The good, the bad and the unfiltered – news

The world is changing.

Moon landings, Mars landings, growing new human organs. Technology has been exploding in what seems like just a few years.

But beyond just that, our fundamental flow of information has undergone a massive change in the way it is transmitted within the last 100 years.

Thanks to the Internet, you no longer must rely on specific news groups and organizations in order to acquire information. Not only do you have many options of information outlets online, you also get it lightning fast. And it’s instantaneous.

For example, during the whole drama with the mass manhunt for the remaining Boston bombing suspect, when the suspect was apprehended, a user from the website “reddit.com” almost immediately posted an image of the man on the ground being handcuffed. The user had an acquaintance on the Boston police force and said the officer took a photo as it all went down and had sent him/her the photo.

Just like that, you didn’t have to wait for the capture photo to be worked into a news segment or be uploaded into a story online — it was just suddenly there, one click away.

However, having user-generated content comes with a price.

During a CNN television segment called “Reliable Sources,” it was mentioned how quickly the information on the Boston bombing was posted on such sites as Reddit and Twitter, and how much faster that was than anything broadcast on the news. One speaker, troubled by such a statement, said that even though these sources might put out information frequently, that information is not necessarily accurate.

Of course, when it comes to content on the Internet (as produced by random users), you run the risk of falling victim to misinformation. Hiding behind their computer screens with very little fear of facing much consequence for anything they say, people can tend to spout lies left and right.

Not to say that misinformation isn’t also rampant offline, but the Internet can compound the problem.

The whole point of a journalist is to take information, pick through all the crap that users/viewers don’t need (often false crap) and choose what you think the public wants to/should know.

What’s happened now is consumers must fulfill that filtering role. Now that there’s this huge amount of information online, and many more people are getting their news from posts on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc, people must decide for themselves, more than ever, what is true and what is not.

What makes this so much different is not the speed at which information is now available by the Internet, but rather how it is given out: through “normal” people.

Instead of a regular news anchor you see every night giving you an update on a traffic accident, you have posts from average Joes like yourself from the site of the accident itself, giving you info from ground zero.

Never before has humanity been able to become so attached and aware of occurrences from thousands of miles away, and because of the looseness of the Internet, that information on the web is always visceral.

A news station can never show you what the world is truly like when it broadcasts through its politically correct lens and miles of family friendly tape and censorship. On the web, however, reality is available in all of its often gory, cruel and truthful simplicity.

It’s all there, unfiltered and uncensored for your consumption, if you can manage to stomach it, that is.