Lost in Translation or Purposeful Manipulation: The True Story of Fake News
The concepts of morals and ethics are spiritual elements based on perception. Most individuals I know follow the religion of their parents. This is because religion is a social-cultural system of designated behaviors and practices. Did you know the structure of a language also affects its speakers' world perceptions? That is why so much false information is being spread, people are speaking the same verbal language, but not the same mental one.
If you have ever seen the 80s cartoon “Inspector Gadget”, you understand the importance of perception. Gadget is a cyborg (part man, part machine) with thousands of high-tech gadgets installed in his body. He is powerful and loyal to his career as a lawman. However, he is also very dim-witted and sometimes clueless. It is because he is lovable, caring, and protective that no one realizes the real solver of his cases is Penny, his thirteen-year-old niece and her dog Brain.
Back in the day, it was nothing to hear a story about a journalist putting themselves in harm’s way for their profession. Chauncey Bailey was killed for a story he was investigating, and Victor Riesel was blinded for one he was investigating. For the longest time reporters, news anchors, and correspondents were well respected and considered heroes of the truth. They literally risked their lives to inform the public of the things that were directly affecting its well being. In my youth, I had no idea about the concept of fake news.
Imagine waking up and doing your morning routine, which consists of watching the news for traffic reports. You hear that your particular road to work is free and clear. Now envision your local news failing to mention anything about a heatwave expected to kill a hundred thousand people or a thunderstorm expected to cause a power outage to millions. Depending on who interprets the situation, the news program you were watching consisted of fake news because they failed to inform you of the more dangerous situations. Some people would just call it omitted news because they did give correct information about your route to work. As an adult, if one doesn’t decipher the information being presented, it can lead down the wrong path and have devastating consequences.
Discernment is the ability to obtain sharp perceptions or to judge well. It can be psychological, moral, or aesthetic in nature. Within judgment, discernment involves going past the mere perception of something and making nuanced assessments about its properties or qualities. When you have to wonder who is telling the truth it makes it hard to determine what information is valid. The calamity occurring in our world now is a natural fallout of it being reshaped. If language forms reality and we are being introduced to new words and concepts, anyone who defines themselves only by old world terms sees this new one as scary.
Let’s take for instance how we write the date. It was instilled in me that you must sign and date all important papers or they were not considered valid. I used to practice writing my name all the time, but never the date. The date was the date, right? Uh, no. There are actually three correct ways to write the date and the one that is correct depends on the location where one resides.
America inherited the months-first dates format from the United Kingdom. They used to insist on dates laid out as mm-dd-yyyy, occasionally so did some other countries, including Canada and the Philippines. The rest of the world began to drift towards the European style of dd-mm-yyyy. Did you know there is a third way, though: The US military, China, Japan, and the Korean nations follow the International Standardization Organization, which has set yyyy-mm-dd as the internationally accepted way to represent time and date. It moves from the biggest unit of time (years) to the smallest (days).
For some it might seem humorous to think about all the confused people who don’t know the correct way to write the date. Others think it’s no big deal. From a legal standpoint it is a disaster. Say a seventy-year-old person is redoing their will and they sign and date it by the American standard, then they move to Europe. Now say they die, and some relatives are not pleased and want to contest the will. Something as simple as confusion over the date of when the will was signed, could cause a delay in money and time.
If the date is different depending on location, then facts regarding current news, history, and politics are easy to misconstrue. For instance, there are a significant amount on people who believe Nelson Mandela died before his recorded 2013 death. It has spawned a whole theory that has gained a mass following and created the term “The Mandela Effect”. If you take the time to read about this phenomenon, you might conclude, a lot of people are not trying to put out fake news. Some are just literally sharing a story based off of their perceptions from experiences and memories. The thing is now days you almost have to be Inspector Gadget to decipher between the ignorant and the malicious.