Woster: The almost unfathomable capacity of the internet – Mitchell Republic

The general election is six months away, and the nation is awash in campaign news, opinion, supposition and disinformation.

It’s a safe bet things will get worse. With the almost unlimited space the digital age offers for folks to share content, the volume of political news will grow like the beanstalk after Jack’s mother threw the seeds out the window.

When I joined The Associated Press in 1969, we sent our news stories over teletype machines. We called those machines “the wire.’’ I remember a time when the teletypes in the bureau in Pierre ran at 60 words a minute.

Imagine receiving your news at 60 words a minute. These days, in the time it took me to type that last sentence, you could do an online search, receive thousands of possible responses and sort through several of them for the answers to your questions.

“Life moves pretty fast,’’ a character named Ferris Bueller said in the movie. And that was long before the almost unfathomable capacity of the internet. That capacity sits there each day, waiting to be filled. Twenty-four/seven news and information organizations, disinformation specialists, scammers, bots and whatnot are poised to fill it, second by second.

That scares me. Especially when the country is approaching serious and important election decisions, it scares me to think all that information space exists and all those diverse operators have plans to fill it.

When Ferris Bueller said that bit about life moving fast, he also said, “If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.’’ He wasn’t talking about hard news, but he could have been.

Think of all the information that swirls around each of us all day and all night. Think about the fact that most of us have in our hip pocket or in the palm of our hand a more powerful piece of technology than the computer systems that sent the first rockets into space. It’s hard to sort fact from misinformation, real news from deliberate distortion. It’s important to stop and look around once in a while.

When I worked for the AP, we sometimes called ourselves the world’s oldest and largest news organization. But at 60 words a minute, we couldn’t fit all the stories we had into the time our wire speed allowed. That isn’t a problem today. We can access more information than ever before.

This is where I put in a plug for traditional news sources, especially long-established newspapers. Most of them have gone to online delivery of news in addition to or sometimes instead of print editions. They still strive to deliver accurate, timely and important information.

I think newspapers, in whatever form they reach you with news, can be trusted. You go ahead and see for yourself. And don’t be afraid to challenge what you think you know by reading opposing views. Check your sources and be open to the possibility that what you know might not be the whole story.

More than 30 years ago, a guy named Richard Bach wrote a small book called “Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah.’’ I enjoyed the tale immensely. When I reached the last past, I read: “Everything in this book might be wrong.’’ That isn’t a bad way to approach new information from uncertain sources.

I read somewhere recently that 58 percent of Americans choose apps and websites as their news sources. An article in the Columbia Journalism Review quoted a Pew Research Center study showing one-third of Americans aged 18-29 regularly get their news from TikTok.

When I think of TikTok, I think of some vague online entity the U.S. House and Senate just voted to ban unless its China-based parent company sells. When younger people think of TikTok, they think of a primary source of news and information. Something like 170 million Americans use the app. It isn’t all dance videos and cute kittens.

The internet contains bad information and deliberate falsehoods. It also holds good information and solid news. Perhaps the best we can do is develop trusted news sources, be wary of uncertain ones and remember that “everything in this book might be wrong.’’