Popular Culture and the Noosphere

As Youngblood states in his writing, we are fortunate to have the machinations of media to enlarge our own visions of the world at large. Back in the early days of media, our image of the world was filtered by just a few individual distributors of information, such as Walter Cronkite. However, that cookie has come to crumble with the ever increased and expanded development of media and the ability to have any amount of information at our fingertips. In  the times before Google, it would be significantly more difficult to find exactly what we were looking to know without the need to go to a library and conduct some research on that topic.

While it may seem that we are able to tap into a vast resource pool of information and knowledge thanks to the development of the Noosphere, one may be able to also argue that this has introduced the ability for people to selectively pick and choose what it is they glean from this vast network. Following Youngblood's logic of many people becoming adept distributors of information, it is has become increasingly possible to spread false information in this noosphere. In a recent, local instance, a Florida woman allegedly had a third breast augmented to her body in the hopes of getting a reality show among other things. This story was spread through major news outlets across the country in a wide viral media frenzy. As is the case in many bizarre situations, the female was found to be a hoax after gaining large media attention. Such widespread false information ought to preclude us on how easy it is to mislead the populace in today's societal capabilities. It makes us wonder if there are many other things that have gained legitimacy through distribution rather than just being a sham.