Dave Barry Quotes

If we are not serious about facts and what's true and what's not. And particularly in an age of social media where so many people are getting their information in sound bites and snippets off their phones, if we can't discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.

I would advise people occasionally to take the media on, but only when you know it's a manufactured product and not a news interview.

2012 was the year I saw Twitter as a negative. More people need to realise that not everything they read is true and that Internet trolls are a real problem.

The power of the Internet is also its limitation - it provides access to large amounts of information without providing guidance on how to sort out what is credible and what is not.

I think sometimes younger people - not necessarily thinkers and intellectuals and the like, but people who are on social media and who are not as informed as journalists or professional thinkers - may get a bit, you know, impatient with the necessity of sustained thinking, sustained argumentation, sustained dialogue.

Our whole educational and cultural system is not designed to provide those intellectual tools, so people are often lost and the internet often becomes kind of a cult generator.

If you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.

You can't believe everything you read. It's never been more true.

If, like many others, you are concerned social media is making people and cultures shallow, I propose we teach more people how to swim and together explore the deeper end of the pool.

The media doesn't educate anyone.

You have all these people in the press who are ringing their hands over fake news stories. That actually became the narratives for critics.

The information you get from social media is not a substitute for academic discipline at all.

I never open the newspaper, never. I never go to a website; I never turn on the T.V. hoping to find something I can attack. It isn't what I do. I defend.

The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?

We binge on instant knowledge, but we are learning the hazards, and readers are warier than they used to be of nanosecond-interpretations of Supreme Court decisions.

The ways in which readers encounter and relate to information is dramatically influenced by their education as well as their awareness of the pitfalls relating to the information source.

I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn't ever have to rely on the press for my information.

Students are very gullible about the web. The only way you can really sort out information on the web is if you've had a prior training in book culture.

There's a danger in the internet and social media. The notion that information is enough, that more and more information is enough, that you don't have to think, you just have to get more information - gets very dangerous.

The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

How do you know the news is reliable if you didn’t gather it yourself?

Facts are incidental if not accidental, and the problem that we have as a society is that there is a significant number of people who have grown up in a different information environment ... surrounded by much more information, but whose provenance is not clear.... The rumors will be believed; the fiction will be thought of as fact; and the political agendas, among other agendas, will be influenced by interest groups who are coming from some quite strange trajectory to issues based on collective understanding that is founded on falsity.

I'm nervous about our civic culture. I'm not sure the Internet is largely the cause of it. It's certainly the cause of careless writing. People who get used to blurbing things on the Internet are never going to be good writers.

It's more necessary than ever before to ensure that discernment and the development of a critical mind guide our take on the world and inform our relationship to the media and information.

We live in a world with fake news being put out there. You don't really know what to trust, and it's a real danger to society.