By:

Anil D. Salve

21 March 2026 at 8:11:09 pm

A Drought of Wisdom in an Ocean of Information

We live in an age where information is everywhere. With a single click, we can access news from across the world, thousands of opinions, countless videos and endless claims. Knowledge has never been so accessible. Yet, in this overwhelming flow of information, something increasingly scarce is discernment-the ability to distinguish what deserves our belief from what deserves our doubt. Information and knowledge are not the same. Reading, watching or hearing something does not automatically...

min read

A Drought of Wisdom in an Ocean of Information

We live in an age where information is everywhere. With a single click, we can access news from across the world, thousands of opinions, countless videos and endless claims. Knowledge has never been so accessible. Yet, in this overwhelming flow of information, something increasingly scarce is discernment-the ability to distinguish what deserves our belief from what deserves our doubt. Information and knowledge are not the same. Reading, watching or hearing something does not automatically make it true. We need the ability to verify information, understand its context, recognise its purpose and only then form an opinion. In the digital age, this ability has become one of the most important forms of wisdom. Social media has transformed the way information travels. WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and other platforms have made communication faster, wider and more accessible. But the same speed that connects society can also overwhelm it. Information often reaches us before facts do. A headline is read before the full story. A short video is watched without knowing what happened before or after it. A photograph is circulated without its original context. A message arrives with the familiar words, “Forwarded as received,” and within minutes it may reach thousands of people. By the time the truth catches up, the rumour may already have done its work. The problem becomes even more serious when misinformation is deliberately created and circulated. Rumours may be planted not merely to mislead individuals but to divert public attention from an important issue, create suspicion, damage someone's reputation or push society towards a particular narrative. A distraction does not always need to be completely false. Sometimes a small piece of truth is mixed with exaggeration, selective facts or emotional language. The result can be more powerful than an outright lie because it appears believable. This is how narratives are manufactured. Social media platforms can become powerful tools in this process. A repeated claim begins to look familiar, and familiarity is often mistaken for truth. A provocative post attracts attention. Thousands of reactions create the impression that “everyone” believes it. One emotional video triggers another, comments intensify the mood, and before facts have an opportunity to speak, public sentiment may have already shifted. This is where mob psychology enters the picture. A society can move from calm to anger, suspicion to trust, or optimism to fear with surprising speed. People who would ordinarily think carefully may react differently when they see thousands of others expressing outrage, fear or hostility. The individual begins to follow the crowd, and the crowd begins to reinforce the individual. The danger is not limited to negative emotions. The same mechanism can also be used positively-to mobilise people for social causes, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, public awareness and community action. Technology itself is neither wise nor foolish. Its impact depends on how information is created, amplified and consumed. The greatest danger, therefore, is not that we have too much information. It is that we may lose the habit of thinking while consuming it. We are increasingly becoming consumers of information rather than creators of thought. Everyone has access to information today, but access does not necessarily mean understanding. The boundaries between a rumour and a report, an opinion and a fact, popularity and truth are becoming increasingly blurred. A post does not become true because thousands of people have liked it. A video does not become evidence merely because it has gone viral. An opinion does not become a fact because it is expressed confidently. An idea does not become correct simply because it confirms what we already believe. This last point deserves particular attention. We often accept information not because it is accurate, but because it is comfortable. We are naturally attracted to information that confirms our existing beliefs and suspicious of information that challenges them. In the digital world, this tendency can be amplified by algorithms that repeatedly expose us to content similar to what we have already watched, liked or shared. Gradually, we may find ourselves living inside an information bubble where we hear many voices-but mostly voices that agree with us. That is not diversity of information. It is an illusion of certainty. Discernment does not mean doubting everything. It means thinking before believing. It means asking simple but powerful questions: Who is saying this? What is the evidence? What is the context? What may be missing? Who benefits if I believe it? And have I heard the other side? These questions may take only a few seconds, but they can prevent hours, days or even years of misunderstanding. This responsibility is particularly important for the younger generation. Children today are growing up in an environment of unprecedented information exposure. They can encounter more information in a few hours than earlier generations might have encountered in weeks. Therefore, education cannot merely teach students how to collect, remember and reproduce information. It must teach them how to question, verify, analyse and interpret it. A student who can write the correct answer in an examination may be academically successful. But a student who knows how to ask the right question is better prepared for life. The classroom of the future must therefore produce not merely informed students, but thinking citizens. They must learn that forwarding a message is also a form of responsibility. Sharing a post is not an innocent act when it can affect someone's reputation, create public fear or influence social behaviour. The challenge becomes even greater in the age of Artificial Intelligence. AI can generate information, images, audio and video with extraordinary speed and sophistication. The distinction between what is real and what merely appears real may become increasingly difficult. In such a world, human judgment becomes more valuable, not less. Technology can produce an answer in seconds. It cannot automatically tell us whether that answer deserves our trust. Some answers require experience. Some require context. Many require the ability to think independently. We have more information, more technology and more connectivity than any previous generation. Yet our real challenge is to preserve something technology cannot manufacture for us: the capacity to think for ourselves. The ocean of information will only become larger. The question will no longer be, “How much information do we have?” The more important questions will be: What should we accept? What should we question? What should we verify? And what should we reject? No technology can completely answer these questions for us. No number of likes can substitute for evidence. No viral trend can replace judgment. No majority can turn misinformation into truth. That responsibility belongs to human beings. Information can tell us what happened. Discernment helps us understand what it means, why it happened, what may be missing from the story and how we should respond. Perhaps, therefore, the greatest educational challenge of our time is not to teach people how to find more information. They already know how to do that. The greater challenge is to teach them how to pause-to pause before believing, to pause before reacting, to pause before forwarding and to pause before joining the crowd. Because sometimes the most intelligent response to information is not an immediate reaction, but a moment of reflection. The ocean is already around us. It is growing deeper every day. What we need now is not more information to swim through it-but the wisdom to know which direction to take. (The writer is the Principal of Podar International School, Ausa, Latur. Views personal.)

