World in my eyes
Writing is something I have enjoyed for the better part of my life. For a reason or two (or perhaps a thousand other excuses), I have not had the time to go after it in the past couple of years.
Never mind that, I have decided that I need to write as part of me trying to bring a bit of a structure to my life. Oh, and also for therapeutical reasons. My daily routine has gone haywire in the past few months. And for someone exhibiting OCD symptoms, this is not exactly a pleasant experience.
I think we can both agree that at this day and age of technology’s progress and the Internet, the attention span of the average user is ever narrowing down. In the same time, the availability and variety of the information flows are overwhelming. For millions of citizens, democracy remains hidden behind a subscription.
Apart from keeping the populous informed, the media has and equally and sometimes even bigger responsibility to keep the checks and balances on the government and its officials. And while the latter is encompassing a vast area of official and private information about the officials (some of it crossing moral grounds), it is still a necessity to offer a sort of accountability in case someone chooses to exploit one’s position.
Establishing and maintaining a good media outlet is often a gargantuan and very costly endeavour. Newspapers, magazine and even websites spring to life and very often disappear just as fast, well before they got the chance to build an audience enough to sustain their model or fully develop their idea and course of events coverage.
Last year, the incredibly depressing by many counts 2016, we’ve got plenty of reasons to bark at the wrong tree. And more specifically, to claim that social media is the main reason for Brexit, the election of Trump and the hybrid war stemming from the Kremlin.
But were these reasons justified? Is Facebook, Twitter or Google guilty of spreading post-truths, false information or outright lies?
They certainly helped, but they are not the ones to blame. At least not the level we have been observing lately.
People believe in what they want to believe. And in many cases, reason plays the smallest part in someone’s thinking process. The social networks sites have just provided a great platform to amplify the message. Any type of messages, that is.
It was the best of a year, it was the worst of a year. And for a few more days it still is. Until 2016 passes the baton to 2017, that is.
2016 didn’t exactly unfold as you and I hoped. In fact, it started somewhat on the wrong foot. First, it was David Bowie who left us and by the end of the year many more legends followed- Leonard Cohen, Alan Rickman, Prince, Mohammad Ali, Gene Wilder… The list is looong. People who marked our history with blazing trails, who left so much for the generations to come and who would never be forgotten. May them all rest in peace!
They all left in the year of #Brexit, the Nice and Berlin terrors, the election of Trump, the bloodshed of Aleppo and literally thousands of many other disastrous glitches in the matrix we call Our World. We never got a rest, actually. Every day something was happening.
I wish for 2017 to be different and more on the positive side. I am sure you do, too.
Dear friend,
I am sure that by now you have heard or read the terms alt-right and post-truth numerous times. If you haven’t, do continue living in your balloon and stop reading. If you have, do go on reading.
When exactly rebranding the words “Nazism” and “lie” become a real thing? How come that the media and we, the people took this rebranding to heart and accepted its spread on-air, print and bytes? Did we forget our history lessons and the devastation events after the WWI caused to humanity? Where is our moral compass or moral has changed to something that doesn’t really need truth?
By now, you would probably think “Hold on, alt-right does not equal Nazism!” and, in the minor scheme of things, you would be right. Especially, when you read the first paragraph in the Wikipedia link above… But here is my perspective.