- Social media created an immediate soap box for everyone, and a way for unhealthy ideas to propagate quicker and more virally. It encourages vanity, inhibition, and unrealistic expectations. Then there’s the whole corporate element, where the mainstream of these platforms are truly just systems of data collection and manipulation.
- Dead internet theory coming in nicely
- The early advent of the internet had high hopes it would be used for the sharing of information. It indeed is, but the most widely used search engines are weighted to point you towards curated and questionable sources of information. This is purposeful, and often capitalistically motivated versus educational.
- There’s more, but I’m tired and didn’t expect to type all this out, so I’ll leave it for the comments.
It’s one medium that can lead people to misinformation, but the pros far outweigh the cons. Education, sharing of vital information in real time, communication, and connections before unavailable with friends and relatives exist because of the Internet. It’s rapidly being policies down a dark rabbit hole of shit policies. Blaming bad journalism and bad actors on the Internet is like blaming the roads when someone is killed by a drunk driver.
If only there were things like education, books, etc.
They do exist but they’re not as easily accessible. I remember reading through the dated information of encyclopedias doing projects in school. Information on the Internet is readily available and updated in a timely manner as new information is gathered.
There are also plenty of books and other education resources that are full of bad information. There are many things taught in schools that aren’t true.
The source of information is the problem, not the medium it lives on.