As simple as human nature, as complicated as the truth.
The following is my South American Business Forum essay application, responding to the main topics for this year: Chasing a Shared Purpose and, more specifically, the subtopic of Reality Gap.
“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”
William Kingdon Clifford
The first and foremost thing I wish to establish in this essay is that 2016`s word-of-the-year, “post-truth”, is not an internet phenomenon: It is a consequence of humanity’s many nuances and subject of centuries of intellectual study. To try and “correct” post-truth would imply correcting essential parts of human nature into what could only be described as a robotic-type state of being. Until recently we have relied quite confidently on the media to present us with the facts we haven’t the time to discover for ourselves. In the development of the internet age, media (as regarding news outlets and information media) has failed to evolve and maintain its integrity. While it resolves its problems we need to explore different means of correcting our biases. The first, immediate course of action I propose is business enterprises filling the holes left by lagging media and the second, more long-term course is regarding educational reform.
In an academic article called “The Ethics of Belief”, an English author states that it is our moral obligation to question that which has been presented to us as truth to prevent the propagation of so-called “fake news”. Our words and thoughts (in modern times shared online via Facebook statuses and tweets) are common property that we share with our communities. These help shape current ideological and cultural truths, passed on to us from our parents on which we construct new ideologies and rid ourselves of obsolete ones to then pass on to whatever generation follows. The author poignantly calls this “…an awful privilege, and an awful responsibility, that we should help to create the world in which posterity will live.”1
Though this sounds like something from a research paper carried out in 2016 with regards to Millennials and Generation Z, in fact these ideas were published by English mathematician and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford in the year 1877, almost exactly 140 years ago. Clifford, author of the first quote in this essay, writes a 10-page exploration into how Man should be held accountable for spreading untruths, regardless of whether he caused any immediate harm or not. Clifford firmly believes a man should find the time to investigate thoroughly, or else he “should have no time to believe,”2 in the same way that critics today condemn the spreading of fake news, pointing out that fact-checking tools are readily available (with something as simple as a Google search, for example). This concept of Man’s tendency to accept a distorted version of reality can be seen as far back as Plato’s cavern allegory.
If our brains are wired to interpret the same information in different ways, if confirmation bias is a “human trait”, if we are all living in the dimly-lit cavern and have lived in a post-truth world since, at least, Plato’s time, how can we call this an internet-era phenomenon? I think it important not to point fingers at a generation whose only fault is to be much more exposed, for better and for worse, in a Big Data age. Though the scope of misinformation has widened and the time frames in which it is propagated has narrowed exponentially in the Internet era, in my opinion we have never, as a society, lived in a “truthful” world.
With this in mind, what could we consider a world “free of misinformation”? It would seem that in order to stop living in a post-truth world we would need to eliminate more than a few human characteristics. These would likely also include certain emotions, as thoughts can use our emotions to spread and likely have higher chances of spreading if they provoke a greater emotional response than their “possibly more accurate but probably more boring opponents,”3 as YouTuber CGP Grey explains in his “This video will make you angry.” Eliminate bias, eliminate emotions, eliminate anything other than the cold, hard facts, and rather than post-post-truth all I can envision is a post-humanity age, wherein all dystopian AI movies got it right and those who make decisions are machines, not men.
My point is to remind the reader that we have always needed tools and safety nets to help us overcome our tendency to allow personal beliefs to override logical arguments and our inability to dedicate ourselves to finding the correct information. We cannot all research and understand every line of reasoning available on a certain topic, even in an age where information can easily be found. I would even argue that it is even more difficult to conduct proper research in an age where we no longer have information but data. As the process of getting a paper published used to have many more hurdles and difficulties before reaching a broad audience, certain standards of veracity and fact-checking were assured, but today anyone with a laptop, Wi-Fi and the right website is an expert. What are needed, therefore, are professionals dedicated to sifting through the data and extracting the information worth sharing; the facts. The truth. We have, until recently, entrusted that responsibility to the media, insofar as news outlets and information media is concerned.
