On the Paradox of Information Sharing and Believability.

On the Paradox of Information Sharing and Believability.

 

Every time that I perform a Google search, look at an article, or watch a video on-line, I increase, by the very design of these web-sites, the likelihood that someone else will see it. By virtue of this ideas gain in global popularity fairly rapidly in the modern age.

The fallacy of an Appeal to Mass Opinion necessitates a sort of skepticism: I do not know, simply by the popularity of a given article, for instance, whether or not it is misinformation. I must therefore take its popularity into serious consideration, and if anything I should exert more effort to question it if it is more popular, because if it IS misinformation, the burden I bear is great and the smaller the minority of skeptics the greater the responsibility for each individual skeptic.

Thus, by using Google to find information on-line*, I am actually DECREASING the believability of this “information” that I am finding SIMPLY BY CHOOSING TO SEARCH FOR IT. If I therefore hear a set of statistics by word of mouth, therefore, it would be most scholastically ethical of me NOT to verify it by using internet resources, because I would be invalidating it in the process of observation. If it was good information, I would be disrupting its credibility. If it was poor information (misinformation), I would commit the Siamese-twin sins of wasting time and spreading it.

 

*This has been called by Martin Heidegger “Standing Reserve.”

 

Dm.A.A.