TOW #17

This is a picture that went viral recently through social media sites like Facebook, Reddit, Instagram and Tumblr. The caption reads that a shark collapsed at the Discovery science center in Kuwait, and that it's something people on these sites should like or upvote because it's something they'll only see once in a lifetime. As it turns out, however, this picture was a hoax, and it wasn't originally designed to make people believe that there were actually sharks swimming in a mall. Jamie King, a photoshop expert, made this photo to be a joke and posted it on his twitter. Someone else added the caption and, before we knew it, the picture went viral. This is just one example of many where people simply believe things without checking the sources of what they've found interesting. A recent "disease" was shared on the internet called Alexandria's Genesis where a child is born with purple eyes, they have no hair on their armpits or their legs, for girls they wouldn't menstruate, and fair skin that would never burn. People shared this diagnosis on Tumblr for months, not knowing that it was an interesting character trait made by an author of fanfiction. No one really knows why people change the meaning of certain things to make large numbers of people believe something that isn't true.  It does, however, prove that we, when we use the internet and see something, need to check before we share it, effectively making more and more people "dumber".