Farhad Manjoo, author of True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post Fact Society, is the guest on the WELL’s open discussion conference Inkwell.vue at the moment. Here’s an extract from his introductory post:

For many Americans, on many issues, objectivity has been supplanted by subjectivity. In my subtitle, I call this the “post-fact” society.

But why? Let me summarize my thesis. New technology has given us more information than ever seemed believable. Think about where you get your news — not just newspapers and network TV, but also blogs, cable news, talk radio, podcasts, etc., all these rich forms of media that we’d never dreamed of three decades ago. We also have more power of that information than we once did. With tools like iPods, Digg, blog networks, and other new mechanisms, now we can easily pick and choose our media.

There’s something wonderful about this new freedom; we’re no longer reliant on an institutional media for our facts about the world. But the shift also creates a problem. We humans have an innate preference to seek out information that confirms our worldview. That’s just how our brains work: If given a chance, we’ll avoid news facts that we don’t like.

Digital technology allows us to indulge those human desires better than we could in the past. On the Web, television, radio, and all manner of new devices, today you can watch, listen to, and read what
you want, whenever you want; seek out and discuss, in exhaustive and insular detail, the kind of news that pleases you; and pursue your political or social or scientific theories, whether sophisticated or naive, extremist or banal, grounded in reality or completely insane.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 29th, 2008 at 10:25 pm and is filed under Democracy, Media, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.