The Internet Effect: Consuming Information in a Fake News Age

credit: Facebook

Did you hear about the man in Atlanta who went rogue inside an Ikea store by placing fake arrows on the floor, creating a labyrinth with no exit?

The story went viral last year and was shared on Facebook more than 8,100 times. That’s pretty impressive considering the site that published the story only has 22,000 Facebook followers and its posts typically get 20 to 30 shares.

If anyone clicked the link and read the story, it would have been clear that it was fake. In fact, the entire site, ThereIsNews.com, is satirical (much like the Onion). But in the social media age, it’s easy to share a link with a catchy headline without actually reading the story or finding out if it is true.

In this case, the story was funny and pretty harmless, but that isn’t always the case. In 2016, Pizzagate made headlines after an internet hoax became very real when a North Carolina man drove to Washington, D.C. to rescue children he thought were being sexually abused below a pizza shop. He believed then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and other well-known Democrats were secretly behind the pedophile ring. The man stormed the pizza shop with a gun. Fortunately no one was injured.

Following the incident, a team of reporters at the Washington Post wrote about how Pizzagate started as a rumor that went so viral many people believed it was true.

“Pizzagate — the belief that code words and satanic symbols point to a sordid underground along an ordinary retail strip in the nation’s capital — is possible only because science has produced the most powerful tools ever invented to find and disseminate information,” they wrote.

The tools the Washington Post is referencing are the various social media platforms – Twitter, YouTube and Reddit just to name a few.

The internet is an incredible resource. It’s a seemingly endless trove of information on a wide array of topics, which is available to millions of people. But as easy as it is to share scholarly articles, research and actual news, the internet also makes it incredibly easy to perpetuate things that are fake, whether that’s fake news stories, fake business reviews or conspiracy theories.

This week we were asked to consider whether the internet makes us smarter or stupid. Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, wrote in The Atlantic that he lost his ability to be a deep reader. He blames years of surfing the Web. While Carr acknowledges that the internet has made it easier for him to conduct research, he says that his mind has become used to quickly skimming things, which has affected his ability to focus.

“In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas,” Carr wrote in The Atlantic. He adds that if those quiet spaces get filled with content, “we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.”

Technology has created a culture of immediacy. People expect things instantaneously, whether it’s the results of their Google search, an answer to an email, a response to a text message, a “like” on social media or their Amazon delivery. This culture has pushed many of us to be multi-taskers – jumping from one thing to the next.

In a NPR article, Jon Hamilton writes about research that shows humans aren’t as good at multi-tasking as they think they might be. In fact, we aren’t doing things simultaneously, we’re just able to quickly switch between tasks, he writes.

It’s this constant shifting between tasks – from checking email, to reading an article, to writing a document – that Carr says hurts our focus. A study from Microsoft Corp., reported on in Time magazine, found that attention spans have dropped from 12 seconds in the year 2000, to eight seconds, when the study was published in 2015.

And it is easy to get lost online. There are plenty of times I have logged into Facebook to post something for work, only to get lost reading my news feed. Before I know it five minutes have passed and I forgot what I logged in to do. But I blame myself for that more than the internet. I allowed myself to get distracted, rather than getting right to the task I set out to do.

The internet can help perpetuate stupidity by making it easy to share fake or hateful information. But I think it has the potential to make us smarter – if we’re conscious of how we use it. Disseminating false information isn’t a new concept.

As Clay Shirkey notes in his article, “Does the Internet Making You Smarter,” people have had the ability to publish and wide share content since the birth of the printing press. It has been our responsibility to determine the credible sources of information. If people thought about what they were sharing – and looked into whether it was true before posting it – stories like the Ikea arrows and Pizzagate wouldn’t be taken as seriously.

In addition to considering the sources of information, we also must think about our consumption. If we’re skimming articles and rushing through tasks to juggle multiple things at once, we’re not going to retain as much and we’re likely to lose focus. But if we slow down and take the time to understand what we are looking for and analyze what we find, we’re more likely to better process the subject.

Of course all of this is easier said than done. It will take more than a few people deciding to rethink how they search the internet. There is a need for a larger change in the culture of immediacy.

And social media platforms have a role to play as well. While many have started to combat fake news, there is still much work to be done. This starts with figuring out a way to block fake sites, not only from posting on social media, but also from gaming the search engine optimization system, which allows them to rank higher among search engine results.

This blog post is an assignment for an Identity, Technology & Communication course at NJIT.