Facts? Truth?
Joseph Bernstein’s recent book, “Bad News: Selling the Story of Disinformation (Harpers, Sept. 2021) is well worth the read. One can also get an overview of Mr. Bernstein’s thoughts by listening to Sean Illining’s interview with him on Vox Communicaitons (How Big Tech benefits from the disinformation panic.)
There is no doubt that the internet with all its nieces, nephew and cousins has opened the door to more opportunities for sharing thoughts, opinions and perhaps a few facts than has ever before been possible. There are still an alarming number of illiterate people in the United States and elsewhere, but there are more literate people than was possible even a 100 years ago. Even the best efforts of the Chinese government cannot completely shut off access to the internet to a majority of its citizens.
In the year 868 in China, a form of woodblock printing was used to print “The Diamond Sutra”. Between the years 1440 and 1450 most European texts were printed using xylography, a form of woodblock printing. In 1440 goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press.
The first edition of the radio was patented in 1896 by Guglielmo Marconi. The first movie using a series of pictures was in 1878.
Next was commercial movies and the local movie theaters. By 1910 there was also the news reel which was a overview of “the news” shown in movie theaters. Next came the television in 1927 but which did not become a common item in most homes much later.
January 1, 1983 is usually considered the year the internet became available to the public although the first computer to computer transmission was in 1910.
I share this brief history to remind the reader that access to information until fairly recently was limited to the spoken word, some signals, drawings, and carvings such as found in totem poles. Priests or perhaps a few other elders were charged with disseminating and interrupting information. ‘
Our family did not have a television until 1956. Prior to that all the news we received arrived via word of mouth, a limited number of books, an occasional radio broadcast when dad hooked up a radio to the car battery or via our transistor radios. We did occasionally attend movies and would see the weekly news reel shown at the local move theater. The regional country school had a limited library and Grandma Fannie her her own personal library. Paperback novels were limitedly available in our home.
The information we received via radio, news reels, word of mouth, school books and even encyclopedias was filtered. Whoever was presenting the news or writing the books selected thin slices from censored lens. Overt theft and mistreatment of those natives who occupied these lands in the United States, slavery, Jim Crow, systemic racism, sexism, and homophobia was often filtered through a conservative, white, so called Christian lens.
Even though the dissemination of information was limited for most of human history, fake news, disinformation, or thin slices of a partial truth or propaganda was always the so called news de jour. As the means to share “news”, points of views and marketing strategies has exponentially increased so has the opportunities to disseminate partial truths or outright lies exponentially increased.
My first conscious memory of racism is age 4 or 5. I was also aware of sexism and homophobia by that age. I cannot recall a time when I was not aware that various family members told the same story from vastly different perspectives. I knew my textbook told a history which was vastly different than what I understood it to be.
The bottom line is that whether we call it fake news, disinformation, lies or any other name historically there has been little shared reality and no consensus of a fixed reality. Modern day politicians did not invent ‘fake news”. They may more effectively use the internet to promote their political versions of truth than did past generations, but they certainly did not invent “political marketing”.
The “truth” is that we have only ever had stories. We take snippets of information from outside of ourselves, blend them with the stories and fears we have already stored, wrap them as attractively as possible and present them as “truths” or “the news”. As soon as these bits of information have been birthed as a story we have “fake news” or, at best, a thin slice of a perspective. The fact that very creative individuals can tell that story in a manner which allow it to go viral is relatively new.
More than ever we citizens of this planet are charged with the responsibility of sifting through these stories and discovering whether any of them contain that rare pearl which we want to call news or truth. We need to teach our children how to do this as efficiently and objectively as is humanly possible. We need to quilt pretending as if we can use the school setting to teach truths. Perhaps the only truth we can teach our children is that we can, at best, together share and explore the paper thin slices we may individually experience as the truth. Thrown all together we may arrive at an approximate shared “fact or truth” which we can use to shape the decisions we make as a body politic.
