The Pope Canonizes Trump!!
There was a time, long long ago, when we could debate an issue and support our arguments with facts. A time when we based our beliefs on data or the opinions of experts. Now, of course, in the laughing gas atmosphere of the internet and Facebook, we’re all experts and our opinions and our ‘friends’ opinions matter at least as much, if not more so, as facts. This is a wonderful freedom for most of us, to be untethered from the nuisance of truthfulness and allowed to believe in absolutely anything we want. If most of our friends believe the Pope supported Donald Trump for President, we can too.
I remember, vaguely of course, when the internet was touted as the most democratizing force on earth, a place where each of us could turn to its vast aggregation of facts and data and with a few strokes of the keyboard, find the answers to almost any question. The encyclopedic range of its information, the speed of its algorithms, well, no one need live in ignorance any more. The future, my friends, looked to be enlightened.
I get e-mails daily from my dad who dutifully forwards most everything he receives to his small address list, one of whom is, unfortunately, me. Most are political diatribes, most are what I once, generously, referred to as misinformation, what I now label as outright lies and propaganda. My father believes most everything he reads. Why would his friends lie? He gets most of his information there and the rest he gets from the commentators on Fox News. He doesn’t like PBS, too biased, he sez.
Donald Trump, our president-in-waiting, declared that the New York Times is biased. Most Americans now think the media is suspect. Obviously, some of it is. But the question has to be asked: if we don’t believe the media, where do we go for the truth? And the answer, my friend, ain’t blowin in the wind. The answer is that we find it in social media. The algorithms dictate what we looked at previously and feed it back in an ever tightening self-generating completely closed loop. Information becomes a black hole where no light escapes the gravitational pull of our own biases. In the end, it’s little surprise Trump won. The real surprise is Kim Kardashian wasn’t elected. At least for now.
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Skeeter, with enough posts to Facebook, tweets, and the mass forwarding of emails, I believe we still stand a good chance to get Kim Kardashian a high level cabinet post. From the picks I’ve seen so far, I fear she’d be an improvement.
Right you are! I was thinking maybe Sec. of Branding. Possibly Sec. of Side Deals.