In today’s world, information is everywhere. Be it in schools, online, on television, on social media and even on posters placed on subway stations and toilets. However, how many of this information serves the purpose of enriching us with the knowledge to nurture our emotional and psychological wellbeing? It is hard to believe that an advertisement placed inside a subway telling us that Marigold milk is the best and healthiest milk choice out there in the market or Burger King’s two dollars ninety-five cents nuggets are the best value meal you can get out of fast-food restaurants is going to be potentially informing us with useful and purposeful information. Some may argue that the vast amount of outlets currently available for man to seek and obtain information makes man more informed as they are presented with countless opportunities to garner useful information. However, I beg to differ as even though there are numerous amounts of ways and outlets for man to retrieve information, plenty of the information provided from these outlets are unreliable or too shallow to truly make man more informed. Hence, I believe that in spite of the plenty amount of information available, man is not more informed.
To start off, the absence of parameters to define media discourse has undermined the quality of information. Media companies are highly profit-driven and would thus play up and dwell on the sensational, tantalizing news that they know will sell. This can be on car accidents, murders, sexual assault or controversial scandals. Media companies only report on such sensational news simply because they are interesting, not because they are important. In the 20 months between September 2012 and March 2014, Fox News aired an astounding 1,098 evening and primetime segments dedicated to the Benghazi attacks. Despite there being no basis, Fox News and other outlets claimed that the Obama administration knew that the terrorists had planned the attacks 10 days in advance. CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell criticised Fox News and the media at large for habituating scandalising the Benghazi attacks with incomplete or unsupported claims. In fact, Fox News often used the Benghazi attacks as a shorthand, as a symbol of a lying corrupt, tyrannical and possibly murderous Obama white house. Hence the information that is fed to man today through the media may not even be based on solid facts and we run the risks of being influenced by false information provided from the media. In fact, according to the World Health Organization, 28,000 people who die daily can actually have their deaths prevented if basic care was provided to them. Yet we hardly see the media reporting on such pressing issues, on how little we give and how we are avoiding important issues happening around the world. When the media does report on such issues like foreign aid, they often tend to paint the image that we are giving substantially and in proportion to our means to people in need. Therefore, the media is actually providing us with an excess of information that deludes us and causes us to be actually more ignorant instead of more informed with the issues happening around us. Therefore, even though the media can give us so much information. man would still not be more informed.
Secondly, even though a majority of man are able to obtain basic education that serves to enrich man with useful knowledge and skills, it does not necessarily mean that man is able to apply the knowledge learnt in a real-life context. Education serves as a tool that enables people to broaden their perspectives and understand things that are happening around them. However, the reality is that most schools today bombard students with bucket loads of content and knowledge, expecting them to ingest them and spew it out during examinations. What students pick up are answering techniques and skills required for them to ace their examinations. Therefore, they are learning how they can apply the tons of knowledge that they learnt to answer examination questions. However, does this guarantee that they will also be able to learn how to answer real-life problems when they occur? The answer is most probably no as the real skills that students actually pick up in their education is the ability to memorise knowledge and the ability to answer questions on paper. To further substantiate my point, according to the United States (US) Bureau of labour statistics, only 26.1% of young people aged 16-19 and 18.7% of those aged 20-24 have volunteered to do volunteer work. Students who have received basic education have more or less been exposed to the growing need to help the needy and they would know how much impact they can make on the lives of people if they choose to lend out a helping hand. However, this point has obviously not been ingested by these students according to the low percentage of young people willing to volunteer. This is a real-life problem that despite being more educated to know the answer to solve the problem on paper, is not solved in real life. Hence, even though man is receiving more and more information through the means of education, they are not able to fully utilise this information to apply to real-life situations, making man not more informed.
Critics may argue that man can be more informed through the means of social media due to its extensive reach. An example they would state is the viral ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge’s aim is to raise awareness about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Over 2 million people on YouTube were tagged in ALS Ice Bucket Challenge videos on YouTube and the campaign was very successful in raising awareness among the public about ALS and it also raised a gargantuan sum of 220 million dollars for the ALS Associations. Thus, proving that the increase in social media platforms has provided more information for man that can make them more informed about previously uncommonly known diseases and issues existing around the world.
While it is true that new media can be a powerful tool to spread information to the general public about current affairs and issues around the world that require our attention, media can also enable individuals to abuse their rights and use social media as a tool to instigate hatred and sow discord among people, societies and nations by posting controversial comments and posts which only have the purpose of evoking tensions among people. For example, The Real Singapore (TRS) website was asked to shut down as it published content that was objectionable in the field of public interest, public order and national harmony. The Media Development Authority (MDA) also added that TRS had fabricated articles and inserted falsehoods into their articles that were either plagiarised or sent in from contributors in order to make the articles more inflammatory. This goes to show that despite the gargantuan amounts of information that new media provides us with, the information may either be fake or have no basis. Such information provided only make man grow hatred for each other and arouses tensions among people and serves no purpose in actually making us more informed and knowledgeable about the world around us. Man is not more enriched and is not able to better understand the world around them. Hence, despite the growing amount of information given to us, man is not more informed.
In conclusion, even though more information is made readily available to man, it is the quality of the information and the way we use the information that makes man more informed. The greater quantity of information provided does not necessarily make man more informed. It is high time we start refining the information we make available to the public in a way that allows the general public to be enriched and enlightened from the high-quality knowledge. This can enable man to be more informed and also potentially start making positive changes to the world with this newly found information.