On how postmodern destroys the art of thinking and creates fake news
The spread of postmodern has resulted in the absence of conventional reality. Instead of conventional reality, we only have perceptions of the world, and these perceptions of reality put together form a mass-produced picture conveyed by media began to function as our new reality.
Most of the 20th century was still characterized by conventional reality. It is not some personal campaign pro old times ‘when everything was better’, mainly because nothing was, but the way how we consumed news and information slightly differed from today. If you turned on Fox News or CNN back then, the two channels drew different conclusions and gave different explanations for the same phenomena. The importance is that there was still a common ground for the phenomenon itself, which the two sides studied and narrated from their points of view. Today, Fox News and CNN report on two separate and completely independent realities that have very little in common.
Appearances overcame and displaced reality by forming perception bubbles. These bubbles that media will close you into may form your opinion and your complete identity. In fact, opinion and identity bubbles have grown and multiplied to the point that they are already filling the space in between themselves. For now the space within the bubbles is larger than the space between the bubbles. In this way, conventional reality has practically disappeared, and it is being produced for us based upon the bubble in which we are captured. Accordingly, reality can be what has not happened, and also, reality can be what has happened, and what has not happened can be valid reality, and what has happened can be invalid.
The ‘phenomenon’, which we must use only in quotation marks, only matters if it is visible. If it can be seen, it is understandable, credible and true, if it cannot be seen, it is too difficult to comprehend, may be untrue and is definitely in vain to explain. The product and result of this approach is what we today call fake news.
Fake news sites do not reflect on reality in any way. They are so detached from it that ordinary news sites, which also lie and produce alternative realities, do not even accept them. These are no longer lies that you can match to a face, an anchorman, news editor or business owner. They pop up online on fake news sites and pretty much only to the extent of an electoral campaign, a global forum or any important event that is followed by a larger group. As soon as a political campaign ends, most of these fake news sites disappear from Internet. How surprising. They are deleted because they are no longer needed.
What is important to know about these fake news sites is that they claim information that can actually be refuted after two clicks. A simple Google search can easily reveal that they are lies. That is why information as such is no longer dealt with by major news portals, let alone the print press. If we just look at their structure, we can see that lies are much more unpretentiously constructed. A fake news page is simply slander and if you prove with a quick research that it is slander and lies, nothing will happen as nothing has consequences nowadays. No one fails when the truth is revealed as there is no one behind the post. Maybe there is a company registered somewhere that is owned by a homeless person with whom they have signed a contract in some dark alley for a few dollars or their daily drug dose. We just cannot even get to the end of who is lying in media. Well…officially. Of course, we always know or at least suspect which side is representing political interests in fake news, as we just have to ask ourselves: which side is favoured by this lie?
Bubbles of opinion and constructions of lies have resulted in the two major courses of horror in the US — and also around the world — forming identity based upon two identity-forming issues today.
One is the left-wing course, whose identity-forming issue is climate change, and the other one is the right-wing course, whose identity-forming issue is migration — immigration, that is. By now, there is such a huge fragmentation and cessation of reality that CNN states immigration is a lie created by Fox News, while Fox News claims that climate change is a lie created by CNN. Although, there are two very serious problems here in the 21st century and we should deal with both profoundly and correctly, we do not have access to them because half of our society denies one issue, and the other half of our society denies the other one. This is because denying and disputing the identity of the other course have become more important than the fate of this century, our civilisation, our children, and humanity in general. The real serious crisis is that we no longer have conventional reality, therefore neither conventional crises nor conventional problems. As half of the world’s problems are denied by one course and the other half of the world’s problems are denied by the other course, these problems are no longer matters of humanity but memes that have divided people into tribes and isolate courses more than ever.
While in the 20th century one half of humanity professed one idea and the other half another idea that clashed in the form of massive apocalyptic world wars and they fought each other, today that scenario is impossible — and don’t get me wrong, I’m glad about it. Systems of ideas are like detour lines in space. They do not meet nor have any intersection.
In the 21st century, it is not necessary to interpret let alone discuss or argue issues, but to distort as much as possible, to throw the properly twisted content in front of the viewers and commentators, and hope that among the many bloodthirsty trolls there will be such a cretin who will really slap a representative.
This is no longer journalism — it is nothing more than deliberate misunderstanding, incitement and lying. The propaganda journalism of the 1940s and 1950s is back: what we get now is a modern, cynical repackaging of the same vile hate-mongering. Each course fights within its own bubble, which has nothing to do with the other, and in the end none of the world’s problems gets resolved or at least tackled in some way for the lack of a common ground where we could still communicate.
