Slashdot Mirror
The Internet's New Alternate Reality
Hugh Pickens writes "Tim Rutten writes in the LA Times that when President Obama released his long form birth certificate last week, one of the striking things about the reaction to the president's calm and — to reasonable minds — entirely persuasive appearance in the White House briefing room Wednesday was the rapidity and ease with which so many leading birthers rejected the evidence he presented. 'Until very recently, if every professional news organization in the nation examined a charge and found it baseless, it was — for all intents and purposes — dropped,' writes Rutten. 'Today, the growth of the Internet has drained the noun "news" of its former authority. If you don't like the facts presented on the sites of established news organizations, you simply keep clicking until you find one whose "facts" accord with your beliefs.'"
that this can work both ways.
A day after President Obama made his joke about Michele Bachman being born in Canada I found someone on Yahoo Answers seriously asking if she was born there. Muhahahaha
I think the traditional mass media has done plenty to damage their own credibility. Why blame the internet?
Their credibility was an aberration to begin with, and really only came about because of big business got in bed with big government during the 1920s. The syndicates, naturally, wanted to get stories ahead of the smaller papers and came to a cozy agreement with politicians not to say anything too outrageous. The politicians were only too happy to comply, and this pushed the smaller, noisier papers to covering local matters. The syndicates were able to promote themselves as being the voice of authority, the peak of which came with Walter Cronkite.
Of course the idea that a god existing makes anything more meaningful is also pretty funny if you think about it.
What would then be the "reason" for that god existing for example?
In the end there is no meaning other than what you create for yourself. Most find it easier to copy their meanings from others - and the larger a group is, the more convincing their meanings appear..
IOW, religions have always exercised the same sort of alternate-reality support as this story describes as "new" for the Internet Age.
When you immerse yourself in a subculture that believes X, it becomes easy to believe X and hard to be motivated to ask questions that challenge X. It doesn't matter whether your source of authority is FOX News, David Koresh, or the Pope - it works the same in each case, and depends on surrounding yourself with people who suckle at the same tit.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
When I was in religious studies, I took a sociology class called "The True Believer" that dealt with this phenomenon. In short, the True Believer exists in religion, politics, in movements and causes of every kind. For the True Believer, his/her cause has surpassed reason and become a matter of faith. Anyone who questions it has become a mere obstacle to test their faith. Any evidence to the contrary is false simple by virtue of that contradiction.
Any attempt to sway a True Believer is pointless. A True Believer can only be swayed by a serious personal crisis or epiphany, a "Road to Damascus" moment that shifts their faith radically. And when they do change, it's usually just to move on an embrace some new cause to be a True Believer in.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Yes, but people are stupid. I've actually had someone tell me that Steven Colbert was a conservative and his program was meant to be a counterpoint to John Stewart. Yes, he actually believed that Colbert, an obvious parody of Bill O'Reilly was serious.
There actually was a fun study awhile back on the Colbert Report. The more conservative a person was the more likely they were to think that Colbert was a serious conservative, the more liberal the more likely they were to think we was being purely sarcastic.
Basically, it is amazing how much cognitive biases color the world.
I used to live in a very liberal college town, and people routinely called me a fascist, neo-con freemarketeer. Now I live in a very conservative city and I'm a leftist, socialist, Mao worshiper. I've been called an "evangelical" on atheist boards (for disagreeing with pure materialism), while every single one of my religious friends think I'm a godless heathen.
I'm guilty of this too. One of my friends I haven't seen since high school came back from Afghanistan where he worked as an interrigator, and espoused being a Libertarian. I quickly dismissed him as being some flavor of Tea Party loon. After a bit of discussion I realized that we have a fair bit in common, though we disagree on core issues. He probably though I was a leftist pinko.
We only see the world in black and white, and it colors our perceptions of others. If you don't agree with my subjective opinion you must be diametrically opposed to everything I see as "good and true", and therefore the enemy. Sadly we let this trend take over, and it has become the whole basis of our debate. It isn't about whats best for people, its about furthering my ideology and banishing those I view as being its enemy.
This is why I completely stopped watching broadcast news. This is why I dread the upcoming primary season. This is why Slashdot is even getting tedious... here, as the perceptions go, you either are a Tea Partying, evangelical with a giant Ayn Rand tattoo; or a Communist, Pinko, Commie red only in favor of the government taking over everything. There is no middle, and this no room for actual conversation.
If I had one wish, it would be for the rebirth of rational civil discourse, or at least a higher standard of it.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey