Truth is drowning — but we can still save it
It sounds ludicrous, doesn’t it? The idea that we could lose truth — that it’s somehow finite, that it could vanish from Western culture. Meaning isn’t something that we can touch or find in any physical sense, so the idea of it slipping away seems positively laughable.
But the sociocultural upheaval currently racking the U.S. is a symptom of a profound paradigm shift that’s been building for decades, if not longer. Jean Baudrillard totally called it in Simulacra and Simulation, and that was published in the early 1980s. The tenuous connections between symbols and the truths they supposedly represent are eroding, and there’s no one to stop this cultural bus from driving itself right off a cliff.
So let’s take a few minutes and break this thing down.
When we talk about the media, what we’re actually dealing with is the plural of the word medium, meaning a substance through which another thing travels. The media is itself communication, when you get right down to it — although various subsets can be termed the “establishment media” or “opposition media,” each relative to the speaker and listener. In that sense we’re usually talking about channels (television or otherwise), and a channel is nothing more than a way of guiding something, the way that a channel can be dug in the earth to guide the flow of water.
Even those simple concepts are being disconnected from their roots, which renders them bereft of their definitions, their meaning. Words are themselves nothing more than symbols, providing a compressed representation of something that takes altogether longer to articulate — and there will always be someone or something that seeks to bleed our agency away by controlling or redefining language. “The Media” is becoming a boogeyman, a shadow on the wall, when we forget what the words themselves convey.
“News” is simply information that we might find pertinent to our lives; news channels, newspapers, etc. would then seem to be aggregators, magpies of the information world. They gather data, and we gather to them like animals at an oasis — or that’s how it’s supposed to work, right?
Not so much.
An information economy is an abstract ecosystem — and as in nature, organisms or parties within it must proactively safeguard their own continued existence, or else risk being swept away by time and forgetting. Any media entity subsists on the attention of its viewers; to expect more of them is to delude ourselves.
Everything in the world must first and foremost act to ensure its own existence. There is nothing for any of us without survival, and media entities (whether people or companies) are no different. Even altruism is rooted in the biological truth that most other people share a significant portion of our genetic makeup; yet in nonlethal situations, self-interest most often prevails in the form of complacency.
The Internet has provided a whole new structure of abstract ecosystems and media, drastically increasing the number of content producers and their chosen approach. The Old Guard way of aggregating news meant passing through gatekeepers; anyone from a professor to a hiring manager to an editor might prevent someone from being part of the journalistic pipeline. In days of Ye Olde News, entities might provide such aggregated reports once or twice per day, but nowadays anyone might log on at any time to check what’s up in the world. It’s also easier than ever to buy a domain name and call yourself a media entity, and though this isn’t necessarily a bad thing in itself, that paradigm shift has changed the whole abstract ecosystem. Even as the demand for news has increased, the supply of it has skyrocketed exponentially — and this imbalance is the root of our problem.
A media entity needs to produce a certain number of stories to keep a potential audience coming back for more, especially in a 24/7 news cycle, so this is where we get clickbait — stories or articles with sensationalized titles to draw attentional resources. And it’s a short shuffle-step from clickbait into the realm of media generation, creating stories or otherwise allowing fabrications to pass unchecked, all in the quest for views.
Local newspapers cannot understand why they should have to go out of their way to make effective use of social media, while the big players are focused on the style of presentation more than the actual substance — and this illustrates the cultural information shift perfectly. Content that is perhaps higher in veracity or pertinence to a given person is quickly eclipsed if no one can find it — or if they simply don’t want to.
So while there may not necessarily be a limited amount of truth in the world, it effectively becomes limited in terms of proportions, drowned by a rising tide of pseudoinformation that is designed to do nothing but help the entity that created it keep existing. Too soon we forget that fact as consumers, prioritizing our cravings for celebrity or sports gossip (among many, many others) ahead of accurately informing ourselves.
Baudrillard talked about the precession of simulacra, or the way that a symbol comes to eclipse and ultimately become disconnected from whatever it initially represented. White cultures in the U.S. are particularly adept at encouraging this process; we enabled the creation of an illusory world in which postracial was a word used without irony, in which suggesting that all people were not getting along was grounds for social ostracism from liberal circles. It was enough for us to present ourselves as not racist or sexist; we didn’t have to be those things deep down as long as we didn’t show it.
We didn’t care if that hyperreal bubble was truthful or not; it satisfied us — and that belief, that faith was enough for us to justify ourselves. Yet it was and remains nothing less than a moral abdication to be so self-interested — and we must look that truth squarely in the eye in order to move forward.
When lies are accepted as truth and proliferated throughout our abstract communities (lumped under the erudite heading of post-truth for the sake of preserving our tender white feelings), we ourselves make meaning that much harder to find. We ourselves set the stage for a liar to be the face of our nation, and now weep and wring our hands, pretending some Other put him in the hot seat and not our own hands. And still we cling to the culture-form of white exceptionalism; each refusal to surrender racial and gender privilege betrays us, contributing to the onslaught one click at a time.
The onus has always been on us to fact-check the sources from which we obtain information and hold them accountable for truth — and just because there were fewer media channels or sources in years past didn’t make that any less valid. It simply made us lazier.
No court, no government can ever prevent this drift away from meaning — nor, indeed, necessarily should they. Any government positioned as the arbiter of truth is itself prone to corruption; anything attempting to pass for truth must be challenged not from the top down but from the ground up, particularly by those who are privileged by the dominant cultural narrative.
Truth itself isn’t something we ever could hold onto; it was always a Tarkin grip, an illusion — and that’s another fact we must face. What is true in one generation is not so in the next; we have to evolve, not stay locked in stasis, culturally treading water for the conceivable future. We can develop better methods of finding and testing meaning, and life is nothing if not ironic, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that the proliferation of media sources in recent years can help serve as the solution to our problem. Independent journalism (meta-journalism, even) can help separate the truth from the lies, the substance from the intellectual empty calories — and it’s this grassroots approach to fact-checking that we must embrace.The same way some of us track sports stars’ stats, so much we check and champion media outlets that are valid.
What is done is done at this point: we must accept our cultural sins in order to embrace what we need to become. The only solution to this modern-day deluge is for each of us to actively question what’s proliferated in our information spheres. Any of us can fall prey to a false piece of data and retransmit it like an infected node; we’re flawed creatures, susceptible to the shortcomings in the cognitive biases that helped us survive over millions of years.
It’s not a moral failing to be unable to determine truth at first glance — yet all it often takes is a few minutes of diligent Internet searches to determine where the boundary between reality and hyperreality lies. We must take that extra step, each time we’re unsure and even — most of all — when we are sure of ourselves, for that is when we are the most vulnerable of all.
If we can only look ourselves in the mirror long enough to set our own false truths about ourselves and our culture aside, we can become better at discerning truth, at teaching our children not just what to think, but how to think for themselves, how to find meaning amidst the muck. Each of us must become a gatekeeper. We have to learn how to question things together, ourselves and our motivations most of all, because only then can we survive this rising tide.
