I love the internet! Thanks to a live-feed web cam I can watch killer whales breach off of Kauai, in real time! From Virginia! (Mahalo Bali Hai!) If I want a recipe for gazpacho, Google will find me 1,630,000, in 0.12 seconds! Social networks keep me...social and breaking news is literally at my fingertips. Yep, the web is a wonderful thing...except when it's not.
Savvy to the potential dangers that can lurk in the shadows of our global village I practice 'safe-search'. No identity theft, cyber(ly)-transmitted viruses (ctv's) or unwanted pop-ups for me! Lame content though is another matter. Once quarantined to personal blogs (yes, I do see the irony), Facebook entries and the nether-reaches of our virtual universe, fact-lacking, time-wasting, article-posing blurbs have spread pandemically. Msn, fox news and the Huffington Post were just a few of many purported news sites that ran a report recently about the bad tip someone left a waitress!?!
When publishing is as easy as hitting the send button I guess I shouldn't be surprised by an influx of non-news news stories...but c'mon! Shouldn't they at least be interesting or informative? Sadly, the source is no longer something to consider when trying to judge a story's import - major sites run with the sensational and/or stupid as often as the tabloids now. Journalism (at least as it is practiced on-line) has devolved into content providing where quality is measured in clicks.
In this age of instant access rumourmongering has replaced research; corrections are no longer the exception, they are the rule! Today's article will often go through several on-line rewrites before the true story emerges! Just look at the tale of a boy put in a washing machine that metamorphosed in the online media over several days! Don't expect any mea culpas for misinformation either; accuracy, it would seem, is no longer a point of professional pride. For these re-tellers it's seeing their piece go viral!