Written October 27, 2021
Jimmy F Pickett
coachpickett.org
Okay
Joseph Bernstein’s recent book, “Bad News: Selling the Story of Disinformation (Harpers, Sept. 2021) is well worth the read. One can also get an overview of Mr. Bernstein’s thoughts by listening to Sean Illining’s interview with him on Vox Communicaitons (How Big Tech benefits from the disinformation panic.)
There is no doubt that the internet with all its nieces, nephew and cousins has opened the door to more opportunities for sharing thoughts, opinions and perhaps a few facts than has ever before been possible. There are still an alarming number of illiterate people in the United States and elsewhere, but there are more literate people than was possible even a 100 years ago. Even the best efforts of the Chinese government cannot completely shut off access to the internet to a majority of its citizens.
In the year 868 in China, a form of woodblock printing was used to print “The Diamond Sutra”. Between the years 1440 and 1450 most European texts were printed using xylography, a form of woodblock printing. In 1440 goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press.
The first edition of the radio was patented in 1896 by Guglielmo Marconi. The first movie using a series of pictures was in 1878.
Next was commercial movies and the local movie theaters. By 1910 there was also the news reel which was a overview of “the news” shown in movie theaters. Next came the television in 1927 but which did not become a common item in most homes much later.
January 1, 1983 is usually considered the year the internet became available to the public although the first computer to computer transmission was in 1910.
I share this brief history to remind the reader that access to information until fairly recently was limited to the spoken word, some signals, drawings, and carvings such as found in totem poles. Priests or perhaps a few other elders were charged with disseminating and interrupting information. ‘
Our family did not have a television until 1956. Prior to that all the news we received arrived via word of mouth, a limited number of books, an occasional radio broadcast when dad hooked up a radio to the car battery or via our transistor radios. We did occasionally attend movies and would see the weekly news reel shown at the local move theater. The regional country school had a limited library and Grandma Fannie her her own personal library. Paperback novels were limitedly available in our home.
The information we received via radio, news reels, word of mouth, school books and even encyclopedias was filtered. Whoever was presenting the news or writing the books selected thin slices from censored lens. Overt theft and mistreatment of those natives who occupied these lands in the United States, slavery, Jim Crow, systemic racism, sexism, and homophobia was often filtered through a conservative, white, so called Christian lens.
Even though the dissemination of information was limited for most of human history, fake news, disinformation, or thin slices of a partial truth or propaganda was always the so called news de jour. As the means to share “news”, points of views and marketing strategies has exponentially increased so has the opportunities to disseminate partial truths or outright lies exponentially increased.
My first conscious memory of racism is age 4 or 5. I was also aware of sexism and homophobia by that age. I cannot recall a time when I was not aware that various family members told the same story from vastly different perspectives. I knew my textbook told a history which was vastly different than what I understood it to be.
The bottom line is that whether we call it fake news, disinformation, lies or any other name historically there has been little shared reality and no consensus of a fixed reality. Modern day politicians did not invent ‘fake news”. They may more effectively use the internet to promote their political versions of truth than did past generations, but they certainly did not invent “political marketing”.
The “truth” is that we have only ever had stories. We take snippets of information from outside of ourselves, blend them with the stories and fears we have already stored, wrap them as attractively as possible and present them as “truths” or “the news”. As soon as these bits of information have been birthed as a story we have “fake news” or, at best, a thin slice of a perspective. The fact that very creative individuals can tell that story in a manner which allow it to go viral is relatively new.
More than ever we citizens of this planet are charged with the responsibility of sifting through these stories and discovering whether any of them contain that rare pearl which we want to call news or truth. We need to teach our children how to do this as efficiently and objectively as is humanly possible. We need to quilt pretending as if we can use the school setting to teach truths. Perhaps the only truth we can teach our children is that we can, at best, together share and explore the paper thin slices we may individually experience as the truth. Thrown all together we may arrive at an approximate shared “fact or truth” which we can use to shape the decisions we make as a body politic.
Written October 27, 2021
Jimmy F Pickett
coachpickett.org
Okay
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