Be careful to check your source’s.

 Subject: Fwd: Be careful to check your source’s.



The fertility of a nimble mind is catered for by the inputs we give it. A book lays open where you left off reading, a television channel churns out its messages as Spotify soothes us in the background and all these stimulations crowd the brain with often unrelated thoughts. Does this fragmentation of our attention span help or hinder since we are soaking up information at a prodigious rate far greater than when your attention was fixed on an encyclopaedia, with all its fact checked information. Today we don’t need facts and rather settle for an ‘outline’ which we fill in along the way.

Of course knowing things by accident rather than by intention has many short comings since the information is gathered from quite spurious sources. The rumour mill, fake news, propaganda are all sources of information we should steer clear of, the more salacious the story the more we should question it and sadly many media channels have been monitoriesed to appeal to the baser parts of our interest span. It’s easier to take the word of the influencer than to dig deeper and spend time researching a little more thoroughly but if our lives feel the world is full of inconsequential stories and only that which touches us directly is important then ‘You Tube, X, Tick Tock’ and the like are the neighbourhoods to get lost in.

“Don’t believe all you see and hear on the BBC” is the claim taken up by the influencer, and of course every story has more than one side to it but at least the output of the established media reporter has much more substance than the hysterical rant projected as political bile from the more recently formed media companies who’s prime aim is to do what the Murdoch Press did to news print back in the 80s and who incidentally owns the same organisations now established as outlets both here and America.

It’s one thing to have poorly resourced news and information but when it’s deliberately misreported with the intention of misleading and fostering harm then we are in danger of misunderstanding important aspects of what we need to understand to make sense of what is happening. Of course there are many who simply don’t care as long as they can banter in the ‘Dog and Whistle’ but a society is only whole and healthy if it is confident in knowing its position on certain important things. Its position might vary from your own but at least the language and the concepts give us room to communicate. Shrill, bear pit bating is not communication and whilst for some it may be entertaining it’s certainly not educating.

I remember the days of black and white TV and debates between AJ Ayre, the philosopher and the Archbishop of London on the existence of god. Each word, each sentence was evaluated (as best we could) as my dad and I sat mesmerised, listening to academically trained minds who had spent their individual lives following a different track on this most fundamental question, “is there a god”. Of course it’s a subject without a definitive answer as only the call on faith guides the answer one way, alternatively a deep scepticism which pertains to all religious faith, defines the other. A good media in those times allowed the space and time to develop one’s own view, today views are manufactured for you and simply fed as fact.