He said, she said

There’s an interesting discussion on Digg.com at the moment: do people actually read the articles before pitching into the debate? Helix400 makes a particularly good point about the echo chamber effect of the Internet:

With many websites such as Digg or other blogs, information is now being spread through the following means:

An event happens -> A person reports on this event -> A user briefly summarizes what he thought this reporter said -> Users read the summary and comes to their own opinion based on a very brief summary.

It’s sad just how powerful the short headline is to forming people’s opinions. The headline, above anything else, is usually what people trust the most.

Also, since passing information along in this manner almost always leads to inaccuries, this leads to people forming opinions based on this inaccurate misinformation.


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