Of Bicycles, Biographies and Bits

It's about time I made another post relevant to my scholarly interests. I've been busy with my day job, reviewing my math and doing some fun writing. Oh, and I've also been surfing a bit on my bodyboard and loaners from neighbors after I broke my own. Today, I'm retreading an essay I posted somewhere else a few years back. I originally wrote this during debate of the Affordable Care Act. I noticed a definite political character to the information that partisans on either side cited to back up their opinions. Some of the information was misinformation, some was disinformation. There was opinion wearing the cloak of fact, demagoguery and outright deception. Some actual information swam to the surface at times. That got me thinking about how and why people choose specific information sources. For instance, why did some people choose the Liberty Council website as being more authoritative than the text of the legislation it linked to at Thomas.gov? Liberty Council was one source of the 'Death Panel' myth. And, yet, when you followed their link into the actual text of the legislation, nowhere was there language about such a thing. And, yet, more people believed Liberty Council than the actual language of the bills. Why was this the case? The small amount of research I've done into matter shows that there is no easy answer to this one. One thing did become clear, that information and politics are deeply bound together. I could and hope to write a thesis on this topic. The following essay was my first attempt to come to grips with this topic.