Information

I was flipping through some channels after I arrived home from the office today, and found myself captivated by an animal planet program about migrating caribou. I didn’t watch long enough to fully understand the reasoning behind their constant migration, but I did witness a mother give birth to a baby caribou, only to trot away instantly from her newborn without hesitation.

It was amazing to me to watch the baby caribou stand immediately and begin walking around. I’m still figuring out how to walk and balance effectively and I’m almost 25 years old. Amazing world we live in. To cut to the meat of the story: Baby gets lost, mother abandons baby after 10 minutes of looking, baby tucks itself behind a rock to endure the cold evening and withers away into the crisp grass only to eventually become soil for the new grass that will feed new baby caribou the following summer.

In witnessing this fast-foward circle of life, I somehow managed to relate rotting caribou flesh and death back to the internet.

We hold these truths, to be self-evident, that all information is created equal.

This paraphrased statement from the Declaration of Independence, clearly isn’t true when applied to the internet. Much of the information created is ignorant, hateful, uninformed, baseless or simply irrelevant.

Men are ‘created’ equal, but over time they diverge fairly significantly in depth and breadth of knowledge. Information isn’t created equal because it is the product of men who are more or less educated, knowledgable, or who perceive the world differently than their brothers and sisters.

If we therefore assume that information is not created equal, should inferior information on the internet decay, like the frail, newborn caribou in the bitter Yukon forest?

Can information on the internet die?

Absolutely. Information should degrade like any other element.

But what about the solid truth that is spoken? Those words that resonate throughout time, that are so pervasive, that they seem to be always relevant, and always meaningful? Should those words then degrade too?

My answer to that would be yes, they should degrade if they are challenged and they lose. Those great information producers of all time will endure. Socrates, Nietzsche & Plato, Lincoln, Kennedy & King. Their words have endured. Their words, their information, will endure because of their universal application.

The words worthy of application and worthy of publication in a major platform should be promoted and should be learned and read. It will be a tremendous success of information aggregation and information distribution platforms to engage the world and judge and learn the effects not through orders of magnitude, but through orders of quality and goodness, to ensure the true great information elements resonate and maintain their throne while unworthy and seemingly weak claims swiftly meet their demise and decompose into the soil for the next generation of potentially monumental thoughts.