There was in interesting article in this morning’s Consortium News entitled “Who Determines What’s Disinformation?”. It was primarily about fact checking and “disinformation experts” and argued that many, if not all, the professionals in that field were in the pockets of those in power who wanted (or needed) the public’s view of reality to coincide with their own. The author relied heavily on the theories presented in the book Society of the Spectacle (1967) by the French philosopher Guy Debord. While finding the article interesting and finding nothing in it, or Debord’s theories, to quibble about, I found it a superfluous abstraction of what is otherwise a blinding flash of the obvious.
Cutting to the chase, the fundamental issue is – what is truth? What is real? How do we sort out what is real from what is unreal and how do we combat all the bullshit? To these questions, the author had no answer and, I suspect, neither did Debord. (Truth in advertising here – I have not read Debord’s book, but had he provided an answer, I would have expected the author to bring that out in her article.)
As an aside, those who are interested in the subject should watch the movie “Matrix” (1999). It was an interesting movie that vividly portrayed the fundamental issue, what is reality?
More truth in advertising: I don’t have the answer either. But I do have a method for determining what I believe. The method is very simple, but it’s a lot of work. The approach is to take the information about a topic from multiple sources (e.g., Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, LeMonde, Der Spiegle, Izvestia, Al Jazeera), arrange the information in a sort of Venn Diagram and look for the intersection. Therein, probably lies something close to reality. (Note: I said “probably” and “close” to reality. There is no certainty, but I have more confidence in that than anything else.) Then, over time, I try to correlate this with other pieces of the puzzle, similarly derived, and formulate a picture that makes sense. Most of the time it does, but sometimes it doesn’t and when it doesn’t it’s probably all wrong.
Now the point of this is not to brag about how I determine what to believe, but to point out that determining what to believe is hard work. Anyone who truly wants to know the truth needs to find a way that works for him/her in sorting out fact from fiction in a world filled with far more fiction than fact. The alternative is to drink the Kool-Aid, and the result is a world full of quasi-robotic humanoids nodding in unison to the wishes of those in power who need the public’s view of reality to coincide with their own.