He Said. She Said. A Half-Eaten Apple. And So It Began

A funny thing happened in the Garden of Eden. Today, we’d call it fake news.

Fake news.

Alternative facts.

A news media under fire. Headlines screaming our new leader is a liar. Facebook stressing everybody out.

Welcome to 2017. It’s off to quite a start, wouldn’t you agree?

Most noteworthy is the speed at which all of this is taking place. Of course, we have advances in technology to thank for that, and also to bear the brunt of the blame.

Fake news is nothing new, with the first instance dating back to the Garden of Eden. By today’s standards, it’s the stuff that makes for great television. He said. She said. Easily understood subject matter. Scandal. Visuals, in the form of Exhibit A: A half-eaten apple. Immensely shareable, even before Twitter came along: The story enjoyed a 100 percent market penetration rate. The fact the lie won out? Yeah, that was bad.

Fast forward to present day, where the news media is doing battle with the new administration over unsubstantiated claims — lies, you say! — and social media rules as the place to wildly share facts, both real and imagined, buried deep inside vitriolic commentary.

At the heart of the argument, I guess, is merely this: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Adam could’ve called up God, to primary source and put to rest the rumor created by the serpent. We expect legacy media to do the same, although the argument can be made, for many reasons and on many levels, that the news media has gotten away from and often fails in its fundamental responsibilities. In far too many newsrooms, Eve repeating the serpent’s lie equals primary and secondary sourcing, which is erroneously deemed good enough to lead with.

Social media, however, is now proving to be our modern-day serpent. Sharing tales often too incredulous to believe, followers have fallen victim to the con of all cons: A friend said it was true. In another lifetime, her name may have been Eve.

This opens the door to a pile of worms: Social media friends should never be mistaken for true friends, should they? From there, things decline rapidly. Many moons ago (pre-1980), parents sat the kids down for a coming-of-age discussion. Today, kids sit the grandparents down for the tech era’s equivalent of that birds-and-bees talk: explaining click bait.

Adding to the mass confusion in a huuuuge way? An education system that has in no way, shape nor form kept up with advancing technologies, leaving much of our public — some say as much as 70 percent — so lagging in computer skills they can barely navigate a website.

Just when you think things look gloomy, it gets worse: Distinguishing between fact and opinion is a skill that’s barreling its way toward extinction at an alarming rate, with one out of two college grads failing the test.

Interesting, talk shows often beat out news shows in terms of ratings — and few if any in the viewing audience understand talk is opinion-driven, or commentary. It’s why talk shows are so strongly denounced as ‘biased’ when, of course, that’s exactly how they’re designed.

Combined, is it any wonder that the longer we spend with technology, the more befuddled we become? Current estimates say we spend just over seven hours a day staring at a screen — computer, tv, phone, combined. Any wonder we’ve fallen into an abyss? No wonder we have no real friends.

But maybe this disruption, the cacophony of complaints over fake news, is exactly what our society, our increasingly soulless culture and humanity itself needs right now to reverse its course. Perhaps the emerging discontent with social media will renew a passion to connect with people human-to-human, without the middleman of technology. It’s not implausible: Facebook is losing users and those that are remaining are sharing less. But 2017 could be the year of all years: Princeton researchers, back in 2014, predicted Facebook will lose 80 percent of users this year. Of course, they did so by comparing it to an infectious disease but, hey, knowing what we know now, were they that far off?

Infections spread rapidly, just as rumors do. Fake news will always be with us, because it always has.