainment. Chronicles of dreams realized and broken. We want to take readers on spell-binding adventures, introduce them to powerful jerks they don’t know (or don’t know enough about), weirdos, eccentrics, and folks in search of redemption.”
This email almost made me throw my laptop off my balcony.
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