Has the Internet increased our level of ignorance?

Muhammad Al-Biladi Al-Madinah In simple language, ignorance is the opposite of knowledge. It can be divided into simple ignorance, which refers to a person who admits that he does not have knowledge about a certain thing. There is complex ignorance, which means that a person is ignorant but does not know it. The latter is more dangerous and the most widely common in our society. Some people think they know a lot about a subject and start talking about it and passing judgment based on confusing or elusive information but in fact they are ignorant. In my opinion, the Internet is the culprit. It should be blamed for the rising levels of complex ignorance in our society. Social media websites are teeming with misconceptions and myths, which many people believe. Although the Internet has made a lot of information readily available, it has also, in many cases, given us false information about many topics. Nobody scrutinizes the information available on social media websites and this means that anyone can post whatever he likes and claim that it is true. I do not need to give you any statistics about the false information available on social media. It suffices to say, though, that you can open WhatsApp and count the number of false sayings attributed to Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), and see how many rumors and false stories are circulated every day. Many of us buy into these statements and believe what is posted on social media. We should raise public awareness about this issue and give people the tools they need to find out if a story or piece of news is true or false. In the age of the Internet, the problem does not lie in the availability of a piece of information for there is an avalanche of information everywhere and it is all just a click away. The real problem is how we analyze this information and its sources to find out if it is correct or just a rumor.