Friday, May 30, 2014

Perspective

A couple days ago, I posted this picture with the caption:

"Our pit caught a panther"


The resulting comments were pretty interesting.  And showed how easy it is to change someone's perspective.  See, a few of the posts were convinced that my 8lb house cat really was a panther.  Their perspective was skewed by two things.

1) My caption
2) The angle the picture was taken and the editing to remove anything that would have showed the true size of the cat 

And that got me thinking about how easily we fall for things we see on the internet (particularly facebook). 

 How often do we see an article posted and get all riled up because it talks about some injustice.  And then we go and re-post because "Oh, my gosh!  The world must know about this!"  All without checking the facts or making sure that there wasn't some other reason for what happened.

Social media has connected us to stories and people that we would never have come into contact with before.  Our world has grown infinitely smaller.  But it has also increased the spread of misinformation/ half truths all for the sake of a story.

And it isn't just news.  It's about diets and exercise.  It's about health- natural vs conventional treatments.  It's about  school choice- public vs private vs homeschooling.  

We all have our convictions about what we believe are true- there's nothing wrong with that.  It's what makes us human.  It becomes dangerous when we only see a part of the story- the part that the writer (or photographer) wants us to see.  The part that supports their point of view, even if their point of view is only a small part of the entire story.

This next week, I challenge you to research all sides of the story before you hit share.  Chances are what's being reported- that little snippet of a video-  isn't the entire story and it's being taken out of context.


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