Is there an antidote to rising infodemic too?

In the 1960s, for the first time in history, the number of people with intellectual skills (white-collar workers) exceeded the number of manual labourers (blue collar). The American sociologist Alvin Toffler said that humanity had entered a new era, the era of information. Today, in the time of Covid-19, false information is almost overriding evident facts, which led some experts to warn of another epidemic called the ‘infodemic’.

Over the past half century, information has spread to such an extent that it has overpowered the human ability to distinguish between true and false. In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries named ‘post-truth’ as the word for the year. Post-truth is an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion

Experts modestly express their need for more time to understand the events, while the overzealous people are quick to spread cries of pessimism, fateful predictions and judgments.

and personal belief’.

In the ‘post-truth’ world, information is pouring in from all avenues: the Internet, social media, newspapers, and various publications, television, radio stations, and not to mention the word of mouth that circulates everything. It is becoming hard to reach the truth with information ‘traps’ that hide behind clicks and between the lines of every news story.

In The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs

a book by Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, the authors highlight that every piece of information circulated today is initially questionable, and should be subject to validation, with no exception even to that simple basic information that is self-evident; such as information on the weather or on the number of participants at an event.

Technology has a great advantage of making information available to everyone, but its use in ignorance and lack of exercising caution and responsibility is contributing to spreading misinformation; thus, producing a false picture, a fabricated film, and statements intentionally taken out of context.

In the information age, finding truth is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Let’s take Covid-19 as an example. Everyone is talking about the risks, symptoms, results, prospects, and possibilities based on their sources, without realising the need for determining the validity and reliability of the said sources; particularly, when the subject is crucial and the information exchanged is probably perceptive and could be interpreted differently by different people.

There are many such examples, and the common factor between them is that, in each of these cases, experts modestly express their need for more time to understand the events, while the overzealous people are quick to spread cries of pessimism, fateful predictions and judgments.

It is indeed the era of ‘post-information’, or the era of the misleading information epidemic, where the one who filters information based on the principle of doubt and validates is the winner.