As Professor McKinney mentioned in class today, the news that Osama Bin Laden had been shot dead was all over Twitter before the mainstream media or President Obama made any official annoucement. Although the news did not come from the White House directly, it has been reported that the information came from reputable sources associated with the White House with former ties to the US government.
Professor McKinney also commented on how quickly the information spread and that even the President has no control over the spread of official information. This reminded of the kid’s game Telephone and how the Internet is just a giant version of this game. In my opinion, modern technologies and the type of communication they allow for is less fact-based and more about hear-say. There is no real control of the type of information posted anywhere on the Internet. As a result, people are free to post the truth and its corresponding lies. They can also make up anything about everything. Or they may simply misunderstand the information they receive online.
This leads me to wonder: what, then, is the purpose of the Internet if there is no security and confidence in the information we receive? Personally, the vast amounts of information available on the Internet and anonymity of the people posting this information makes me paranoid about the whole situation. If there are so many false accounts of information out in the world, who’s to say that we won’t eventually forget the truth?
(This is somewhat unrelated, but this Tumblr post shows how information and images can be easy altered to deliver a message or convey a feeling.)
This is a very interesting topic and one that has come up in more than one of my classes. The internet has the ability to quickly inform many people about certain information, whether it be true or not. In my political science class we talked about this phenomenon calling it the YouTube effect, meaning that YouTube and other internet social media sites have come to bypass actual news channels and sites themselves. Before the internet there was the CNN effect which had political influence and was a way for the media to be an agenda-setting agent, but once the internet grew the YouTube effect came into play and was a way for “citizen journalists” to have their say. It was no longer credible news sources reporting news but it was news coming for every corner of the internet. Twitter trending news breaking topics and YouTube releasing raw and uncensored news worthy videos. Like it was said in class, the way that news spreads these days is very interesting and with more and more individuals on the internet the spread of news has become more instant, but has also come with a price as the credibility of this information has become blurred.
The internet plays a great part on events of the world. It was said that someone from Pakistan was actually tweeting live when the whole mission was taking place, but didn’t know what was really going on. Everyone tries to keep everything a secret, but they never know about the third party keeping tabs on them. If someone from the white house was tweeting about this mission before it was known to the world, the whole process of the DNA and moving his body and so on could had been compromised. Sometimes we don’t think about the whole picture before we announced to half the world what is going on. Im pretty sure if he tweeted this then he/she must had broken some sort of confidentiality agreement of some sort.
-Armenis Perez