Academic blog Mk Two: the mis-information highway

It's that item again for the second in the new installment of blogs and this time I've decided to have a look at the credibility of of online sources of information (in relation to the reading on trust and trasperancy). This topic has always been an issue for me, especially when trying to get the latest news on films and TV Shows one can see the pure amount of bull spread by supposed "inside sources". Sure entertainment news is already a muddy mess of mis-information without the aid of the Internet, take the British tabloids for one. The internet is full of these kind of rumors though, whether it be that some celebrity has died or what a new episode of a TV show will feature. Another blogger on Helium.com suggests that these rumors come about through a few different ways but only one of those really pertains to the Internet. Todd Pheifer (the blogger in question) says that the questionable standards of fact checking on the net are to blame. Though while this is true some of the information that is pure fiction reported on the web is not always verifiable.

The one example that keeps coming to my mind is from when "Terminator: Salvation" was in pre-production and a rumor was reported about the film's apparent ending. While at the time the "spoiler" was largely rejected at being so ludicrous it just could not be true. That no sane film maker could possible use this proposed ending. However the rumor was actually true and it was only the bad reaction from the leak that got the producers to scrap this part of the script.

I guess what I'm trying to get at in this is though there is that even with trust earned from news sources there will always be times where secrets are leaked and not only because there is too much information available and if every piece of news from an unnamed source was not published well...let's just say we'd have a pretty terrible terminator film on our hands (though some would say it's terrible anyway).

Well that's all I've got to say on that matter for now, oh and for those coming here for the film reviews I promise I'll get one up soon.