Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back by Matthew d'Ancona
what's in it for me in (200 words summary)
I was specifically drawn to the 'How to Fight Back' description on the cover. This chapter starts with some solutions whereby we have to count on the Gatekeepers such as google and facebook to acknowledge their responsibility. Personally, I wouldn't count on this since they are a big cause of the problem in the first place. The writer also put's hope in (BBC's) journalism, The BBC tries to fact-check the most popular outliers in Facebook fair enough, but quite a lot of work for a news station. Also, this could be interesting to compare this approach with Noam Chomsky's view on journalism. Further along, it claims that Post-truth is an emotional phenomenon. It concerns the attitude to truth rather than truth itself. The counter-attack should be therefor emotionally intelligent. In the last page one of biggest conclusions would be that: If people want an end to the post-truth era they must want it themselves. We often regret our early passivity only when it is too late.
In general, it was an interesting book for my thesis, it also directed me to new points of interests:
- Nietzsche's quote ' there are no facts, only interpretations'
- Nietzsche's point that Culture should replace Scripture.
- Sara E. Gorman and Jack M Gorman, who researched, the Neurologic basis of why we ignore the facts that will save us?
Notes :
Preface:
p4 reference to Orwel's Essay (1942) 'looking back on the Spanish war' about the success of propaganda. This was an early premonition of the post-truth era. Orwell feared that totalitarianism would be the force that destroyed the very notion of veracity. As we shall see, the pressures bearing down upon truth today are more complex, dispersed and insidious. But they are also more unsettling precisely because they do not emanate from an identifiable Big Brother or Goebbels or Izvestia. There is no single statue to bring crashing to the ground. Trump is a consequence rather than cause
P6 Writer thinks there is a voice within each of us that resist lies, even if that voice has (for reasons we shall see) been muted. The truth is out there - if only we demand it.
Chapter 1 - the coming of the post-truth era
P14 - Nietzche ' there are no facts, only interpretations' (the writer is referring to Coway's response to Spicer's interpretations)
P22 - Plato - the notion of the noble lie P25 - Regan, My heart and my best intentions still tell me that is true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not. P28 - Rasputin - The Man Behind The Tsarina P29 - Socialist Arlie Russe Hochschild has written about 'deep story' that underpins political attitudes and social behavior. 'A deep story is a feel-as-if story - It's the story feelings tell, in the language of symbols. It removes judgment it removes facts. ( story people on the hill, waiting in line, make America great again while others ( refugees) cut in line)
P32 - Drew Westen and Daniel Pink, brain research on the role of emotion in political behavior. ( book: The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation)
Chapter 2 - YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!: The origins of the post-truth era
P52 William James 'My experience is what I agree to attend to' (The Principles of Psychology, see more info on http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin11.htm)
P52 - There is a Hierarchical system of information in which established brands decide what news is fit for consumption. (note Irma- also in the book 'Het zijn net mensen- Joris Luyendijk')
P56 - What psychologist call 'mirroring, Trump - Notorious during the campaign for his falsehoods - began accusing his media critics of peddling 'fake news' themselves.
P59 When everyone with a twitter account can claim tobe a news source, it becomes infinitely harder to distinguish between facts and falsehood. Everbody and no one is an 'expert' Who can monitor a limitless space?
Chapter 3 - Conspiracy and denial: The friends of post truth
Info on how evidence-based researched is trusted less then anecdotage, and institutional authority is heeded less than conspiracy theories. In the case of vaccinations, this could be deadly. There is an interesting neurologic research done by Sara & jack Gorman: Why we ignore the facts that will save us?
P61- Article in Harper's Magazine, 1964: The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter, to this day urtext for study on conspiracies P 65 – According to Sam Smith, writing in progressive review in 1995 'The poet understands that a myth is not a lie but the soul's version of the truth. One of the reasons so many stories are mangled by the media these days is because journalist have become unable to deal with the non-literal http://prorev.com/center.htm (good 2 read)
P 65 –In the post-truth are there is a good reason to define literalism. Times journalist David Aaronovitch suggested that the prevalence of such believes reflects on the fundamental human yearning for a narrative: 'We need story and may even be programmed to create it'
Note Irma -> Look up : Voodoo Histories: The Role of Conspiracy Theory in Modern History (2009) https://scholar.google.nl/scholar?q=Voodoo+Histories:+The+Role+of+Conspiracy+Theory+in+Modern+History+(2009)&hl=nl&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjHl_G09eXWAhWFZlAKHdoLBskQgQMIJDAA
P 68 – Psychiatrist Karl Menninger 'Attitudes are more important than facts'
P 68/69 – Separate research, Brain images has revealed the Neurologic basis of this effect. Note Irma -> Look up: Sara E. Gorman and Jack M Gorman, Denying to the Grave: Why we Ignore the facts that will save us (2016)
P 70 Rob Brotherton 'Our beliefs come first: we make up reasons for them as we go along. Being smarter or having access to more information doesn't necessarily make us less susceptible to fault beliefs.
