First off…  any spambots reading this should immediately go here, here, here,  and here.  Die spambots, die!  And now…  the winning entries in the Watcher’s Council vote for this week are “As Long As We’re Talking, We’re Not Shooting At…

Have you ever seen _Until the End of the World_? Great movie. The characters inhabit a world with very little privacy and so are rather habitual about the kinds of subterfuge and multiple ‘personalities’ they use – complete-ish personas with their own bank accounts, IDs, disguises, etc. mostly to avoid creditors and governments.

While the movie isn’t exactly related to your point, its close to it in the sense of Universal Distrust, down to everyday interactions. Nothing is real, reality is freely manipulated and everyone knows it, so one has to sift through the noise to find what truths one can, and those normally off the grid in some way. I think its sort of accurate on how we’ll wind up living.

The only answer I can find is in two parts:

1) Consider your source

2) Hold your conclusions in abayence until you’ve found sufficient evidence to support the claim

The first was something drummed into me from a very early age. I remember coming home from school one day with some piece of paper I was handed on a street corner. It was from some communist front group whose message was pretty far above my second grade wisdom, but the vocabulary wasn’t. The platitudes it offered sure sounded good, at least to an 8-y/o. Bringing it to my father’s attention as something he might want to get behind, I had one of the big lessons in life. It included learning about “You have to read between the lines.”; “Just because it’s in print doesn’t mean it’s so.”; and most importantly, “Consider the source”.

Some of that was certainly over my head; I was still trying to learn to print between the lines. But it all stuck.

I’ve been pretty lucking (sorta) in my life in that I’ve been a lot of places that were “newsworthy” for various reasons. I learned that what gets reported only bears a resemblence to the reality that was going on around me. At best, the reporting missed important parts of the stories; at worst, if was fabrication coming from the mindset of the writers.

I find almost anything can be believable, but that doesn’t mean it should be believed. It needs to be verifiable in some form. It has to have some accord with the facts as I know them.

If it’s something completely new to me, then I absolutely want to hear more. I want to know the protocols of an experiment that tells us something new. I want to see the questions–as asked–on a poll. I want as complete information as possible.

This isn’t always possible, of course. If some bit of information doesn’t have sufficient support to meet my “looks pretty solid” tests, then I put that info in a “hold file”, keeping it as “tentatively true, but not confirmed”.

This is useful in all sorts of ways. It saves me from anxiety about whether, for example, coffee is good, bad, good, bad, neutral, no bad, no really good for you. It stops me from making an ass of myself by asserting something that got disproved yesterday but I didn’t see the memo. It also helps me from making judgments about people I’m about to meet before I make my own judgments.

The only solutions to the problem Ron poses is at the receiver end. Trying to regulate the sending end just isn’t going to work.

Yes, there are many new choices of sources for information. Some are worthy, many not (but then, that can be said of the old media, too, no?) To the extent that individuals can properly process information, this is a good thing.

Some of the damage that is possible through the new media, the asymetrical part, is because we are still giving much of the new sources the same credibilty that we gave the old. Otherwise, how would the Nigerian Email Scam STILL be going on, except as parody? When people adjust to the new trust model that must be used, much of the raw damage that can be done will be minimized.

We can see this in the MSM, with their deluge of Conservative/Republican/Bush bashing. The public is just not reacting as strongly as they would have a few years ago. There is a fatigue to scandal that is desensitizing people to stories. There have been enough questionable stories, from Swift Boat Vets, to RatherGate that the public is not nearly so willing to just believe what is presented to them. I am sure, as more people get more experience with the new information flows that this will become more pronounced.