The New Digital World

This presidential election is one for the history books. I turned 40 this past April and haven't really cared or paid to much attention to Politics until I was 30 yars old. How much can a President really impact my day to day life anyway? Well while Bush has been in office I have received several checks from the stimulus package that directly impacted my check book in the form of cold hard cash. Which I always like. This was basically my money anyway Congress just decided to give the money back to me. As a get older I find myself getting more interested in what is happening in both local and national politics.

In a very short period of time access to information has gone from 4 TV channels and handful of radio stations to hundreds of cable TV shows, 1000's of satellite radio stations on top of the local radio stations, and do not forget the Internet. This new Digital World has created to much information for the average pin head to digest. Recently I read an article from Harry Lewis, who is a computer science professor at Harvard. (Click here for the story)

In this article written for the Boston Herald Harry mentions that the interactivity of the media, the atomization of knowledge and the premium on rapid response result in a collective loss of wisdom, judgment and perspective? It is amzing how incorrect information can be posted with little if any consequence.

For instance, recent blogs and other web media site reported that if Obama wins, he is going to be sworn in on a Koran instead of the Bible. Or that Trig isn't SarahPalin's baby, it's her daughter Bristol's. Or, Obama refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance. Here's the list of books Palin wanted to ban from the library ...

All these claims, none of them true, turned up in the e-mail inboxes of millions of Americans this summer. In spite of both campaigns' efforts to correct the record about their candidates, the rumors linger on and spread. Amazing how the national media used to be objective. Or at least that is what we are told. Growing up in the 70's and graduated from High School in '86 I never really paid attention, but now it is so obvious that Keith Oberman is a very Liberal supporter of the Democrats. NBC and CBS are so one sided in their reporting it is hard to take anything they report seriously. The good thing about all of this new technologies we have at our finger tips is that the average person can Google just about anything and verify information as a way to Fact Check what a particular candidate says or news report. Using site like factcheck.org or snopes.com can debunk most inaccurate reports.

So eventually these stories get sorted out and corrected right? Not really. The impact can be huge and sometime irreversible. Harry Lewis point out in his article the destructive nature of what can happen. On Sept. 7, a Bloomberg News online site posted a headline about the bankruptcy of United Airlines. Within minutes, the company's stock dropped from US$11 to $3, wiping out a billion dollars in networth. The headline was erroneous. A news story from 2002, when United actually had declared bankruptcy, inexplicably crawled out of its digital cave on Sept. 6 and turned up as a Google search result. Human negligence (anyone reading the story itself would have realized that it was not current) and urgency to spread the word (anyone delaying a response for a few seconds might lose millions of dollars) combined to produce the implosion.

So are we as a nation getting dumber becasue we have access to much information?