Next week, if all goes well, someone will win the presidency. What happens after that is anyone’s guess. Will the losing side believe the results? Will the bulk of Americans recognize the legitimacy of the new president? And will we all be able to clean up the piles of lies, hoaxes and other dung that have been hurled so freely in this hyper-charged, fact-free election?
Much of that remains unclear, because the internet is distorting our collective grasp on the truth. Polls show that many of us have burrowed into our own echo chambers of information. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, 81 percent of respondents said that partisans not only differed about policies, but also about “basic facts.”
For years, technologists and other utopians have argued that online news would be a boon to democracy. That has not been the case.
Much more insidious is that we are losing the concept that there is such a thing as objective reality. i.e. facts. In a way, we are back to the old days when decision were made by stacking up the claims of various philosophers/bloggers, rather than actually going out and seeing what is true.
One just needs to look at World Trade Center building 7 to see that the government narrative on 911 is not true.