Local Bridges and Their Influence on Information
Local bridges, especially when their spans are large, play important role in information communication. By definition, local bridges provide their endpoints with source of information that they would be otherwise far away from. But if we view local bridges from a more critical perspective, they do provide pure information to their endpoints but meanwhile, they also add interpretations onto the information and pass the interpretation together with the information itself to their endpoints.
Here is a vivid example. Alibaba, an e-commerce giant from China started trading on New York Stock Exchange this past Friday after its IPO. This is a piece of neutral information. The following is how different local bridges, or medias in this case, shape this piece of information.
Huffington Post, an American online news aggregator, named the article related to this topic as Company You’ve Never Heard of Is Now Bigger Than Facebook. And it also provides a “helpful” flowchart persuading people to stay away from Alibaba stock. Apparently, Huffington Post holds a contemptuous view on Alibaba’s achievement. On the other hand, most major medias from Mainland China are reporting this from a completely different point of view. Most of them portray the news from a positive or even praiseful point of view. An example is the article from FengHuang, a locally influential media in Mainland China as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan.
An important and inevitable fact is that if some group knows completely nothing about this piece of news before they read the article from one of the medias, then they must be affected by the interpretation from the media as the interpretation is part of the information they received from the local bridge. This will prevent people from knowing the information because either interpretation from the media is actually twisting the information to some extent, as opposed to the neutral information itself.
In closing, I would like to offer a piece of advice. As individuals, we all belong to some kind of isolated group heavily depending on one local bridge for information from the other side of the world. When you get some piece of new information from a seemingly reliable source, which in most case will be local bridges, it is always a good idea to go out and hunt for other interpretations on this piece of information. In most cases, you will find out the original new piece of information you get from the local bridge is not accurate, or even wrong. After all, the world nowadays is connected together and information exchange is not aheavily dependent on local bridges. The Internet will offer you the same piece of information from different perspectives. Google is always your good friend because it always provides you an unbiased gathering of information.
Media Sources Mentioned Above:
Huffington Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/19/alibaba-market-cap_n_5850374.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/19/alibaba-ipo-flowchart_n_5850568.html?utm_hp_ref=business
FengHuang:
http://finance.ifeng.com/a/20140921/13132333_0.shtml