About 10 minutes ago I came across an article on Huffingtonpost.com that simply mentioned that famous actor Johnny Depp is not dead. Apparently a rumor of the unfortunate demise of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "Edward Scissorhands" star in a road accident in Paris was a hoax. This incident though highlights something I've wanted to blog about for some time, namely the hoax was enabled by the real time communication media that we have today on the internet. All it takes are for sufficiently trusted agents online in social networks such as Facebook or Twitter to get the faulty information, for that information to spread rapidly as a "meme" through the internet and soon off the internet into the real world.
This ability for information to spread so rapidly is only recent and was born on the backs of real time social media services like Facebook and Twitter. We saw most recently the power of information spread using these tools in the U.S. election …
This ability for information to spread so rapidly is only recent and was born on the backs of real time social media services like Facebook and Twitter. We saw most recently the power of information spread using these tools in the U.S. election …