Chinese Version
10-04-2016
Travelers often experience joyful surprises away from home.
Travelers who love flower and plant will likely encounter strange fruits and experience joyful surprises, in autumn, away from home in a garden, which was what I had experienced in Wurzburg.
On one autumn morning, I went to a garden. In the garden, little shiny red fruits in the dew-dropped green leaves gleamed and called at me to stop. I stopped and bent down to take photos of it.
While taking a photo of the red fruit, I was surprised to see purple fruits and black fruits hidden in the green leaves, and I joyfully kept their beautiful images too. I thought I captured the actual sizes of the three autumn fruits I saw in the garden. However, when I enjoyed the photos later, I found that my lens had unified the size of the fruits, because I knew they are different in size. This is probably due to the fact that my eyes are used to some specific size.
My subconscious tendency and preference had already affected the fruits before the photo was taken. The readers, who have never seen the three fruits before, would naturally think that these three fruits are of the same size after looking them on individual photos. This is unintentionally misleading. I sincerely think that the photos of the autumn fruits I took are true portrayals, but they are not…
By convention, we all aware that different trees, although they have experienced the same spring-time effects to reach maturity in autumn, will produce fruits of different sizes. While looking at the individual photographs of the three autumn fruits, readers may not bring up their awareness of different sizes of fruit, but just undoubtedly think the three fruits on the photos are the same size.
This situation reminds me of how nowadays we are bombarded with information on social media via mobile devices. Due to the lack of editorial corrections and high productivities, news reports and personal blogs are 24/7 (24 hours a day, 7 days a week) surging continuously on social media. And many accounts carry the author’s subconscious or conscious personal perspectives, which could mislead the readers a lot, similar to my pictures of the three autumn fruits.
We need to continuously accumulate knowledge and establish our own rules to reduce unnecessary anxiety caused by being confused about excessive information. So that we can avoid being overwhelmed or choked even when swimming in today’s ocean of information.
I hope our society can consciously reduce the amount of misrepresentations that an overwhelming amount of information may cause.
In addition, in the era of big data, anyone who analyzes data with a predetermined purpose may make up values to reach said purpose… At this time, it is largely dependent on the conscientiousness and wisdom of big data players.