one of the earliest movies i could remember when i was a kid is ‘they live’ with roddy piper and if you haven’t heard of or seen it, i highly recommend you do. while it does have a slight political agenda, it’s by no means ‘night of the living dead’. my dad used to love it and i guess that’s why i remember it so well today…
the movie came out in 1988 when the cold war as we never knew it was coming to an end and technology was coming into a new generation. but the propaganda of the, dare i say, evil-doers, came through every form of media we take for granted, especially written-type. it would have magazines and billboards with bold letter words: obey, question humanity, marry and consume, stay asleep…but that got me thinking, how different was life before the internet? i’m 26, i barely made the cut-off about knowing what’s considered the future and what’s considered primitive (5 years older and i probably would be one of those people who just got their first cell phone). with this new type of medium has come more responsibility than i realized. when i was in college, the internet was an information source you’d take with a grain of salt, it was known to be a high risk since you’d either get an F or kicked out for plagiarism…not to mention down 50 bucks for an essay some 7th grader wrote. but now things are different. much different. the more i hear about ‘responsible information’ the more it gets me questioning the things i read and what students today are really learning from.
it’s easy to assume the government plays gepeto for cnn, but what happens when we ourselves are dictating what potentially millions of people will read? for example…wikipedia. before powerzamcam, i taught 5th grade, learned more about the way we think in one year from 24 ten year olds than i did in 16+ years of education. about a quarter of all reports these kids handed in were direct off wikipedia. what scared me was not that they were doing it, but that the parents had to have known they were doing it and if they didn’t, how did they take it when i told them it was direct off a website?? i’m not questioning the child’s sense to find information by the simplest means possible, but i am questioning the source and how ten year olds are able to fool adults that should be positively influencing them into questioning things and looking for misinformation themselves without typing in keywords and clicking print. i read this on wikipedia’s ‘about’ page:
Visitors do not need specialized qualifications to contribute, since their primary role is to write articles that cover existing knowledge; this means that people of all ages and cultural and social backgrounds can write Wikipedia articles. Most of the articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet, simply by clicking the edit this page link.
looks like everyone has the chance to play historian now. i read an article a couple weeks ago about a guy that lived and breathed new york, he was flipping out over the fact that the wikipedia article about nyc had numerous historical, factual, and geographical errors. he spent 2 days trying to confirm and update the article. so this means up until then, thousands of kids across the world used this explicitly incorrect ‘source’ to write an essay about one of our greatest cities. now i am sure there were quite a few college students using this article to fool what should be experts in the field, ie professors. and to get even more dramatic…nyu and suny professors directly!
how crazy is that…it took a new york citizen with the tenacity to challenge what he read about the city he loves to correct the information fed to millions of people. and if you don’t think it’s such a big deal…try googling new york city and see what’s in the top 3. something that’s been a factually wrong source was sitting at the top of the number one search engine on the internet! well at least it’s fixed and we don’t have to worry since it’s not world changing.
now say you’re 18, excited to vote for the first time, and you want to read up on the candidates…so you innocently google barack obama and john mccain to do your research and what’s in the top 3??
…but i guess this is already ‘existing knowledge’ so it’s got to be right.
‘the world needs a wake up call gentlemen…we’re gonna phone it in.’
enjoy.
- sal campo
