Who are you going to believe...me or your own eyes?. --Groucho Marx
The witty, acerbic member of the twentieth century comedy team Marx Brothers, Groucho Marx had a lot of funny sayings...another I like is from the movie Duck Soup: "Why, a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can't make head nor tail out of it." The above quote I did select sadly has a lot of relevance to today's world of disinformation, conspiracy theories and innuendo. I, like you, am a fellow traveler through this strange time of mass digitalization and nearly universally available news sources due to cell phone/Internet technology as well as a multitude of different "news" channels on television, tailored to reinforce the preconceived notions of their viewers. Social media, especially Facebook and Twitter, and search engines like Google employ algorithms to discern their users' interests and politics...and then present material that promotes them. I distinctly remember Trump's 2017 presidential inauguration and the general sparsity of people attending it in person...and his claim to the effect that it was a record-setting crowd. And then his yes-people went out into the media to parrot that false claim. About all these mass shootings, the Covid pandemic and the 2020 election, I've seen these issues all for what they were and yet the media is loaded with those promoting denial and lies: and people believe them and not their own eyes! I'm not sure people in general haven't changed...they've always had this kind of tribalism to them that sways them to accept "facts" that are untrue just to fit in with their group. What's different is how this omnipresent digital input is affecting how different folks distinguish reality from fantasy...or whether they actually want to...
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