Does It Even Matter?

The following images (plus the one above) reflect 10 presidents, 10 quotes, and the presumption of truth. Each of them are from posters I once made and placed on the wall of my web design classroom, back in 2018. The catch, as I told my students, was that only seven of them were true. Three of them were (and are) spurious, false, and misleading. One of them I even wrote myself and typed it next to the face of a president. So I pose to you the following three questions:

1. Can you determine which three quotes are false (or misapplied)?
2. Can you find the original source for any of the seven quotes that are true?
3. Does it even matter?

Back in 2018, when I gave this assignment to my students, we were studying the spread of information on the web. But at this point, that assignment and that study is irrelevant. Now it’s simply a matter of ongoing discussion. Now it’s simply a matter of ongoing discussion, especially seeing as so many of us are either prone to believe conspiracies (and claim them as fact), eager share quotes that we like (whether that person said them or not), or we’re determined to battle with those who carelessly and sometimes heartlessly spread misinformation, to the detriment of those most vulnerable, those who don’t know any better.

So again I ask, does it even matter? Or are we all too tired, too passive, too disinterested in truth to care anymore?

Feel free to pass this along to others, but wouldn’t it just be something if these quotes, including the false ones, made their way into the webosphere, along with a myriad of other poster quotes, without anyone ever questioning the source. Ahem. So goes the World Wide Web.