Fact checking – has technology made us sloppy?
Today I received my first bank statement as the new treasurer of our local youth club. It arrived courtesy of a lovely old man from up the road. The statement had his address on you see.
Yes, despite me sitting down with a business banker, filling in my address details and signing they were correct, he still managed to choose the wrong address on his system.
How? Because instead of paying attention to the details on my form, he inputted my house number and postcode and opted for the first address his computer came back with.
OK. Human error and easily sorted. But would it have happened before the bank got its souper-douper networked system?
Have we stopped engaging our brains now all the information we need is at our fingertips?
How about this for a gaffe? Birmingham City Council (England) sent out 720,000 leaflets featuring a lovely cityscape of Birmingham. Shame it was a lovely cityscape of Birmingham Alabama. Doh!
What’s the betting whoever designed it simply tapped ‘pics of Birmingham’ into a search engine and picked the one that fitted the layout best. Would this error have happened before the internet existed? When the designer would have had to pick up the phone to a photo library?
Don’t get me wrong – I love computers and the internet. Spellcheckers, email, and online fact-checking have all increased the speed at which I can work exponentially.
What worries me are the people who think running a document through a spellchecker means they’ve proofread it.
What worries me are the people who believe something is true because it’s on the internet.
Anyone now can upload content and call it fact. And, with articles being rewritten repeatedly for different sites and uses, the same misinformation is regurgitated over and over. Deb Ng over at Freelance Writing Jobs wrote a great post on how she thinks Private Label Rights (PLR) articles are perpetuating this problem.
Even internet founder Sir Tim Berners-Lee has said there needs to be new systems to rate websites’ trustworthiness.
What do you think? Has technology made us sloppy? How do you double-check your sources and facts?
Comments
Miguel Wickert
You know, that may be the case for some people but for me, in this age of information overload. I find that it grows and even stretches my mind to work harder, smarter and quicker. At the same time I understand your concern. I may be dependent upon the individual. :)
rachael
@ Miguel - thanks for stopping by and for the heads-up that the comments weren't working.
There's no doubt I've found the answers to lots of things I didn't know on the internet, plus the answers to lots of things I didn't know I didn't know. And all within the blink of an eye. I just think, as with all things, that sometimes we need to slow down and be careful to check where the information has come from.