Recognizing Disinformation And Misinformation
Disinformation is taking on such a strong course. Much like a snowball effect where its own gravity and mass is increasing at such a exponential rate. I wonder…where is this all going? Misinformation is the beginning of a course of disinformation. It is dangerous because it misleads the masses to incorrect thought which can breed fear and perpetual further misguided thinking. This slows society, creates discord amongst our neighbors, and is not good for spiritual enlightenment as we saw during cultural renaissance periods in the past.
Social media curates a dangerous misconception of the way the world is.
When you go to your favorite self re enforcing bubbles, you are just hearing your own views replicated and expanded on, which is polarizing. This drives people to more extreme views. This is why it is important to set boundaries on social media consumption. Read books. Listen to different opinions. Strengthen your alacrity for consuming resourceful knowledge.
We are active creators of our own knowledge and experiences.
When we face something new we have to reconcile it with our previous ideas and experiences: either we change what we believe or we discard this new information.
There is a rise of anti intellectualism. The dismissing of art, literature, and science. Now you don’t understand anything, you learn slogans. You have to learn to discovery and explore, know what it is. Repeating slogans and sayings isn’t knowledge or wisdom. Knowledge isn’t just repeating back facts, however, instead it is understanding the mechanisms that derived conclusions or thought patterns. Periods of renaissance in the past ushered in some of the most creative ideas, inventions, while uplifting society. This way art, music, and literature is so important to the soul. It gets your mind to think the way it was intended to. Purposeful and creative.
The philosopher Plato wrote the “Allegory Of The Cave”. This story depicts a group of people who have been chained inside a dark cave since birth, facing a wall. They can only see the shadows of objects and people projected onto the wall by a fire behind them. These shadows are their only reality, and they believe that the shadows are the true forms of the objects.story Social media platforms can be seen as modern-day caves, where users are exposed to curated content, often portraying an idealized version of people’s lives. Just like the prisoners in the cave, users may only see the ‘shadows’ of reality — highlight reels and carefully chosen moments — rather than the complete and genuine picture. The prisoners in the cave are cut off from the external world. Social media can sometimes lead to a similar sense of disconnect from real-life interactions and experiences. People might become so engrossed in their online personas and interactions that they lose touch with the depth and richness of face-to-face relationships. In Plato’s allegory, one prisoner is freed and exposed to the outside world, eventually discovering the true forms of reality. This can be seen as a parallel to the desire for genuine connection and information beyond the superficial content on social media. Just as the freed prisoner seeks enlightenment, some social media users seek more authentic interactions and reliable sources of information.
Plato’s Cave allegory and its themes of illusion, distorted perception, and the pursuit of truth can be connected to the impact of social media on how we perceive and engage with reality, often highlighting the potential for superficiality, echo chambers, and a disconnection from genuine experiences.
I was recently introduced to the concept of Constructivism. Constructivism is the theory that says learners construct knowledge rather than just passively take in information. As people experience the world and reflect upon those experiences, they build their own representations and incorporate new information into their pre-existing knowledge. As we progress with A.I. and the large growing chest of information on the internet, I think it is important for people to construct specific models around the way they engage information. Being that is environment is so new, it may take years for schools and institutions to take steps in augmenting curriculum to teach students about these fundamentals.
Society cannot sustain under the current model of ingesting information in these algorithm boxes. It will create too much confusion, fear, and destruction. If we think about it mathematically, the economy could experience a drag in productivity. Which will translate to less personal earnings and lower GDP. If you account for the time spend in distraction, add a multiplier effect of knowledge regression and mark this relative to prior conditions before the rise in misinformation, we would have to assume that we are taking a step back.
Every hour you spend consuming information that is misleading, that is an hour you could have spent educating yourself in resourceful content or getting an hour of productive work done. If society cannot recognize and make adjustments, collectively this is going to put downward pressure on growth in every aspect of our lives.
