'Post-truth'
declared word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries-uncredited story –
dated Nov. 16, 2016
Oxford Dictionaries says post-truth is thought to have been first used in 1992.
However, it says the frequency of its usage increased by 2,000% in 2016 compared with last year.
To my friends and all the rest of you very intelligent free humans:
We are all full of crap and everybody's crap stinks. I have written about truth and perhaps how we find the truth. I feel this to be an important topic. Bogus news is a plague.
There are reasons for this, as documented and discussed in the following links. (A quick scan of the links and/or the stories provides some of the details.) The basic concept is that all of us exist inside of our own 'filter bubble', our own 'echo chamber', made worse by the algorithms of google and facebook. In political terms, both left-wingers ( like me ) and right wingers, tend to gravitate to 'news' and 'content' that supports our own beliefs. This is all pretty obvious, especially to most of the savvy and sophisticated users of diaspora. Whether we want to admit it or not, is another matter.
No one is prefect and we are all subjective. At least we can start there. No one has the absolute truth, only what we perceive to make the most sense to us. Most post links and some kind of documentation to amplify their ideas. But there are a plethora of fake news sites, pseudo opinion sites, and outright 'pure' propaganda sites.
One problem with the recent US election was the 'narratives' of each political group took precedence over what could be defined as relatively objective truth, if such a thing exists. I would maintain it does; if you look deep enough and hard enough and if you are willing to grapple with the ambiguities of life's great and small mysteries.
You can add another fact to the equation. Language is constantly morphing as we find new expressions to describe our feelings and discard other words and expressions that do not seem relevant to our lives. Thus the relevance of the Oxford Dictionary in reporting on word usage and the emergence of new phrases.
All of this adds up to quite a quandary.
As an aside, I find that the word choices of my 'spellcheck' seem to have become less accurate for some reason. So if you are a bad speller like me, and the spellcheck is not providing an appropriate spelling, you are in real trouble. But that is a small problem.
The bigger problem is how do we talk to one another. If you accept the purpose of social networking and the whole internet is to facilitate communication between free humans, we obviously need a way to talk to each other, in language which we can agree on, and with honesty and respect. That Is the purpose of our endeavor here, isn't it ?
1. - rise of fake news -
Uncredited story – Nov. 6, 2016http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-37846860
2. - Zuckerberg plans to combat problem of Facebook fake news - http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38039506
Uncredited story – dated Nov. 16, 20163. - How we got to POST-TRUTH -
https://www.fastcompany.com/3065580/how-we-got-to-post-truth
BY RUTH READER , a writer from Brooklyn, NY – dated Nov. 18, 2016
