The course was quite interesting and i have learnt a few things that i did not know about in using Google search. I would say one of the most valuable lessons was the reminder of always take note of the credibility of what we found from the Web.
This is actually something we all know - what's on the Internet may not necessarily be correct and we must always take it with a pinch of salt. However, despite knowing this, we still rely heavily on the information we found from the Web and simply take it as facts. A lot of people, more often than not, would just believe what they read on the Web without validating it.
An example of such incident was shared during one of the sessions. It was about a fake quotation being wrongly attributed to Martin Luther King Jr. The article is quite a good read and illustrates a few things:
- About communication - as mentioned in Fact #4 in a little story i have written before, words get distorted after going through a few hands. Sometimes the fact may even get so garbled that it is totally different from its original form. In this incident, even a simple copy-and-paste from the FB message can get distorted.
- About the information age - the Internet is one powerful platform that can be used to create untrue facts. This incident shows how a FB message changed its form and spread over the Internet in such unbelievable speed. And due to the nature of search engines, the more people write about it the more hits we would get from our search results and hence wrongly making us believe that it is a fact. One thing that the course kept emphasizing was that the search results and result ranking do not mean authenticity and validity. It is simply a collection of what are out there on the Internet. When everyone says the same thing doesn't make that thing a truth. I think i do not need to re-tell the story of how everyone in the ancient time used to believe that the earth was square until one man proved everyone wrong.
- About human nature - people hate being told that they are wrong, even when the facts are shouting right at their faces. They will get all defensive when people disagree with them and point out their mistakes. They do not understand that by not recognising their mistakes, they appear as more foolish than they already are and will continue to make a fool of themselves when they continue to make the same mistake over and over again.
- About what we once learnt from school - punctuation is very important.
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