A Word On Context (Don’t Believe Everything You Read!)

I read a post on Gizmodo.com today titled, “Maybe This Is Why Blockbuster Is Dying”. The post uses the following quote to point out how Blockbuster’s CEO is out of touch with current trends:

“I don’t have to figure out how to get it from my Nintendo machine to the screen. I know I can do it, but I don’t want to–it makes my head hurt to think about it!”
– Jim Keyes, Blockbuster CEO

The quote is taken to mean that CEO, Jim Keyes, finds it easier to go to a store, rent a DVD, drive back home, and play it on his DVD player than he does to learn how to stream a movie from NetFlix using his Wii. The post then makes the point that Keyes and Blockbuster are not forward thinking, and that they are “willfully ignoring the fact” that streaming is the future of video rental.

Interesting.

Want to see the whole quote? Here it is (you can read the entire original interview a Fast Company):

“What I want to do is punch a button on my remote, and have access to 10,000 movies. You can get it all here. I’m going to be brash for a moment, but I don’t have to figure out how to get it from my Nintendo machine to the screen. I know I can do it, but I don’t want to–it makes my head hurt to think about it!”

Yup, if you just add the first sentence, “What I want to do is punch a button on my remote, and have access to 10,000 movies,” you see that Keyes is not “willfully ignoring” streaming video rental, he is saying that Blockbuster is trying to develop a system that is much simpler that NetFlix’s method of going through the Wii.

Big difference, right?

Sadly, if you read the comments on the Gizmodo article, so many people buy into the article’s out of context premise and jump on the Blockbuster bashing. Only a few took the step to read the original material (which, admittedly, the Gizmodo writer does link to) and point out that inaccuracy of the post.

Blockbuster may or may not succeed in their efforts. That’s not the point. The point is that with information becoming more and more readily available, people seem to be taking less and less responsibility for forming their own opinions. This is why election time annoys me so much. A candidate will spout off some quote or statistic which is almost always waaaaaaaaaaaaay out of context and usually distorted right up to the edge of being a lie (but never crossing that line). Then people will accept that as truth and run around repeating that stat and citing it as proof for why their side is right and the other side is wrong – without ever having bothered to do a little research or even think on their own.

The Gizmodo article writer either a) didn’t read the original piece closely before writing his piece or b) “willfully ignored” it so he could pull a quote out of context to bach Blockbuster. Either way, it smacks of unprofessionalism and idiocy.

But this is what happens on the internet (and in the world in general). People either unintentionally out of ignorance or willfully out of malice will twist words, pull things out of context, and stretch the truth to make their point. If you blindly accept whatever you read or hear, you will be adding to the problem while ultimately hurting yourself.

I for one am tired of people being slavish drones to anything anyone writes anywhere. Here’s a simple tip to make sure you are not blindly supporting someone’s manipulative lies:

Check Source Material!

Just like with the Keyes’ interview, don’t blindly accept every quote you read. If it is a quote that gets you fired up and angry, before you spout off like an angry pitbull, see if you can find the original interview/speech/article and find out how bad the quote actually was.

I am constantly looking for people saying and doing stupid things that I can write about. I can’t tell you how many times I have read a great headline or synopsis on a site like Digg only to click through the material (and then onto the source piece) only to discover that what happened wasn’t really that bad.

In this day and age, there’s not much of an excuse to not check source material. If you don’t know how, here’s a hint: there’s this tiny website called Google which helps you find anything on the internet. You should look into it.

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