Chapter 4 – The crash of the philosopher's stone
P 98 – The epistemology of Post-Truth urges us to accept that there are incommensurable realities and that prudent conduct consists choosing sides rather than evaluating evidence.
P 98 – perfectly predicted in Wag the dog, Note Irma -> Look up: a movie satire (1997) which describes the pageant of a fictional war invented to distract voters attention from a presidential sex scandal.
P 102 – Orwell, The idea of 'doublethink' – 'the power of holding two contradictory believes is one's mind, and accepting both of them' – is the direct ancestor of Post-truth. And the warning to Winston Smith by his inner party interrogator, O'Brien, that 'reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else'
P 103 – Note Irma -> Look up: first episode of The Thick of it (2005) terrifying spin doctor, Malcolm Tucker & minister Hugh Abbot
Chapter 5 – The stench of lies: strategies to defeat post-truth
P113 – It is a central claim of this book that digital technology has been the principle infrastructure of Post-truth. The question is what to do within its rapidly shifting borders.
P 115 – the gap between the Law and what Facebook describes as community standards
p 116 - Summary of Sir Tim Berners - Lee: Today more people find news and information on the web and through just a handful of social media sites and engines. These sites make more money when we click on links, based on algorithms they show us content they think we will click on - meaning that misinformation/fake news could spread like wildfire. This could be used for financial or political gain.
Possible solutions
- Gatekeepers such as google and facebook acknowledge their responsibility.
- The BBC tries to fact-check the most popular outliers in FB, Instagram, and other social media. When they see misleading stories the will publish a "reality check" It promises more slow news o balance the mayfly perspective.
- Google has established a Digital News Initiative, funding to work on an automatic fact checking system.
- Facebook announced it's own Journalism Project that sought to establish stronger ties.. [with] the news industry
- FB also strengthened its collaboration with the First Draft Partner Network, a group of publishers and platforms collaborating to find ways of verifying content from social media.
- In dec 2016 FB announced a new system that would enable a fake news story to be flagged up, triggering a verification and labeling process that would warn users to treat it with caution.
- Apple's CEO Tim Cook suggest there should be a massive campaign organized to make the public aware.
P 121 - The data freely available on social media, particularly Facebook, can construct uncannily accurate psychometric portraits of individuals, Their tastes, affinities, and presumptions. The manipulation of propaganda can therefore be tailored, even on individual voters.
P126- Ost-truth is an emotional phenomenon. It concerns the attitude to truth rather than truth itself. The counter-attack should be therefor emotionally intelligent.
P127 - In their account of science denial, Sara and Jack Garman insist that academic's reach out more to the general public to promote medical scientific information, for example in social media, they need to learn to frame information in a way that they will convince non-scientists.
P 128 - If distraction can be the enemy of truth, it follows that its protectors must engage in the battle for attention. It is not enough to issue a press release, appear on a news channel or tweet a correction, it has to match the prevailing culture. A viral podcast, a demonstration or an online petition would be more efficient. Although veracity must be never be compromised with theatrically. (note Irma->connection Nietzsche?)
P130 - More then ever, truth requires an emotional delivery system that speaks to experience memory and hope. Narrative -defined as a spoken or written account of connected elements - is essential to the fightback called for in this book. This is not a call to some sort of new age news, but veracity will be drowned-out unless it will be resonant.
P-131 - 134 Trump uses a technique that business guru's call 'inadequacy marketing' (Remind people what they’re missing, lacking, or deficient in. Then give them the cure or pill to make their troubles go away.) therefore powerful counter-narratives are required; an approach called 'empowerment marketing' treat the voter/reader/viewer in a mature way, as adults, acknowledging the anxieties of those who feel left behind without appeasing the bigotries fed by this disquiet. Such a counter-story must be constructed with great delicacy. It needs to take account of the alienation spawned by the pace of global change, without deceiving the public that this pace is likely to slow.
P134 - what is required now is a discourse rooted in de generous confidence, not tribal fear, one that emphasizes the befits of well-managed immigration and recognizes that admission to a country entails responsibilities to integrate as well as rights to be treated unequivocally as a fully fledged citizen.
P 136 -Ridicule is another force that debunks lies, but does so with emotional impact rather than an intellectual battering ram.
P 140 - Umberto Eco: argued that realism would always reassert itself when we encountered 'lines of resistance' Politics and culture have their equivalents.
P 143 - Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King: The Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner. But the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice
P 144 - we often regret our early passivity only when it is too late. If people want an end to the post-truth era they must want it themselves.
P 145 - George Smiley's point: The only reliable engines of change is are citizens themselves.
P 148 - In the long decay of public discourse that has finally brought us to the Post- Truth era, the political class, and the electorate have conspired in the cheapening and enfeebling of what they say to one another. Unattainable promises are matched by unreasonable expectations; unachieved are part-concealed by euphemism and evasion; the gap between rhetoric and reality breeds disenchantment and distrust. And then the cycle begins again. Who dares to be honest and who dares to pay heed to honesty.
P 148 - Our demands as citizens to be told the truth must be tempered by reason but not tamed by complacency.
P 148 - Orwell in clarifying remarks on the meaning of 1984. The Moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don't let it happen. It depends on you