April Fool’s Day is celebrated for extravagant jokes and tall tales. We sit back and laugh at the pranks, knowing we didn’t believe THAT for a minute.
But what about the other three hundred sixty-four days?
What about the bombardment of information that hammers at us 24/7 through the rest of the year?
As a former librarian, I had to be aware of which print publishers were reputable and responsible for the validity of the information they provided in their published books. We urged our patrons to pay attention to the source of the information before believing it and using it.
With the coming of our wonderful digital age, we now are buried beneath information, produced by too many sources for anyone to research for accuracy. Social media posts can behave like a viral epidemic—an anonymous person, with little or no training or background, releases information that may be true or may be massaged to support an agenda. Or it can be totally false. Yet it spreads like germs from an uncontrolled sneeze, the spores flung across the world without concern for the truth.
How can we as a civilization flourish if we cannot depend on the information we use to make our decisions and chart our futures? If we cannot trust the accuracy and lack of bias of the reports we get, how do we survive?