Headlines such as this need (of all things) attention:
X is flooded with Israel–Hamas war misinformation
Obviously, misinformation is not a new thing (no, Donald Trump didn't invent it...he's just the latest peddler to come along — although, this perspective makes it less benign). Conspiracies have been en vogue...from the beginning.
We can assail the vagaries of misinformation all we want (and, we should), but I suspect it will have little effect, given how most of us seem to manage our attention (or don't) and how the technology involved facilitates not only the perpetuation of un-truths, but the expansion of them.
We have a truth problem.
I want to put it that way, because the problem doesn't seem to be the truth itself, but rather our estimation and appropriation of it. Sometimes I'm not so sure we're only half interested in it anyway. We're more preoccupied with our own self-interests. As long as it doesn't directly impact us, we don't seem to care too much about the larger good. This may be, among other things, the curse of relative affluence — it leads us to believe we don't have to.
But, we can't just say (after the fact), well how did we get here? We are getting there right now.
I'll give you that it's pretty hard to keep up with. Deluge is a word often used to describe information these days. Which kind of means that we have to become selective. But, I'm sure how that actually relieves us, because we still have to determine what our selections will be. This is quite apparent in the surrounding echo-chambers that have, therefore, developed.
All to say, this is an uphill battle at the very least. To what can we turn to help ourselves help each other?
For one thing, we need to become more cognizant of what our values actually are AND the way they are (or are not) working themselves out in the daily choices we make about how we live. We can't just continue to defer to our trance-like state of existence and then blame those in charge. We are the ones consuming everything they are producing, so they keep producing it (one of the real down-sides of a market-economy). We actually need to do some of the work here...perhaps a lot of it. The system is just making too much money (off us) to regulate itself. And, by the way, simply asking for a bigger piece of the pie isn't a real solution either....
Are we ending up with what we really want here? Is this a healthy situation, for all involved?
If we can't just continue to feed-the-beast, how much of what is involved here is our use of information?
The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
-- Nadine Gordime
