Information Pollution

I have one, you have one, our neighbours have one and our relatives have one too.

What is it? Nah, it’s not an “Opinion”. It’s a NAME.

We all have the freedom to______, nah not express, but to remain silent and THINK.

Mass technology combined with the above two misunderstandings have created chaos around us.

Chaos by the way is pronounced as “kay aus” and not “chaa os”. #Justsaying coz that seems to be the “TREND”.

“I shall speak because I have a mouth” is amplified by the number of social media apps one has access to. “I shall think because I have a brain” can neither be amplified nor be shown-off easily.

Welcome to the age where we need a “Dummy’s Guide book” for forwarding crap on these media.

I still receive “Urgent” Blood requests that are 10 years old.

We have a barrage of research results that differ by the dozen. The one you receive in the morning says don’t eat fruits on an empty stomach and don’t drink water in a certain way; One that warns us of the ills of walking after dinner. Then you receive another message in the evening that is exactly the opposite. Well, I’ve wasted my precious minutes going through these; I’m now morally obliged to follow one of them. It’s OUR choice as they say. The real question is which one to believe?

The one who wrote OR forwarded it to us did their job. They informed us. Mind you, the article you read in a magazine was researched on the internet that was written by some lazy ass after reading a few assorted international newspapers, which in turn was also researched by their local websites. It’s a vicious cycle.

There were qualified journalists and TV reporters and there were qualified critics.

We were taught that we had a pre-historic era; A time when our ancestors did not document events. They just lived, did their thing and perished. Some genius decided to change that, least realizing it would some day snowball into an overwhelming amount of information, that mankind cannot digest.

I guess we don’t realize the dangers of this evil. My wife coined this term and ever since she mentioned the term, it’s been haunting me. 

More than the Global Warming or Cleaning of Ganges, we MUST be worried about 

“Information Pollution”.

Today, the source of any information is dubious and unreliable.

Do we really believe what we read or consume?

It’s random data that is being force-fed to us in the guise of information.

The blind forwarding of fake death messages or someone’s illness just makes me throw up.

Some weird warnings of the Ebola virus having entered a certain city and claiming it’s first victim etc. Our friends believe this and forward it to us assuming it’s better to be safe than sorry – not realizing the damage their act is doing. And our kids are growing up in “THIS” environment.

There’s enough pollution around. Let information not be one of them. After all, Information is KNOWLEDGE. Any risk to knowledge can be catastrophic.

Can sanity be restored? Can Information Pollution be reversed?

The answer is certainly a “YES”.

Yet again, this is something you and me have to do something about.

There’s a simple solution. “Trust BUT VERIFY”.