Misinformation Overload

We never thought to appreciate encyclopedias enough; they were simple, concise, and indisputable in their unwavering authority.
In 6th grade, I wrote a report on Chaos Theory--from start to finish, all of the information I needed (or would ever be able to unearth) could be found in the hallowed pages of The Encyclopedia Britannica.

Now you can do it all from home, with or without the steep investment in encyclopedias which will ultimately be uselessly out of date. It's supposed to be simpler now--a few practiced keystrokes and you're connected with the sum total of human knowledge. Here's the catch:

The vast majority of human knowledge isn't knowledge at all, but ill conceived assumption and hearsay. Fact-checking sites like http://www.snopes.com/ can help to weed out the riffraff, but snopes can't cover everything, or even a significant fraction of everything.
As I see it, there really isn't any such thing as information overload--information is good us, and if there is so much of it that it becomes dizzying, that's good for us too. Stimulus improves cognitive capacity. But misinformation overload is another matter.

Utilizing the information bananza of the internet, I can ostensibly find a digital representation of the Pakistani Constitution in 3 seconds flat (http://www.pakistani.org/pakistan/constitution/), but what I can't do is know if that representation bares any resemblance to any authentic Pakistani constitution, past or present. Believe it or not--the issue is money.

Neither I, nor a friend, nor a local library paid for that copy of Pakistan's constitution, it was free. Free things are nice, they provide me with access to stuff for which I would otherwise have to pay. But free things also take something away--our standing as satisfied or dissatisfied consumers, or more to the point: our right to complain.

Britannica depends upon sales for its existence, and those sales depend upon costumer satisfaction. If the information one finds in her $800 dollar encyclopidea-set proves to be inaccurate, she may demand a refund, and she will certainly not be buying another set as her niece's birthday present. If customer dissatisfaction with a product reaches a consistent and critical point, competing companies will exploit that fact and offer a superior product in an attempt secure the disillusioned market-share.

Incentive is the name of the game. There are certainly people offering accurate information out of the good of their hearts, but in a commodity-free market, those people are unfortunately indistinguishable from others who offer misinformation out of genuine ignorance or ulterior agenda. There isn't any incentive to devote resources to sorting it all out, because there is no profit in doing so.

The Russian people were the first to find this out the hard way when Socialist theory was misapplied to an economy that was not ready for it. When per capita income was institutionalized, specialized domestic services and products unilaterally declined in quality. The rest of us are finding out now--at least, those of us who can't afford to pay for quality.