“True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society” (Farhad Manjoo)
I just finished True Enough, which challenges the conventional thinking that new media democratize information and will lead to greater vetting and truth. On the contrary, the author argues that new media encourage the retreat into reality tunnels. The greatest benefit of the book is a detailed analysis of the psychological factors that go into propaganda. It explains why “Swift Boating” works. Manjoo– a Salon.com columnist whose platform is the Web– makes an insightful and correct analysis, but I’m also wondering if there is also a nostalgia for solidity, to the days when there were less media, and diminished freedom of expression due to the top-down model of the one-to-many media structure of old. I think the warnings he makes about our tendency to regress into info tribes should be headed. Does he want to a return to the Jeffersonian ideal of educated elites, or a newspaper saturated public sphere? The solution, I think, is rather old, which is to rely on the Buddhist concept of mindfulness, which is to not hold onto some notion of mediated truth, but to surf it as an engaged, mindful observer.
For more insight follow the debate about the book’s conclusions between Manjoo and Steven Johnson, author of Emergence.
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