A Teacher's Role In The Post-Truth Era
This piece from Sean Illing at Vox-- “Flood the zone with shit”: How misinformation overwhelmed our democracy-- captures the issue as well as anything I've seen in the past few years. Here are a couple of key bits:
We live in a media ecosystem that overwhelms people with information. Some of that information is accurate, some of it is bogus, and much of it is intentionally misleading. The result is a polity that has increasingly given up on finding out the truth.
How is that affecting the times?
We’re in an age of manufactured nihilism.
The issue for many people isn’t exactly a denial of truth as such. It’s more a growing weariness over the process of finding the truth at all. And that weariness leads more and more people to abandon the idea that the truth is knowable.
Illing suggests that this is deliberate, a strategy aided by technology and perfected by folks like Vladamir Putin.
In October, I spoke to Peter Pomerantsev, a Soviet-born reality TV producer turned academic who wrote a book about Putin’s propaganda strategy. The goal, he told me, wasn’t to sell an ideology or a vision of the future; instead, it was to convince people that “the truth is unknowable” and that the only sensible choice is “to follow a strong leader.”
And there it is.
We're used to the idea of propaganda aimed at getting us to believe something in particular, that it is designed for linear goals-- we will get people to believe that a balanced breakfast is the most CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: A Teacher's Role In The Post-Truth Era