A very senior retired bureaucrat once requested me to review his book. After going through the book, which was a decent account of the socio-political scenario during the long tenure the author had served in several positions in the State and Central Governments, I came across a factual error. That was the only lapse in the voluminous book. Out of curiosity, I asked him where he got that information from. His answer was that it was from the Google. It would be futile to argue that everything posted on the search engine is wrong. But certainly, everything given there is not right either. And that’s what needs to be understood. In today’s age of easy access to astronomically large volume of information, authenticity is the first casualty. There is an old saying — little knowledge is dangerous. Well, we now realise that more knowledge has become even more dangerous because what we consider knowledge in common parlance these days is not knowledge in the right sense of the term. It is just information and this information can be both misinformation and disinformation depending on the intention of the post. It is against this backdrop that we need to think about a recent research finding in the UK on internet searches for serious health conditions commissioned by Perkbox Medical. It has been found that the searches on the net for serious health conditions have risen manifold in the last few years. Curiosity is obviously not bad. But what is happening is that access to information is giving a wrong sense of empowerment. In searches for medical conditions, people get to know the ailments, their etiology and symptoms and their treatment also. The problem is that this makes them think that they can substitute the doctor. Many go for self-medication, many buy anxiety in the process and many turn into hypochondriacs. In fact, hypochondriasis is a major problem these days as any one carefully observing outpatient departments in hospital can find out. In India, which is still a developing country where healthcare facilities are still not as streamlined, this tendency creates a fertile ground for quackery. As a result, even sales persons at local pharmacies have the temerity to overrule the doctor’s advice. This is not the case with just medicine. In areas other than heath, too, such situations have become prevalent. Students in teaching institutions have started considering the internet as substitute for teachers and are not keen to attend classes. In specialised subjects like Psychology where the dividing line between so called common sense and scientific conclusion is thin, this can lead to a lot of confusion. With such easy access to information, everyone considers himself/herself to be a psychologist. So it has become a major problem these days as street level generalists are replacing experts in a big way and this leads to a lot of misplaced assumptions. Francis Bacon opined that knowledge is power, but hardly did he realise that a time will come when information will become knowledge. More so, he could not figure out there will be a social media monster that would change opinions, create opinions and even replace scientific knowledge with whims and fancies. We have, thus, come to a state where Goebbelsian hypotheses is pushing truth to the back seat. It is no longer about repeating a lie often. It is just about posting a lie on the net and the rest will follow.

Pathak is a professor of management, writer, and an acclaimed public speaker. He can be reached at ppathak.ism@gmail.com