Priyanka Sharma

    consultpriyanka1@gmail.com

    WE live in a great era where every possible bit of information is available right at our fingertips. And I don’t mean metaphorical fingertips. All we have to do is turn on our laptop or just whip out our smartphones, type a couple of keywords in any of the hundreds of search engines available and voila.

    No subject is too difficult and no topic uncovered, the Internet has answers to all our questions and will satiate all our curiosity. The latest books and movies, reviews on those books and movies, the climate of Antarctica, the war in Iraq, diseases, prevention of those diseases, our favorite food recipes, you can even find the recipe to make a bomb in the kitchen. Maybe not on Baidu but surely on Google.

    But here is a fun question, how much of that information is legit? We tend to rely on the Internet so much that we never even think of questioning the authenticity of the information on it. If it says on the Internet that it’s going to rain, we flip out our umbrellas without once looking up at the sky. If it says that Mr. XYZ is a successful businessman, philanthropist and has made tons of contributions to the welfare of his country, we tend to like the guy. But when a few weeks later, the Internet tells us that the same man is a narrow-minded racist with no respect for women, no amount of charity and philanthropy can save the guy from being hated by the people. We even make our own contributions in popularizing the statements by tweeting, blogging and writing long elaborate posts on various social media platforms without thinking for a fraction of a second.

    A few months back, a woman blogged about how she lost a lot of weight on a banana diet and even though I don’t like bananas, I was tempted to have a breakfast full of them.

    Any monkey with a laptop and basic knowledge of computers can make a good guy look very bad and make a criminal a saint. All he has to do is say the same thing over and over on different websites, forums and social media platforms.

    Like they say, tell a lie a thousand times and eventually it becomes the truth.

    All the successful money-making scams and the millions of buyers of magic weight-loss pills after seeing an advertisement on the Internet only seem to reiterate my point.

    Now I am not saying that all the information on the Internet is false or propaganda. In fact, the Internet has improved our lives in more than one way. The speed of information transfer, saving paper, keeping together two lovers on different continents, spying on cheating wives and husbands (just kidding). Information is power and the person that has means to control it has a very powerful tool to manipulate the way we look at things and feel about someone.

    So don’t believe everything that you read on the Internet. Check the facts supporting it and don’t post or repost, tweet or retweet anything unless and until you are a hundred percent sure of it because each of us has the means to manipulate the information out there and change someone’s perspective about something or everything.

    (The author is an aspiring writer with a passion for travel and photography.)