“Fake News” is getting a lot of heat these days from some of us who actually believe that truth is better than untruth—those of us who are being forcibly dragged into the “post-truth” era.
As if “post-truth” were something new. Actually, we’ve been drifting into the post-truth fog for quite some time now. In Virtual Unreality, Charles Seife (2014) chronicles the many ways in which the digital revolution and its star attraction, the Internet, have been masking, warping, and turning upside-down our perceptions of the world and even each other. A pedestrian example is how easily one can manipulate one’s Facebook persona into one loosely based on, and more attractive than, the original—more good-looking, more cool, more talented, more sociable, more with it. As the joke goes, “on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog,” and no one knows whether what you’re feeding them is bullshit.