Language lies to us about its ability to facilitate communication. Anything beyond the most trivial of instances of description and communication carries enormous degrees of uncertainty and ambiguity. This is both the strength and the weakness of symbolic language, but ultimately – language itself benefits most. Human minds are bound by an acquired linguistic intuition […]
Context: Social media users more likely to believe misinformation The adoption of a “social” communications technology walks hand in hand with the suspension of disbelief as to the veracity of curated information broadcast on that channel; a wilful or semi-unconscious cognitive entrapment as progressive desensitisation to serial falsehoods. This may have taken a particular shape […]
Beauty has two faces. One is the natural symmetry and resonant eloquence of the parts as they are manifest in and as a whole, of unified pattern and unity. The other is the abstraction and symbolic token of value and meaning that we cultivate (and inherit as culture) through language and tradition. The first is […]
The old Nietzschean idiom about the abyss staring back seems apt here – as we gaze into an abyss of political chaos, partisan insecurity, confusion and intractable information complexity. This is precisely what is being done in the US right now through externally (and internally) sourced disinformation. Notice that, agnostic of truth-value, distributed patterns of […]
Fakes fly faster and further than facts for pretty much the same reasons that it is easier to break stuff than to make it: entropy. It’s not a long stretch of the intellect, imagination or of verifiable observational experience to perceive that, given a platform and a digital device, any wingnut with an axe to […]
You could be mistaken for believing that the primary public narratives and political engagements of our era are dominated by simpletons and misanthropes…
Belief has always been quite easily uncoupled from reality…
