The Dark Shadow Shrine

embrace the darkness; that you may see the light nestled within it......

Monday, January 02, 2017

When hard truths lose out to seductive lies

Click HERE

-Note the use of examples and questions in the opening BANG

-Interesting anecdote for BANG!
Oxford Dictionaries chose post-truth - an adjective defined as "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief" - as its international word of the year.

-what we are witnessing instead is the rise of a new phenomenon of completely invented news stories, concerning events which never happened.

-the long-term consequences of the electronic age. When the Internet first became a platform of mass communication, the assumption was that this would be a positive development: With facts available at one's fingertips on every handheld device, policy choices will be better informed, more politicians will be held to account, and more people will engage in public debate.
In fact, precisely the opposite has happened. While the Internet expanded public debate, it also created alternative communities which blocked out the evolution of ideas and filtered out views they did not like. Twitter and Facebook as well as a whole host of chat rooms effectively operate as echo chambers, in which the more you engage with one view, the more the software algorithms of these platforms connect you to others who share similar views and prejudices.

-Yet the most negative aspect of this post-truth age has been the rise of an anti-expert sentiment, the rejection of the idea that some people know more about a subject than us, and that we should therefore be guided by their views and experience.

-Google, Twitter and Facebook cannot continue to claim they are merely platforms for other people's ideas.

-"a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its trousers on", as Winston Churchill, Britain's wartime leader, is reputed to have said.