SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media will always be a conduit of misinformation/misinformation/information.

This is also why it's a democratizing force. But democracy has unavoidable responsibilities attached. Today it's difficult to impossible to suppress information. It's more easily watered down or festooned with shines objects of destruction. Information is nearly impossible to suppress.

Even if Facebook were completely regulated the same tech would emerge elsewhere devouring information and our privacy in its wake. The privacy ship sailed long ago while people were bitching about free speech and gun rights. Our definitions of privacy is changing along with our definition of veracity. Just as our definitions of history have changed. Ancient writings are often considered more historically reliable and authoritative than modern evidence. Now questions abound about footage of a president being shot in a motorcade or a kid in hand cuffs being shot in the back by police with dozens of cell phones uploading it to YouTube/ Twitter/Facebook as it happened. It's precisely as Marshall McLuhan said, "the medium is the message".

It forces us to a greater clarity and to the bleeding edge between inferiority, self-perceptions and beliefs versus the 'truths' or 'knowledge' which are measurable, quantifiable and build upon one another. External consensual realities versus an internal ground of being. In an age of fake news, the deep state and alternate truths, where is veracity? What is reality?

We are forced to either research and choose what is closest to real or shoot from the hip and decide what we believe is true. One thing is certain the truth of knowing and believing can no longer be accepted as interchangeable. Our intimacy with our technology is growing and changing us as a species. It's become much more intimate than incursions into our privacy, it's found its way into our biology and essentially our destiny. Those feathers won't be going back into that particular pillow.