By this morning we should know the result of the local elections. Who cares? I would guess it is only the die-hard political junkies and people with nothing much to do who will vote. No one came down my road and asked for my vote and the water hole in the Diego Martin main road, despite being "fixed" for the third time last month, is filling up again, much to the delight of those dinky-headed youths in their mini cars who can now demonstrate their driving skills by swerving erratically into my lane and giving me the finger as they pass. And the garbage piles up and up and up. For some reason, however, some guys came around last week and asked us about rats. They then disappeared (the guys, not the rats). Won't see them until the next election.
The Oxford Dictionary has just declared "post-truth", word of the year. It beat out other contenders like "alt-right", referring to the extreme conservative views held by white nationalists and not a few Trinidadians of the "trader" persuasion who believe they are businessmen. Also "Brexiteer", a Brexit proponent and comparable to the local Trixits who believe T&T can field a successful Trinidadian test cricket team. Dream, dream dream! Finally, the lovely word, "adulting" which I thought might have something to do with adultery but which in fact refers to the practice of "behaving in a way characteristic of responsible adults, especially the accomplishment of mundane but necessary tasks." The less one writes about that in T&T, the better.
"Post-truth" is a well known concept in T&T. We have been practicing it for years although we have never referred to it as such. We lose out again. If Jamaicans or Bajans had invented the concept, the entire world would know about it. Pan, anyone? That well known Japanese invention from the 20th century? Anyway, post-truth is an adjective and refers to "circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to public emotion and personal belief."
See! We doing that since I know myself. It's "mauvais langue" or the vicious, calculated talk designed to damage a person's reputation! We miss out. The $350,000 roti bill allegation comes to mind. The burning question of whether the money was paid for roti skins (plain roti) or roti complete with curried filling versus the allegation of who have more "outside than inside chirren." Fabulous stuff. Nation building and all that!
That capacity for self-delusion, so characteristic of elections in T&T, is now common internationally as seen in the UK and US elections of 2016. The adjective's most common use in fact, is in describing "post-truth politics" or political campaigns that appeal to voters' emotions and are disconnected from facts. It is becoming increasingly difficult for the ordinary person to separate fact from fiction, no doubt due to information and social media overload. Humans are not designed to be in touch with thousands and thousands of people's opinions. That is a set up for uncertainty and confusion. Charlatans thrive in such conditions. Hence the number of "herbalists" and smart men on radio and television successfully pushing their nonsense, not to mention the hypocritical traditional business firms with their advertising experts urging mothers to buy vitamins and growing up milks to "make their babies smarter." What a waste of money.
We have been so brain-washed that it is increasingly difficult to separate fact from fake.
The situation is particularly worrying as it refers to children. If children are the future, the future might be very ill-informed.
Researchers at Stanford's Graduate School of Education have spent more than a year evaluating how well students across the USA can evaluate online sources of information.
High school and college students in 12 states were asked to evaluate the information presented in tweets, comments and articles. More than 7,800 student responses were collected. In exercise after exercise, the researchers were "shocked" by how many students failed to effectively evaluate the credibility of that information.
The students displayed a "stunning and dismaying consistency" in their responses, the researchers wrote, getting duped again and again. They weren't looking for high-level analysis of data but just a "reasonable bar" of, for instance, telling fake accounts from real ones, activist groups from neutral sources and ads from articles.
Notice the last, "cannot distinguish ads from articles." Students were shown a Slate home page that included a traditional ad and a paid story branded as "sponsored content." Most students could identify the traditional ad, but more than 80 per cent of them believed that the "sponsored content" article was a real news story. We have a similar situation here where so called journalists take a media release or a printed handout from a company, attach their name to it print it as "news" and presumable accepted as "news" by readers.
In another test, students were shown a photograph of a strange looking flower with the caption, "Fukushima Nuclear Flowers: this is what happens when flowers get nuclear birth defects."
The author of the study, Dr Sam Wineburg, had this to say: "The photograph had no attribution. There was nothing that indicated that it was from anywhere."
"We asked students, 'Does this photograph provide proof that a nuclear disaster caused these aberrations in nature?' And we found that over 80 per cent of the high school students that we gave this to had an extremely difficult time making that determination.
"They didn't ask where it came from. They didn't verify it. They simply accepted the picture as fact."
