01-30-2017, 01:47 PM
For those of us who strive to be well-informed about political developments, how do we insulate ourselves from the growing phenomenon of "fake news"? I ran across this blog post, which provides a thoughtful--albeit partial--answer to that question.
In the New Atlantis blogs, Alan Jacobs recently wrote the following:
http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2017/01/recency-illusions.html
...the Twitter-cycle is far, far too short. People regularly get freaked out by stories than turn out to be false, and by the time the facts are known a good deal of damage (not least to personal relationships) has often already been done — plus, the disappearance of the cause of an emotion doesn’t automatically eliminate the emotion itself. In fact, it often leaves that emotion in search of new justifications for its existence.
I have come to believe that it is impossible for anyone who is regularly on social media to have a balanced and accurate understanding of what is happening in the world. To follow a minute-by-minute cycle of news is to be constantly threatened by illusion. So I’m not just staying off Twitter, I’m cutting back on the news sites in my RSS feed, and deleting browser bookmarks to newspapers. Instead, I am turning more of my attention to monthly magazines, quarterly journals, and books. I’m trying to get a somewhat longer view of things — trying to start thinking about issues only when some of the basic facts about them have been sorted out. Taking the short view has burned me far too many times; I’m going to try to prevent that from happening ever again (even if I will sometimes fail). And if once in a while I end up fighting a battle in a war that has already ended ... I can live with that.
Personally, I prefer the long-form reading upon which this blogger now relies. It's no guarantee of objectivity, accuracy, or any other standard to which most journalists and authors aspire. But it beats the hell out of the kinds of sources he once mined for news.
In the New Atlantis blogs, Alan Jacobs recently wrote the following:
http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2017/01/recency-illusions.html
...the Twitter-cycle is far, far too short. People regularly get freaked out by stories than turn out to be false, and by the time the facts are known a good deal of damage (not least to personal relationships) has often already been done — plus, the disappearance of the cause of an emotion doesn’t automatically eliminate the emotion itself. In fact, it often leaves that emotion in search of new justifications for its existence.
I have come to believe that it is impossible for anyone who is regularly on social media to have a balanced and accurate understanding of what is happening in the world. To follow a minute-by-minute cycle of news is to be constantly threatened by illusion. So I’m not just staying off Twitter, I’m cutting back on the news sites in my RSS feed, and deleting browser bookmarks to newspapers. Instead, I am turning more of my attention to monthly magazines, quarterly journals, and books. I’m trying to get a somewhat longer view of things — trying to start thinking about issues only when some of the basic facts about them have been sorted out. Taking the short view has burned me far too many times; I’m going to try to prevent that from happening ever again (even if I will sometimes fail). And if once in a while I end up fighting a battle in a war that has already ended ... I can live with that.
Personally, I prefer the long-form reading upon which this blogger now relies. It's no guarantee of objectivity, accuracy, or any other standard to which most journalists and authors aspire. But it beats the hell out of the kinds of sources he once mined for news.