Given that "DeepFakes" are increasingly becoming part of what we see on YouTube to distort reality and disturb the balance in our minds of what is reality why on earth would we watch it as a source of information.
It's an intriguing sociological question which touches on our need these days to condense everything into an ever shortening time span as our brains are pummelled with unsubstantiated information. Once upon a time only the things we saw with our own eyes would we believe. The world outside our vision and our experience was of no interest and only practical things first hand held any interest. Then the printing press developed mass awareness linking the worlds outside our immediate gaze with a host of worlds which were in the gaze of others. The acceleration of ways to view these other worlds has proceeded at a pace such that today we see, at an instant things happening on the other side of the globe. So what we see has become the yardstick for what we know, no longer is the encyclopaedia lifted from the shelf to find out the academic truth but a heading is typed into YouTube to ferret out a clip which nearest exemplifies what you are looking for. The clip and the family of clips of the subject are linked in convenient boxes tantalisingly made simple to click onto and becomes the total source of your knowledge, "seeing is believing" right !
Sadly this is not true anymore, the manipulation of viewable content has become so good you simply can't recognise what is true or what is false and if that is now the case where do we now go for the truth. Does the truth matter or is life simply entertainment a series of experiences the starker the better. Do we kneed to know the truth since we are often seeing things which are happening far away. On the one hand, our two dimensional input which can never be equal to the reality of what is happening on the ground whilst on the other, because we can't do anything useful to help or hinder, we are simply voyeurs, watching for watchings sake.
If of course what we see effects our actions that's different. If we are led to contribute to a charity because of the sight of malnourished children or if we are convinced by propaganda to vote in a certain way, these are arguments for the good and bad use of information. If on the other hand we treat everything we see with a dose of skepticism and search around for a balance of views and take on board the motivation for why these pieces of information got to you in the first place, then your internal filter, your brain will fathom it out.
A more dangerous aspect of fake news and fakery in general is that not only does it sow the wrong idea about a subject, it causes intelligent right minded people to doubt each other. Sowing disharmony then is the greatest danger since with disharmony flows a range of ideological wedges between people who would normally be friends. We all search for comfort in finding someone who thinks like we do, it bolsters our sense of camaraderie and makes the world less lonely but if, whilst we live and work in close proximity, we are searching for answers to the world around us from very different news sources, some deliberately misleading then it's difficult to find any sort of cohesion. The term “it's as plain as the nose on your face” when good old common sense would be enough to find conformity is missing in a chaos of fakery, a tactic used by those who wish us harm to destabilise society and make people pliable to any sort of suggestion.
Sent from my iPad
It's an intriguing sociological question which touches on our need these days to condense everything into an ever shortening time span as our brains are pummelled with unsubstantiated information. Once upon a time only the things we saw with our own eyes would we believe. The world outside our vision and our experience was of no interest and only practical things first hand held any interest. Then the printing press developed mass awareness linking the worlds outside our immediate gaze with a host of worlds which were in the gaze of others. The acceleration of ways to view these other worlds has proceeded at a pace such that today we see, at an instant things happening on the other side of the globe. So what we see has become the yardstick for what we know, no longer is the encyclopaedia lifted from the shelf to find out the academic truth but a heading is typed into YouTube to ferret out a clip which nearest exemplifies what you are looking for. The clip and the family of clips of the subject are linked in convenient boxes tantalisingly made simple to click onto and becomes the total source of your knowledge, "seeing is believing" right !
Sadly this is not true anymore, the manipulation of viewable content has become so good you simply can't recognise what is true or what is false and if that is now the case where do we now go for the truth. Does the truth matter or is life simply entertainment a series of experiences the starker the better. Do we kneed to know the truth since we are often seeing things which are happening far away. On the one hand, our two dimensional input which can never be equal to the reality of what is happening on the ground whilst on the other, because we can't do anything useful to help or hinder, we are simply voyeurs, watching for watchings sake.
If of course what we see effects our actions that's different. If we are led to contribute to a charity because of the sight of malnourished children or if we are convinced by propaganda to vote in a certain way, these are arguments for the good and bad use of information. If on the other hand we treat everything we see with a dose of skepticism and search around for a balance of views and take on board the motivation for why these pieces of information got to you in the first place, then your internal filter, your brain will fathom it out.
A more dangerous aspect of fake news and fakery in general is that not only does it sow the wrong idea about a subject, it causes intelligent right minded people to doubt each other. Sowing disharmony then is the greatest danger since with disharmony flows a range of ideological wedges between people who would normally be friends. We all search for comfort in finding someone who thinks like we do, it bolsters our sense of camaraderie and makes the world less lonely but if, whilst we live and work in close proximity, we are searching for answers to the world around us from very different news sources, some deliberately misleading then it's difficult to find any sort of cohesion. The term “it's as plain as the nose on your face” when good old common sense would be enough to find conformity is missing in a chaos of fakery, a tactic used by those who wish us harm to destabilise society and make people pliable to any sort of suggestion.
Sent from my iPad
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