As Always - Be Suspicious

Here Comes Everybody details disruptions that the internet era caused in the news industry. Before the rise of amateur bloggers and social media gurus, the news was first filtered by big agencies and then published.  Now it’s the reverse. The news goes out via the diverse channels of the World Wide Web and then the filtering happens second. Should this fundamental shift in the publishing process change the way we approach the news? As we discussed this question in class, the following thoughts came to mind. Over the past several hundred years the world has had good reason to be suspicious of what it reads and hears from the press because it was likely heavily filtered. With the filtering plug lifted in our internet era, we still have need for suspicion, but for a very different reason. We must be suspicious of what we hear, precisely because it may be unfiltered.