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Are you immune to Infodemic?
Spoiler: no, you are not.
We live in the Content Overproduction Ages. We even coined a new word to explain what’s happening in the information ecosystem during the COVID-19 emergency. The word is infodemic [1].
Grammatically, infodemic is a portmanteau of “information” and “epidemic”. It refers to the fast increasing amount of content production about a topic, no regard if accurate, non-accurate, even completely false.
The fast content over-production is a typical characteristic of the infosphere: it’s a natural consequence of the digital revolution and of the decreasing cost for content production and distribution.
We only need
- a device connected to the internet
- a platform
- a piece of content suitable both for the device and the platform
Suddenly we can turn ourselves into a broadcaster.
The User Generated Content is a neverending flow.
In this context, we should expect by professional media strong choices. But for several reasons — a non-exhaustive list here: crisis, old models, the use of social media to drive traffic to websites, the use of quantitative metrics to measure success, the advertising business model, in some case political interests or the interest of some newspapers’ stakeholders — we often see an overproduction even in journalistic content. Again, no regard if accurate, non-accurate, almost true, partially true, or even completely false. Or sloppy, or — of course — a clickbait/attention-bait content.
Let me give a couple of examples.
The problem with this headline (which is actually a genre!) is that it suggests at some levels a sort of correlation between the vaccine and the death, even if it specifies that currently there aren’t connections.
The sentence is not false, but there is not a correlation nor causation between the two events. Yet, focusing on those kinds of news, causes confusion in readers and could be perfect for those who believe that vaccination is a mistake.
