> We're not in a post-truth world; people have always made stuff up.
A post-truth world doesn't mean that lies now exist, but I suspect you know that. I'm referring to things like the dramatic declines in trust in journalism[1], a crucial part of how we build our aforementioned shared reality. There are cultural and technological explanations for this, but no small part of the blame falls on journalism itself (though arguably, this is just the inevitable consequence of the structural economic challenges that they've faced).
The explosion of communication and information access engendered by the Internet is a double-edged sword. Decent, intelligent people are able to sift through the firehose of lower-quality info to build a clearer view of the world than ever before, without being bottlenecked by the pitfalls faced by the institutions that used to have a monopoly on producing and transmitting knowledge.
But it seems that the vast, vast majority of people benefited from the paternalism of our scientific and journalistic institutions, and are helpless before the one-two punch of a) a firehose of low-quality info and b) the spreading rot in the scientific and especially journalistic establishment.
True. I was comparing now to the days before newspapers and investigative journalism. Perhaps “post-truth” does make sense as a term, if there was also “pre-truth”, and we have left the golden age of truth.
A post-truth world doesn't mean that lies now exist, but I suspect you know that. I'm referring to things like the dramatic declines in trust in journalism[1], a crucial part of how we build our aforementioned shared reality. There are cultural and technological explanations for this, but no small part of the blame falls on journalism itself (though arguably, this is just the inevitable consequence of the structural economic challenges that they've faced).
The explosion of communication and information access engendered by the Internet is a double-edged sword. Decent, intelligent people are able to sift through the firehose of lower-quality info to build a clearer view of the world than ever before, without being bottlenecked by the pitfalls faced by the institutions that used to have a monopoly on producing and transmitting knowledge.
But it seems that the vast, vast majority of people benefited from the paternalism of our scientific and journalistic institutions, and are helpless before the one-two punch of a) a firehose of low-quality info and b) the spreading rot in the scientific and especially journalistic establishment.
[1] https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Pro... The proportion of Americans who trust the media is at 2/3 of what it was even 20 years ago