Trust on the internet
“We no longer see the internet as a means of communication but as a way to change a nature of reality itself.” -The Sprawl
How much can we trust on the internet? How can we believe that everything that we found on the internet is trustworthy? Is it just another form of propaganda?
The sprawl is a film documentary about Propaganda about Propaganda. The colourful and confusing website is showing many videos when it scrolls down the page. I have to say that I don’t understand what they are doing with the short confusing and annoying series of videos. The video is hidden under the colourful text or frames. At first I thought it was their theme for the video but I accidentally clicked on the video and found out that videos are on YouTube. The strange thing is videos on YouTube don’t have colourful text or frames that are hidden videos.
I don’t actually know why they don’t put the text and frame in the video itself ,but in my opinion, the sprawl is trying to communicate that we see only on the surface and it is not always true. This can relate to the quote at the beginning of the article that the Sprawl wants to show that the internet is changing reality.
The work from the Sprawl is more like an experimental film.
“I live in the megastructure of the cloud, where any truth may be uploaded or downloaded in an instant.” -The Sprawl
This quote from the video name In the streets, I am no more than a ghost. It is true that we can easily upload and download information easily. Everyone can access this information and easily mislead by this information. Many websites like Wikipedia let people write information and change it which is good to gain more information from other people but it is also bad if that information is not correct. This leads to a question: How much people believe on the internet?
The internet is like a library where we can find information. The information on the internet is easy to convince people to have bias due to the wide spread of information and other people comment on that information leading to a misunderstanding. There is a case that the model got divorced by her husband because she had plastic surgery. The photo of her husband and kids go viral on the internet. This situation makes a lot of trouble for the model because this photo is not true.The photo was photoshop and misuse in a wrong way. People on the internet start to believe this photo is real. Not only people on the internet but also people around her start to ask her about plastic surgery and it affects her work as a model.
We can see that information on the internet cannot always trust and it leads to misunderstanding that cannot easily get rid of. This is like propaganda. The internet is the best platform to spread news but if that news contains bias and misleading information, the internet will change to the worst platform.
Don’t trust what you see on the internet is the best thing to protect yourself from misleading information. Searching for the deeper information before you believe it or find a source that is believable and reliable, but what kind of source can we rely on? Umm.. I don’t know because I still don’t believe in myself.
