The power of misinformation.
Browsing a book by Bruno cardeñosa about popular lies I verified something I had intuited for a long time, the hoax or urban legend of the need to drink eight glasses of water a day, a result of misinformation and the interest of mineral water bottling companies, the book details the reasons and dangers of this information.
This example, as well as the one that recently appeared in the press about a circular object at the bottom of the ocean that some clever people have rushed to attribute to an unidentified flying object, are examples of how misinformation works and the power it has.
When we pick up information that has not been rigorously verified, it is most likely that it has been used by the same media outlets that distribute it, in the Internet age the easiest thing is to embellish it with popular attributes, give it an attractive title, and distribute it, if the work has been done well it will become popular, and after some time we will find that this information returned in the form of scientific certainty, most likely if it is not essential any organization will take the trouble to clarify things.
We can find the same modality of misinformation in our daily work, where many people participate in a task, the lack of a truthful informant or an effective means of distributing a statement converts reality into that which is most attractive and easy to accept by everyone and that is when it is not conveniently manipulated, over time it will become a certainty, and shortly after everyone will be surprised at the difference between what was intended to be communicated and what is really being understood.
All the gaps, and there are many, that remain uncovered in any type of statement will be filled by popular knowledge converting them into reality.
Misinformation or the lack of effective communication is directly responsible for most of the popular beliefs, wouldn't it be appropriate to start giving it the importance it has?.
What would happen if there were people solely dedicated to publishing and verifying information? And I'm not referring to journalists, you only have to read a newspaper with conservative tendencies and another with progressive tendencies to observe how the same news can have two very different meanings.
What is missing and lacking in this society are impartial figures dedicated to validating information by contrasting it with distributed knowledge.
One of the most important dangers of misinformation consists of partial manipulation, half a truth is told and the other half is seasoned with what interests us, this way of acting is typical of politicians and the press with a tendency toward a certain ideology, this form of action is based on a very simple rule, one tends to listen to or read what one likes and turns a deaf ear to everything else. It seems to me nothing less than a disguised form of deception consisting of selling what one wants to hear and not what is really happening.
Evidently we all have natural preferences, but it is also true that in general we wish to know the truth, besides it is clearly seen how the same media outlets that lean toward one side or another later criticize this same way of proceeding in others.
I keep asking myself why there is no figure, some type of higher education explicitly dedicated to contrasting reality and validating it, perhaps we take for granted that fundamentally we all know what is really happening.
More lies are told than necessary due to lack of imagination
truth is also invented. (Antonio Machado)