When I was nine years old, my elementary school converted from being a strictly uniform school to promoting creative expression through clothing. Prior to this change, my mornings were filled with mundane rituals my mother said would instill some discipline into me. I washed up, ironed my yellow button-down shirt, prayed that I would have a blessed day, and was promptly kicked out so that the talkative crossing guard could lecture me for the next two minutes that my lack of talking is a dangerous trait. It was so great! Not. It took my mother a few months to let me wear normal clothes so I was the outlier for a while just waiting to join the creative expression movement. Of course, that privilege came with its own problem. I had too many choices and from then on, I began to hate options. My nine year old mind was barely ready to choose what I wanted from a restaurant (anything with broccoli and apple juice, please) and I now had to decide on how to match my tops and bottoms. This is a short phase for children. It passes by quickly. This fear of decision, fueled by too many choices sparks up again over and over in different forms – each phase lasting longer than the last and the solutions are more creative each time. Unfortunately when I was eighteen years old, my social feed offered me too much of a variety as well. However, I’m twenty and I still haven’t found a solution that doesn’t involve more options.I receive my news from multiple platforms and that is the start of my overload. I have a website for my happy news, crime news, and multiple websites for my political news. My happy news and crime news are separate and local. I want to know all of the good things that go on in my neighborhood and also what train to avoid in other areas just in case there has been a recent string of robberies. That makes sense. However, political news that require my support and vote is hard to understand with many conspiracies and fake news floating around. I’ve come to know the battle of opinions I face now not as my filter bubble but as the “mud in my water” or “noise in my head” from two articles, Flood the Zone with Shit by Sean Illing and The Billion Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President by McKay Coppins. Between you and I, read Sean’s article first. It’ll take some patience to read McKay’s article completely and understand each sentence. If you haven’t noticed by now that article is unnecessarily long, just like it’s title.
Sean is absolutely right! I do live in the “age of nihilism” where I am force to be more cynical than I would like to be. I have the option to choose which truth to believe. On top of consuming news, I have my opinion leaders and other institutions such as University, that influences how I understand information given to me. Sean renamed selective exposure and selective perception as rank partisanship. This habit is reinforced with our social bubble and filters that are systematically programmed into our media ecology. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter will push messages that I seem to agree with. In McKay’s case, if I follow Donald Trump, I would be encouraged to follow his MAGA squad and FoxNews reporters. I am so overwhelmed by the options of different truths that I would rather choose a side. Even if I decided to sit down and decipher each bit of information, I would still have to choose who and what to believe.
The age of nihilism is manufactured because it was strategically created supposedly by politicians. Instead of media doing its job by being readily available for the public to make autonomous decisions, the media is flooded with so much crap, one cannot make a proper decision. Vladmir Putin, according to Sean Illing, created this “flooding of the zone” so that the public can never agree with each other. I understand this strategic tool as being an act of God. Let me explain! I do not mean an act of God as in Dr. Frankenstien and his monster. I am referring to the tower of babble. Bare with me. When too many people got a bright idea to make a tower to heaven, God wanted to end their attempts – not so much the idea. He struck down the tower and made it so everyone spoke a different language and there were never enough people to continue the efforts of getting to heaven. Essentially, they gave up instead of focusing on learning to understand each other. That would have been too much. Flooding the Zone is only effective when people become tired of being their own gatekeeper and constantly filtering messages. Instead, an anxiety similar to nine year old me having to put together a outfit, arises.
These articles are not so much about fake news is it is about having too many options. I am capable of sniffing out a lie when I see one. However, not everything is so black and white. The illusion truth effect can swallow anyone. I never get a break! Even if I do not watch live news or read a newspaper, ads fuel the games I play and the websites I use for research. Consuming news now comes with a feeling of insecurity and discomfort.
“It was that, in this state of heightened suspicion, truth itself—about Ukraine, impeachment, or anything else—felt more and more difficult to locate.”
There is no way to solve this – not yet anyway. Sean and McKay do an excellent job of pointing out what the problem is in our media ecology but offer no solution. Any solution that I can think of would result in threatening our first amendment law with government censorship. There is no way to control the truth without adding more pressure and confusion into the mix. A government sponsored website dedicated to the “truth” would still have it’s own agenda that would not allow me to autonomously choose a side. Ultimately, there is always a side I have to choose where it is choosing a team (Republican or Democrat) or idea (strict gun control laws). I will keep to making smaller, yet important decisions like where I want to eat – anywhere, I love food.
cececannon32 