If it's online, it has to be true
Do you believe everything your friends share online?
How often do you click on the hottest news on your Facebook feed? Research shows that more and more adults get their news from social media. The gap between TV and online is narrowing year to year and pretty soon, TV news might follow print media and become obsolete.
It’s not just us who find bogus sites on the rise. Buzzfeed looked at the top 20 fake news stories relating to the US 2016 election (Trump v Clinton), compared them to the top 20 stories from 19 major media outlets and found out that the fake news got considerably more engagement, especially on Facebook. Funny enough, most of the fake news sites’ creators reside in a small town in Macedonia and those kids (most of them still in school) don’t care about politics, all they want is clicks and the ad revenue that comes with it.
What does it say about today’s society? Are we all so naïve that a bunch of 18-year-olds can fabricate the most ridiculous stories and make us all believe they are true? Or do we just like everything that has the wow factor and crazier it gets, more we want it to be true?
Rational ignorance is the idea that you don’t acquire knowledge or educate yourselves on matters. Most people put it down to the idea that the cost of knowing things is greater than the benefits. For some people, it’s time or money or effort. For others, it’s because it’ll simply rock their world. For most in western society, it’s because we have a fixated idea of what we know and believe and that’s all we want.
The rise of The Shed at Dulwich on the top of the list is mind-blowing, not only because it shows how you can fake the reviews, but especially as it shows how gullible the public is and how little people need to believe. Are we going to get crazy about a restaurant, just because we can’t get in?
That is one project we wish we had ‘furnished’…………