Australian women’s love for sport

The Conversation

Jan 3, 2025

3 min read

Australians love a good sport story, because we love our sport. While many of us think of sporting narratives playing out on fields and courts, there are some wonderful sporting stories captured in our country's rich literature. And just as women have always been playing sport, they have also been writing about it. Here are some books by women and non-binary writers for your summer reading list. They look at sport in a range of ways. Whether you enjoy histories, non-fiction, poetry, crime or even romance, there is a sporting story to suit all readers. These books seek to connect with diverse sports fans, or anyone looking for something a little different.

Footy in literature

When we think of books about Australian rules football, we tend to think of the many memoirs, biographies and other non-fiction works documenting the game's history, cultural influence and place in collective memory.

Despite the game being the country's dominant football code, it has not strayed too far into the world of fiction. Fictional footy narratives are rare.

The first women's Ashes

Marion Stell's The Bodyline Fix: How Women Saved Cricket delves into a fascinating yet often overlooked chapter of cricket history. The book explores how Australian women cricketers in the 1930s played a crucial role in restoring the integrity of the sport, following the infamous men's Bodyline series of 1932-33, which strained relations between Australia and England.

Stell is one of Australia's foremost sports historians. She has gathered the stories of women's sport in Australia, tracking down documents from scrapbooks kept by athletes and their families, mining storage units and garages for historical gems, and peering through miles of microfilm.

She is the author of the germinal book Half the Race: A History of Australian Women in Sport (1991), and her co-authored work with women's football pioneer Heather Reid, Women in Boots: Football and Feminism in the 1970s (2020), is also excellent reading.

Whole of My World by Nicole Hayes (2013)

These books depicted the ways women work to connect with the game and the joy that fandom can bring. They also examined the dark side of the sport, such as the effects of toxic masculinity.

More recently, Sarah Thornton published Lapse, a crime thriller set in rural Australia, where the protagonist, former lawyer Clementine Jones heads to the country and ends up coaching at the local footy club.

Lapse is an interesting look at Australian rural life, racial tensions in small communities and the dynamics of country footy through the tropes of the thriller genre.

The novel has lots of suspense to keep you turning the pages. The plot is a refreshing take on the “stranger arriving in a small town with a secret”, featuring a woman protagonist who comes into a hypermasculine environment.

Matildas' momentum

Who didn't get caught up the excitement of the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup? One of the successes of the event was how many new fans were welcomed into the women's football family.

Football historian and academic Fiona Crawford has been busy over the last couple of years documenting the increased focus on Australia's national women's team the Matildas.

She published The Matilda Effect (2023) in the lead up to the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup. She also co-authored Never Say Die: The Hundred-Year Overnight Success of Australian Women's Football (2019) with Lee McGowan, which is another great read.

First Nations people and sport

Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity by Ellen van Neerven is a compelling blend of memoir, poetry and cultural commentary.

Personal Score is incredibly powerful, alternating between intimate reflection and sharp political critique. It explores what it means to play sport on stolen land, to love football – and questions the game's colonial history.

Tennis anyone?

Romance fiction book sales are on the rise. You might be surprised to learn that sports romance has become a major player in this growing market – so much so that from February 28 to March 2, 2025, the world's first Sports Romance Convention will be held in Minneapolis, USA.

As we gear up for the Australian Open, a timely title is Abra Pressler's Love and Other Scores. Pressler tells the story of an international tennis star with a secret coming to compete in Melbourne's grand slam tournament. When he falls in love with a local, he finds he can't hide his secret much longer.

Pressler's novel explores how diverse sexualities are still stigmatised in men's sport, at the same time as it depicts an environment where there are more intersectional identities. And of course, as is necessary in the romance genre, it gives us a “happily ever after” ending that allows us to imagine a sporting world where these issues are not only resolved, but celebrated.

-The Conversation

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