This is very interesting. I have to think about it some more.
... and it's more tempting to join a team than ever before to make sense of things.
Because of the sheer volume of information? Or do you think that other cultural changes are contributing to this?
nel: We cross posted earlier and I decided to answer your post separately because there was so much in it, instead of adding an eta to my earlier post.
First, I acknowledge that "not care about the truth" can be perceived as incendiary, but I would not like to back down from opening my initial statements that way in the other thread because of the nature of the comments that preceded it. What concerned some posters in that discussion was clearly a question about the "truthfulness" of a text - truthfulness in a very broad sense, and I won't rehash all the issues that were raised. There were a lot of counter-comments of the style, 'get over yourself' and 'whatevah' which I took to be dismissal of not only facticity itself but of the posters who cared about it, a dismissal of their approach, their mindset. Now, that may be a matter of individual posting style, but it struck me with some force. Other than expressing insult, I have not yet heard from anyone who made statements of that nature that they did not mean to dismiss the very concern of other posters for "truthfulness" in addition to rejecting a need for facticity in fictional works and the publicity that surrounds them, etc.
I don’t know whether Faramond is interested in discussing the more existential aspects of this issue. His post seems to lean in that direction. But I think it might be a hard topic to talk about.
As to the meat of your text, you made two points which seem to me significant in their potential to explain a generational difference, if there is one:
This is very much the academic approach to investigation. It seems to me that this approach is needed towards nearly all information presented by the media these days. (And I include the internet in the media; I think I mentioned it earlier as a significant factor.)Jn, I am not quite sure I would go as far as "young people think that the truth cannot be known." My view is that the truth can be known, but it is our task to decipher it as best we can.
<snip> the rest of this paragraph, closing with:
But I have no expectation that any individual source is true, and the only way I know to avoid the abyss of which you speak is to assume the burden of consulting a multiplicity of sources in the hope that that will come closer to "the truth" than any single type of source seems consistently to do.
This requires work. It requires more work than I had to do to sort out fact from fiction when I was your age. And it seems to me a lot to ask of a citizenry that all people approach information the way academicians do. Most people are not trained to approach information this way and do not do it naturally.
My perception is different regarding the futility of this demand.In summary, it is clear to me that assuming the truth of alleged "news" is naive and demanding it is futile.
I do not mean by this that my perception is right and yours is wrong. On the contrary, I suspect that your perception has a much higher probability of being accurate. Much higher. But I find that I cannot surrender my conviction that my demand is legitimate, because my expectations were shaped during an era in which it was not futile to make such a demand. In other words, my perspective is generational.
• Newspapers were more diversely owned and they competed for fame via investigative reporting.
Certainly news was slanted, but if one wanted to read things that slanted in different directions and find one's own middle, it was EASY to do this. Even in the small city where I grew up, there was a bookstore that carried all the national and big regional papers. For one dollar and a 10-minute drive I could have ten genuinely different perspectives on every issue. And those perspectives would be rich in socioeconomic meaning as well - regional differences, business v. labor differences, gender differences depending on the reporter, political orientation depending on the owner of the paper.
Here's what I can get today at the largest bookstore in my area, and I live in a region with 4 million people, not 100,000 as I did then: The Philadelphia Inquirer (daily), USA Today (daily), the New York Times (once a week), The Wall Street Journal (once a week), plus three or four local papers that report on neighborhood events. Probably I could do better at a Center City bookstore, but that's an hour and a half drive for me, a $7 parking bill if I can't find a meter, and the papers themselves all cost a few dollars. My hometown has also changed: the bookstore I used to use is out of business, replaced by the same conglomerate Borders and B&N that I have here, offering the same fare.
It’s also not worth it to seek alternate news sources because the lack of competition is reflected in a lack of alternate perspective. Southern Ohio no longer offers the auto industry labor news perspective but the same Knight Ridder perspective that I can get here.
• The incidents we've heard recently of a Pulitzer Prize winner fabricating sources, a journalist for NYT fabricating sources, a journalist being used to channel government disinformation on a domestic issue, outing a CIA agent, etc. .... this kind of thing was unheard of when I was of the age to start reading newspapers.
I am flabbergasted to hear such stories. I was flabbergasted to watch Dan Rather's reports on the first Gulf War. My overwrought, hoity-toity attitude is that reporters who fabricate news or play out fictional drama on TV should be criminally prosecuted. It's an assault on the constitution.
Boy, am I naive.
The idea of shrugging off the newspapers and the Six O'clock News is like a little death to me. They were THE source when I was growing up. I feel positively betrayed by the turn the communications industry has taken. There were problems, there were scandals, there were exposes, but they were not shrugged off as they are now, business as usual.
• No internet. If you wanted to research a topic in depth you had to go to books. Words printed on a page are not ephemeral. One can point to what an author wrote and discredit it. Citations are given. One can read them and decide if they were presented faithfully.
The standing of careful scholars and serious writers in the public voice was much, much greater (imo) than it is today, simply because of the volume of unverified modern noise available now to drown them out. And most of that noise comes from the internet, but some of it also comes from academia itself, from a proliferation of schools and programs and self-published journals where the peer review is specious. As Faramond observed, there is enormous pressure in many cases to draw biased conclusions, and data does get fudged. I'm not saying this never happened before, but it happens now with greater frequency.
Just by the way, my University recognized a need, back in 1997, to develop a policy about internet sourcing by students. To this day we don't have one. We haven’t figured out yet how to structure our requirements for verification where the internet is concerned.
I don't think that there is lack of interest across the board, or a general belief that no truth in any circumstance can ever be known. I am thinking of it more in terms of territory surrendered than in terms of a changed attitude toward the importance of truth in general.But that resignation does not automatically equate to disinterest with the truth, nor a belief that the truth simply cannot be known.
Jn
edited for glitches