Last night, I confused someone’s recently deceased sister for his wife on Facebook. It was an honest mistake, an embarrassing one, but a mistake nevertheless. I quickly corrected it and moved on.
However, I am not alone in discounting fact-checking in today’s world of information overload. We are bombarded with images, news articles, memes, opinions, quotes and humour constantly through social Media and other avenues.
Information has become excessive and more transient than ever. Quality has been a casualty due to this fast production of info on social media assembly lines.
Truth and facts have taken the maximum beating in this eyeball grabbing competition of the ‘Dumb & Opinionated’. That’s why, even the people at Oxford Dictionaries have named ‘Post Truth’ the word of the year 2016.
For the uninitiated, it’s just a pseudo-intellectual jargon for ‘lying’.
However, their couldn’t have been a better selection for this year, as post-truth has been our slogan for 2016 in both word and spirit.
From politics to current affairs, everything has greyed out in the shadows of fake news and propaganda. Social Media has proven to be a matrix of a this post-truth world.
Research has shown, in most countries, barring a few, 60% population get their news from social media and as time has proven, people tend to believe anything that has an image with helvetica font on it.
This has differently impacted different groups and individuals. There are obvious beneficiaries of this “lying-world”.
New breed of politicians thriving on hatred of a few unleashed sensationalism mixed with the shadow-of-surreal and have gained enormous momentum across the world. They feed on the bad-news-demand-immediate-attention mentality of humans and peddle half baked truths or absolute lies with enormous vigour.
People panic, they prosper.
Check out history, nincampoop leaders were able to do exactly the same thing even without social media, albeit at a slower pace.
Because of our social media shares, biased opinions based on what our timeline algorithms keep serving us and relentless pursuit of running away from the hard task of fact checking, we are disseminating factually incorrect information faster than Spanish Flue of the nineteen twenties.
We are inadvertently creating an army of young cynics. Teenagers, who should be open to exploring everything under the sun are growing up to be haters of views or ideologies not consistent to their social media timelines. As Maya Angelou said, “There is nothing more pitiful than a young cynic, because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing”.
It’s our responsibility to avoid commentary from the shallows, deep dive every once in a while, explore the fantasy-world of facts whenever we can and stop pussyfooting whatever issue we find on our timeline first thing in the morning.
The more followers you have, the bigger your impact, the bigger your responsibility becomes, to act like an adult.
WE ARE BETTER THAN BEING LABELED AS A POST-TRUTH GENERATION.
PS: The title of this piece, “A Cage went in search of a bird” is a phrase from Franz Kafka’s translated work, Parables and Paradoxes (1946). For me, It has varied meanings and I (without fact-checking) believe that all of us living in this social media obsessed post-truth world are looking for maximum attention and maximum acceptance while drifting away from real and meaningful relationships built on solid grounds, not just in flashes of our best moments spread across Facebook and Instagram posts.
PPS: Don’t let this article stop you from posting those funny memes and sarcastic comments, your existential crisis fills my life with enormous joy.
