Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
When driving, one often comes across roads where the only option of movement is either turning left or right. The nature of these roads makes it nearly impossible to assess whether there are other cars or vehicles coming towards you.
Logically, you would think one would have to gamble the moment that they turn 90 degrees, having no idea when to precisely go. Lucky for all of us, safety mirrors were invented and are placed very conspicuously on these very corners. These wide convex mirrors allow us to properly assess road situations, preventing road side disasters from becoming a regular occurrence.
Now just imagine every news source, media outlet or business being just as transparent with their information. Instead of running off on partial knowledge and potentially creating a crash site, imagine having all information that allows you, the consumer, to make a well informed decision.
Whenever my classmates and I had to carry out a research project for secondary school, our teachers would constantly remind us to not use Wikipedia. Wikipedia, to our teachers at least, was notoriously known for misinformation and blatant inaccuracy. It’s a common misconception that ‘everyone’ can upload ‘something’ on Wikipedia. However, there is a somewhat lengthy process to finally getting published on Wikipedia; moreover there are even workers who actively patrol the site to detect any errors of unsupported facts.
Despite this success story, of a company trying to combat misinformation, there are many other instances where information is misconstrued or even censored. From asymmetric information presented to consumers who are trying to make an economic choice, to news channels and newspapers running stories that only tell a percentage of the truth, there is a fragrance of dishonesty all over our society.
Like puppets manipulated by a puppeteer, consumers are at the expense of powerful corporate companies and even the government. As consumers, all we can hope for is that we’re given enough to know when it’s safe to go.