However, it has been made evident that the media is no longer capable of fulfilling this role. Clickbait titles, speculation, personal opinions stated as facts, hundreds of sub-sites embedded in links scattered across a few scant paragraphs written by a self-declared journalist with no qualifications appear alongside ‘legitimate’ news sites which sometimes produce content that is almost indistinguishable from their aforementioned, amateur colleagues. A few months ago I took to my own Facebook page to write about how I “can’t help but cringe at how some newspapers and websites call my ex-President a criminal when she has not been formally charged by our Justice system. I can understand why people I know refuse to read these articles (that do have solid facts) because they write in such unprofessional and vindictive manners.”
Taking this into consideration, it is possible to conclude that the media has failed. It has failed to adapt to an internet era, failed to provide us with easily accessible, concise and relevant information. It has fallen into pleasing viral trends rather than maintaining itself as a separate entity and has therefore, in great part, eroded the trust that society should have in its media outlets.
I have no doubt that the responsibility is shared across different communities and institutions — by no means do I wish to lay a blanket condemnation over all journalist, media groups and independent writers. However, in the same way humanity cannot ignore its flaws with regards to personal biases, the media cannot ignore its failures in its attempts to evolve within the World Wide Web.
What I wish to propose in this essay are two possible solutions that can be carried out while the much-needed adjustment from media sources is in process. The first short/immediate-term solution is the seizing of multiple business opportunities to provide reliable news in a manner that responds to current trends such as YouTube communities, visual messages and bidirectional communication.
What if we had a social media site based on opposing views? What if we had a platform in which your news story was featured based on professional reporters marking it as legitimate? What if satirical news shows criticizing real issues were given a proper monetary platform? What if there were podcasts, discussion panels and threads dedicated to each developing news story in the world? It may sound utopian, but isn’t this precisely what the internet is meant to achieve, information utopia? There are audiences for every niche, as YouTuber Veritasium discovered when he was able to obtain financial support for highly detailed and specific explanations of physics topics by aggregating niche audiences across the world. If one thinks of how large media empires managed to consolidate themselves without this benefit of aggregation of the internet, it becomes difficult to justify not exploring the possibility of developing similar enterprises in a digital world.
Undoubtedly there are enormous difficulties in trying to bring these ideas about — how to control spamming, how to make any of these ideas profitable or even trustworthy. I cannot explore these in depth in an under 2000-word essay, but I think it important to at least pose these questions.
These same difficulties apply to a much greater degree with regards to my second, long-term solution: education. As young adults now entering the professional world, some of us feel lacking in certain tools and skills when facing difficult challenges in an ever-changing landscape. This needs to be avoided for future generations fully submerged in a Big Data, internet world. The ability to critically analyze data, program basic codes and algorithms to filter through spam, the construction of values based on truth and not celebrity status are possible modifications that would affect intellect, technical skills and cultural values alike. The educational system is due for a deep seated overhaul of values and basic structure, not least in the face of how internet has overhauled our basic forms of communication. We need to educate ourselves and those after us in the ability to navigate this wonderful, yet terrifyingly complex, landscape of the internet and pick up the slack in measuring the veracity of a source.
By no means do I profess to know how to properly resolve these issues, but by asking these questions and presenting these doubts I hope to spark some form of debate in order to, perhaps, help construct the discussion that leads to the answers we need.
To conclude, therefore, we as humans are utterly fallible. We believe fiction more readily than fact when it excites our emotions or confirms our biases and we have been guilty of this flaw since before Plato’s musings. Across the ages, we have turned to different authorities to separate the truth from the lie, from religious scholars to the modern-age media. In the age of the internet, however, we have yet to find that authority. Will it be a website or group of international eminences, or will it fall on the shoulders of each and every one of us, educated and armed with new tools to finally become one of those men William Kingdon Clifford envisioned, free of the sin of misinformation?
