We live in an era of information explosion. There are so many sources of information that it is practically impossible to quantify their legitimacy. Since the sources are immense, and each platform or portal is out there to make a mark for itself, there is a perpetual race for becoming more and more visible. Broadly speaking, the plating of the information is given more importance than the plausibility of the information itself.
There is a plethora of data available about almost everything. No subject is aloof from the technological scanner. Everything is out there. Amidst all this information, it is very common for a person to be driven into oblivion if everything was to be blindly believed and abided.
Recently, there was a news article doing the rounds, that Google is eyeing a stake in the British telecommunication company, Vodafone. So many big names in the news industry carried this news piece, there were numerous blogs written about it and in a matter of time, this information started trending. As a direct impact, the stock market opened with a significant surge in the Vodafone share prices. The stakeholders had a field day before an official spokesperson from Vodafone clarified their stand on this development.
Apparently, the company had not discussed or mulled any such business development as Google had not approached them with the aforementioned proposal. This caused a lot of ambiguity amongst the people who had invested by anchoring their knowledge to the information which was doing the rounds. Though the fate of Vodafone and Google, joined in a merger, remains to be seen, but what caught my attention was the fact that it is has become so easy to dissipate information, either warranted or unwarranted, throughout the world.
As a receiver of all that information, the consumer needs to awaken to the idea and importance of information filtering. Even though the common man lacks the technical know-how for filtering the source of any information, but vigilance and corroboration can go a long way. It is imperative to make well-informed choices, and one must definitely tread along with calculated risk. A suitable buffer should always be kept for uncertainties.
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