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Tuesday 12 July 2016

Below the line poetry: Social media vs newspapers

Critical thinking skills FTW!
If you send the canary down the tunnel
and it comes back dead,
 you don't salute it for its brave sacrifice
and go down the tunnel anyway –
you turn the hell around!
Facts are sacred, cross checking mandatory.
But fear is addictive.

Journalism follows
it no longer leads..
a race to the bottom.
Just because it's your opinion
that the moon is made of green cheese
doesn't mean that opinion should be given
the same weight as, say,
Stephen Hawking's opinion
on the physical nature
of the moon.
Why is the public mistrustful of the mainstream media?
Because they have proven themeselves to be untrustworthy,
time
and time
and time
again.

Angst and Anguish
the Guardian's raison d'etre!
Rather than post truth politics
we should call it
post-professional journalism
as there was a time
when things used to be checked
and lies were harder to push.
I think the hard truth is
that
those days
are unaffordable now.

Social media,
for all its faults,
has empowered
and enabled
the public
to discuss and coordinate
its response
to matters of the day.
The mainstream media
no longer
controls
the public's discussion.
Mainstream politicians
no longer
control
the public's coordination.
The problem being
that everybody is now
a
super savvy
one man
"Che Guevara"
with an ipad.

The Guardian sells
to a pessimistic and guilt ridden middle class,
and it's obvious that
this is often
a deliberate editorial policy.
Too many opinion pieces,
not enough investigation.
Too much reporting,
not enough journalism.
Scientists are not supposed to defer to authority
in lieu of evidence; 
normal people kind of are.
And yet you're still here...
Huge paradox.

Information spreads so fast,
and so widely
that false information
can be embedded in the social sphere
fast enough
that once proved false it is too late.
140 character reporting in action.
That and GroupThink.
How do you combat a simple lie
with a complex truth
in the face of
140 character news reporting?

We live in an age where
people will tell the lies
that
people want to believe
as the truth
I think there is an argument
to be made
for serious people
to withdraw
from the world of social media. 
So much hate in the btl comments.

To the police,
the land of post-truth
is nothing new:
they've been occupying it
for years.
Social Media.
Full of Corbynites, Kippers and Cybernats
railing against Bilderberg and lizard men.
Starting
boringfacts dot com
 anyone in?


(From: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jul/12/how-technology-disrupted-the-truth)
Below the Line Poetry takes online article comments as its source material; they are formatted and re-edited to create a poem.

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