Despite being a great tool, social media (and yes this forum is social media in my opinion) does have many problems. But lets not pretend it's a problem limited to youngsters - look at the demographics of Facebook users. Middle aged adults just don't want to admit it.
@pansyface, I actually quite like ‘I’m a celebrity get me out of here’
I was sorry to see Russell Watson evicted tonight; when my wife had her first brain tumour he sent her a very warm, thoughtful card expressing his best wishes.
Russell Watson is a highly successful and popular ‘operatic tenor’ from Lancashire. A few years ago he was taken very ill with a brain tumour ... this was operated on but a couple of years later it regrew and caused a bad bleed on the brain leading to emergency surgery and radiotherapy etc. and it’s been a long road back to relative health ... a long period of rehab. A really fine voice and he seems to be a really decent chap.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
Oh. I googled the name but only came up with an American football player. 🙄
That'll be Russell Wilson. Can't quite imagine him belting out Nessun Dorma on 3rd and long
Incidentally (and apologies if someone has already made this point), the issue with misleading information is not the medium used to disseminate it, but the general decline in critical thinking skills. Print media has always published stories of questionable truth or simply biased to a certain way of thinking - it just seems that information on the internet, be it Wikipedia or Facebook, is more susceptible to being accepted as fact without question.
Do you think it's only a critical thinking problem? When we had only the press (and TV) we were all aware of the bias. Now, the source of the information is largely unknown - and the same stories proliferate across many sources. Then tack in 'the bubble' (much the same as reading a biased paper - but 24x7) whereby online users get bombarded with stuff that algorithms think they like - so end up seeing stuff that constantly reinforces their bias.
I'm not sure that it's a lack of critical thinking only, but more that even the most insane stories take on a life of their own if they're repeated enough and appear to come from different sources.
@strelitzia32 -- I think it is at least as much also the audience reach / negligible barrier to entry for disseminating information as any decline in critical thinking. Print media has a more limited reach , and there is at least some hurdle (one can self publish a print pamphlet/newspaper and go to the effort of volume distribution - not a low cost exercise). Online-- I know next to nothing about gardening but little stops me from setting up an authentic-looking website "pretending". The lay reader has little way of differentiating good info from bad info. There is plenty of good info out there, its just harder to find among the volume of fluff.
edit to add : did not mean this as a criticism of your post and I see @steveTu made similar points but types faster! so please don't interpret this as a piling-on personal attack in any form.
@josusa47. Your smart tv can listen, your smart phone can listen ,your laptop can watch.
Really? That's great - I've been spreading the Christian gospel all this time, and I didn't even know it! Praise the Lord! He really does move in mysterious ways.
Posts
I was sorry to see Russell Watson evicted tonight; when my wife had her first brain tumour he sent her a very warm, thoughtful card expressing his best wishes.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
That'll be Russell Wilson. Can't quite imagine him belting out Nessun Dorma on 3rd and long
Incidentally (and apologies if someone has already made this point), the issue with misleading information is not the medium used to disseminate it, but the general decline in critical thinking skills. Print media has always published stories of questionable truth or simply biased to a certain way of thinking - it just seems that information on the internet, be it Wikipedia or Facebook, is more susceptible to being accepted as fact without question.
edit to add : did not mean this as a criticism of your post and I see @steveTu made similar points but types faster! so please don't interpret this as a piling-on personal attack in any form.