I watched a YouTube video by someone who enjoys balancing rocks on top of each other. The end result looks exquisite. But they also said that when they shared pictures on social media, many people responded by calling them fake or photoshopped.
This got me thinking of another way in which the ever-increasing unreliability of media content is doing damage. It is causing us to see all, or at least much of reality, through the lens of misinformation. In addition to making us think of the fake as real, it is also making us reject the real as fake. It is engendering a cynicism with respect to reality.
People are starting to think of something that is possible as something impossible. The maker of the video took this one step ahead and asked how many things there might be out there that we can do but we reject as impossible because our sense of what can be real has been damaged by a never-ending stream of lies and half-truths. Could there be experiences we refuse to have because we think them impossible?
And also, there is the matter of this rejection of possibilities being infectious. Sure, fake news spreads fast and gets a lot of people to believe false things. But another thing that spreads equally fast is our cynicism. We tell each other to not believe or at least to be careful about believing things and claims so frequently that what results is a culture of cynicism. We are assuming the impossibility of a lot of things, much to our own detriment.
[Note: This text was transcribed from handwritten pages by AI. Minor typographical and grammatical errors have been corrected while preserving the original content.]
