One of the joys of writing novels in a historical setting is the research. Some people hate it. I thrive on it, love it in fact! It feeds my soul to go digging for new information, to find the tiny little details which may have been lost in the depths of time. Once upon a time, I did it more frequently, digging out information people needed. When I stopped doing it, it felt as though a part of my soul had died. So when I began to inadvertently write in a Victorian setting, that little part of me which had gone to sleep suddenly woke up singing.
It's got me thinking about the way we see the world. Once upon a time, we had one newspaper or one news channel or a single radio station. Before that, we had nothing. We relied on word of mouth for information. These days we have entire libraries and encyclopaedias at our fingertips. A multitude of news sources are just a click away.
Yet people still seem to rely on a single source for their information. Often I'll see arguments where the person will say "I saw it on X blog so it must be true". Or, "I found it on X news source". Never has the person ventured further than this single link to verify what they're posing to the world.
It's time to wake up. There's so many alternative news sites out there, so many everyday people reporting from the ground. The major news channels want you to believe what they report. They want you to believe that what they say is truth. They want you to get hooked on what they say and pass it along verbatim.
Time to wake up, world. Time to start looking deeper into the issues which matter to you. Get out there and get reading. It's amazing what there is to discover and read. Enjoy! It's an incredible ride!
This is one of my huge pet peeves with facebook. People just mindlessly share posts without doing any fact checking. Of course many of the things they share are devoid of facts to check. They're the emotional equivalent of a poke with a cattle prod, without any clear goal or action. And of course the trouble with a lot of the alternate news sites is I'm not sure they check their facts beyond what they need to serve their own particular bias.
ReplyDeleteThat's one of my pet peeves as well, and something I see becoming more and more evident. When people say that they saw the information in someone's status update I stop listening and tell them to go and read up on whatever they're ranting about. It makes me wonder why people don't think to research before they say something. I do wonder if they don't realise that they're going to be found out? Or that it makes them look extremely silly when they say "I didn't read about it. X person posted it in their status"? The same with many of the news sites. It's not hard to actually go and read up on something. Search engines are our friends!
DeleteIt bothers me, too. It's one of several reasons I closed my Facebook account. It reminds me a little of people who believe whatever religious beliefs they were told as children, rather than doing their own research and giving it some real thought and making their own decision on what to believe. I think a lot of people just don't know how to research things, or can't be bothered to spend the time. And so many are just too naive to think that what they're told might not be true.
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