Tag Archives: information

Easy lies and the hard truth

This is a brilliant comic by Shencomix.com.

Lies are soft and squishy. They can be whatever shape you want. They are convenient. [They fit into any world view.] The Truth is hard and spiky. Hard to embrace. Worth embracing.

I’m absolutely amazed at how many (smart, educated) people are sucked into conspiracy theories and exaggerated (and clearly misrepresented) statistics that fit their world view… even when the theories are debunked.

Example : A US educator that I know shared this October 25, 2019 Joe Biden Tweet, which was a response to another tweet from a Washington Post article on pandemic preparedness:


This is the top reply which has been retweeted 71 times and liked 359 times at the time of me sharing this:


It’s absolutely ridiculous that someone with such influence can spread a conspiracy theory that the pandemic was planned. But it’s convenient. It fits her world view.

The problem is that is so much easier to cherry pick lies and convenient half-truths than it is to actually embrace and meaningfully interpret facts that don’t match biased opinions.

Sometimes lies are easy and the truth is hard… it’s spiky… But we want to live in a society where the hard truth is embraced, even if it isn’t something we want to hear.

Some more related posts:

Information overload

If you’ve never seen the work of Jessica Hagy, you are missing out. Her website, Indexed, is a treasure trove of Venn diagrams and graphs. In her words, “This site is a little project that lets me make fun of some things and sense of others. I use it to think a little more relationally without resorting to doing actual math.”

Here is one of her drawings: Needles and haystacks and such.

I think that if you were a half-a-century old but you were living half a century ago, (let me simplify that, ‘if you were 50 in 1969’), then confusion usually came from a lack of information. You were hardly ever confused because you were overloaded with too much information. Roll the clock forward to today and I think the opposite is far more true. Today, if you are confused from a lack of information all you need to do is Google it, or search YouTube, or ask a few hundred or a few thousand people on Facebook or Twitter.

The only time you are slowed down is when there is too much information to search through. You searched, but you didn’t find the answer on the first page of Google. The instructions on YouTube are for a different version of the product you have and need help with, and so the video didn’t help you. You ask the question on social media and no one responds with the correct answer, but you end up responding to their unhelpful responses anyway.

While I think there will always be situations where there are misunderstandings, anxiety, and even confusion from a lack of information, I also think that somewhere between 1998 and 2005 we passed a threshold where real confusion usually stems from having too much information. We now live in the information age, and information overload is often at the root of our confusion. Will it be like this for a fifty year old in 2069?

Balance and a river of information

Almost 2 years ago now, I had to seriously shift my attitude around online information. I was gullibly trying to read every tweet in my ’stream’ and diligently trying to keep my unread items on Google Reader at a handful. I saw these as pools of information and I wanted to hold on to the information that came into the pool. It was too much. The shift for me was seeing information as a river. Now, I’ll paddle along the stream, but when I get out, I don’t feel the need to pay attention to the stream of information that goes by. It has been liberating.

The key is finding balance rather than being inefficient as I tried to demonstrate in this 4 slide presentation I did for a Connectivism course:


That was the first assignment for the course and it helped me decide to drop out of the course as I tried to seek balance.

I think I’ve made a few points, but if I could make one more it would be that my life still lacks balance and I still spend too much time online… but 3 years ago I would have ‘wasted’ that same amount of time, or more, watching TV. In the wise words of the Comedy Network’s tag-line… to me my online life is ‘Time well wasted’.

via a comment I made on weblogg-ed.com – ‘The Choices We Make’

~ The idea behind a post I’ve written in my head about 50 times… some day I’ll really expand on this idea on my Pairadimes blog.

The original post for the slide presentation is here: Connectivism, Relationships and Balance. But it is in the comments that the ideas behind the presentation really came out.