The zone of proximal depravity
Martin Weller,
The Ed Techie,
Dec 21, 2017
I read somewhere this morning (I've lost the reference) that the success of fake news depends on a willing audience. People believe fake news because they want to believe fake news. I think it was related to this CNN story showing how a communist-inspired fake news campaign shook West Germany in 1959. This relates to Mrtin Weller's post on how it has become easier to jump from casual acquaintance to being fully immersed in talk of secrets and conspiracies. "There are implications for this," writes Weller. "For the individual I worry about our collective mental health, to be angry, to be made to engage with this stuff, to be scared and to feel that it is more prevalent than maybe it really is. For society it normalises these views, desensitises us to them and also raises the emotional temperature of any discussion." Maybe. But to be outraged you have to want to be outraged. It's easy to pretend that this is stuff being done to us, that we are powerless. But it's simply not true.
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