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[Atypical-Abbie]

I was going to make this a status update, but I had a lot more to say than I thought, so here's a thread for it instead:

 

It's amazing how little we under-appreciate the fact that we can find out any piece of information in a manner of seconds, simply by typing a few letters into a search engine and immediately get an answer, like some magic genie. Simply wondering who invented ice cream or if Earth really is round was something that could take hours, days or months to figure out if you simply didn't know anyone with the answer, couldn't find it in a book, and even then, it may be outdated or misinformed, yet somehow that is seen as more reliable to some people, just because it takes longer to find.

 

I have lived with this ability as a given for most of my life, it was slower to get the information, but it was still easy, and that privilege is one I don't know if I could go back to living without. I don't think there has been a day in years where I haven't searched something on the internet, either through Google, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or wherever, but it's such a critical thing, somehow able to understand my weird sentence structures to find what I was looking for in the first result almost every time.

 

Information on the internet is not bad information just because it's on the internet, why you think it can be is because you aren't researching the right way, you always go with the first result, your gut instinct and personal bias will drive you to places that prove what you think already is right, not what is actually correct fact, unbiased and researched, compared to your experience you had as a child that is completely unreliable. You must have multiple sources, you must read more than just the headline, but that is simply too much effort these days. It's unfortunate that we are so early in the days of the internet that the people who never had it are confused by it, and the people who do have it are too lazy to do more than the bare minimum.

 

I hope that one day in the future, we will have learned how to properly use search engines, and the internet in general, because everyone wants you to know what they feel, rather than what is true. It doesn't seem to matter if you have a source, they will discredit it, call it false, "fake news" may even be thrown into the mix, but what's even scarier is when there is no source to begin with. How do I trust you when you have no basis for your claims? Yet so many do, and I am sure you can think of many people who talk out of their asses on this sort of thing.

 

I have been thinking about this for some time now, it's unavoidable really, with so many news stories covering the ignorant behavior seen in the flat-earth movement, anti-vaxx movement, and politics in all parts of the world just being a laughing-stock. I was especially inspired by a video series by Crash Course, which I think is going to be the first step in eventually teaching people how to be better informed. I suggest checking out the series they made, it's quite interesting and useful: