Information Overload

We live in a time unlike any other experienced in all of history. In mere seconds, news can travel from one corner of the world to the other via any variety of social media. We literally have the ability to contact people at our fingertips...any time of the day or night. Take a look at this statistic...as of March 2012, there were 644,275,754 active websites on the Internet, and that was an increase of over 30 million from the previous month. (Netcraft) Ironically, if you do a Google search for "information overload" there are over 8.5 million results to peruse! There is absolutely no shortage of information.  However, there IS a shortage of discernment when it comes to dealing with all of this information.

Some wisdom from Ecclesiastes 12:12--"But beyond these, my son, be warned: there is no end to the making of many books, and much study wearies the body." Would it be safe to say, in our current century that "there is no end to the making of many websites, and information overload wearies the body"?  I used to teach 7th grade, and part of our year included writing a research paper. As the years passed and the Internet was a larger tool in the classroom, my students didn't have a lack of information to use for their papers, and they were very savvy at searching it out online. I realized that my role was shifting more into teaching them how to find GOOD information, teaching them that just because it's on the Internet does not mean that it's true. The Amplified version of Ecclesiastes 12:12 amused me--"...Of making many books there is no end [so do not believe everything you read]..."

So what's a parent or a grandparent or a teacher or a youth worker to do? First, make sure you're having regular conversations with the children and students in your life about their media consumption...what are they viewing? What are they listening to? What pages are they "members" of? Secondly, make sure that you are teaching your child to be discerning. Jesus gave the charge in Matthew 10:16 to be wise as serpents but harmless as doves. 

Have you seen posts on places like Facebook that have a ring of propaganda or untruth to them? They usually involve some kind of "scam" that Facebook is supposedly running or something political in nature. And people repost them and repost them and repost them, assuming that they're fact. Quite often, they're not. A website I've used often to check the validity of these sorts of websites is www.Snopes.com. They have almost every urban legend known to man, they give the history of it, and they will let you know whether or not the information presented is fact or fiction.

Bottom line? We can't control the quantity or quality of the information that is "out there", but we CAN control our responses to it.