Buckminster Fuller was an American inventor best known for the creation of the geodesic dome and for the phrase “Spaceship earth”. He also researched what he called “Knowledge Doubling”, calculating that until 1900, human knowledge took about one century to double. That time period is now about 13 months.
The human race has progressed from the Industrial Age to what we call the “Digital Age”. The Digital Age is a combination of the “Information Age” and the “Communication Age”. With the coinventions of the computer and the Internet, we have, not only the sum total of human knowledge, almost everything that happens on planet Earth in real time.
Sometime this past Wednesday afternoon, a Tweet was posted on the Twitter account of the Philippine Department of Education (DepEd), announcing that all classes at all levels in Metro Manila would be suspended the following day. Hundreds of schools and thousands of people had this information instantly and made arrangements, many retweeting the information to hundreds of thousands more people.
Some time later, the suspension Tweet disappeared from the DepEd Twitter account. Naturally, there was mass confusion and no firm answers were forthcoming whether or not classes were suspended. The following day the DepEd “publicly apologized for mistakenly posting false information about class suspensions for Metro Manila.” The DepEd said they got their information “from a fake account impersonating a ‘trusted’ government agency.”
The DepEd took information from the Internet that they assumed to be true and passed it on without verification, which was then taken as the absolute truth and passed on again. Mass information combined with the instant communication of the digital age is not always correct.
The photos and videos of the police van running over protesters at the United States Embassy took minutes to be distributed to thousands and then to tens of thousands more. Almost instantly, this terrible event was seen, interpreted, discussed and judged. But this is a two-edged sword that can cut both ways.
Before the digital age, that event might have been a “he said, she said” between authorities and the public as to what really happened. No longer can that occur with everyone now holding a camera, and that is a good development. And while the public has every right to make a “rush to judgment”, sometimes that rush is not right.
Were the injuries a result of one individual’s abominable actions, for which he should spend a very long time in prison? Was this the result of a complete breakdown in the command and control of the officers on the scene, for which senior police officials should also do jail time? Is there an inherent and disastrous defect in police crowd handling that also caused the deaths and injuries at the protest held in Kidapawan, North Cotabato, earlier this year? We must have the answers.
But we all have an obligation to seek and find the truth. However, that will not be achieved if we immediately accept the first information disseminated at the speed of light. As the popular meme goes, “The problem with Internet quotes is that you can’t always depend on their accuracy.”—Abraham Lincoln, 1864.