"Now Everyone Has a Voice"
by Todd Hayen
That’s a good thing, right? Isn’t that what we’ve been fighting for all along? Isn’t that what Norman Rockwell meant when he painted "Freedom of Speech" - the guy standing up to speak, with some folded-up paper in his pocket? That’s what free speech is all about, isn’t it?
“Every man has a voice to be heard.”
Yeah, I thought that was the whole point, too. Now I’m not so sure. I remember when the Internet was first coming into mass awareness, and I read an article commenting on it as a forum for every thought every person ever had. The article said this would be the first time such a bulk of information would flood our attention, almost all of it unedited and unvetted.
The author who wrote this article believed this would be a huge problem: that before then, information was sorted through, vetted, and deemed “worthy of human consumption” before it was made available to the throngs of humans grabbing for it.
This is good and bad, of course. The “good” is that before something was published, many eyes went over it, it was carefully determined to be accurate, and it was rejected if found to be preposterous, sensationalist, or downright a lie. (I am speaking here more of news items and non-fiction work.) Of course, if something was labelled “fiction,” the scrutiny was a bit less extreme. But it was still important to identify it as such (recall the famous Orson Welles “War of the Worlds” broadcast).
Now, with the internet, and to a lesser degree with self-publishing that bypasses traditional publishers, anything can get out there. Anything. And there seems to be no responsibility regarding accuracy, identifying fiction from non-fiction, and opinion from evidential proof.
Of course, needless to say, the “bad” of the old system is that anyone who controlled the press controlled what the press published. This would include even book printing, and particularly the printing of news, which should not be controlled by anyone other than editors and writers. Writers expressing their free thoughts is one thing; editors determining who gets published, or radically altering what writers write in order to express a certain narrative, is another.
But often editors are owned by the system (whether it be governments, institutions, special interest groups, or advertisers), and don’t even do the proper job they were meant to do. This is a problem - and quite frankly always has been. Particularly in countries known for the restriction of their citizens’ freedoms, such as the former Soviet Union, Communist China, and a litany of other countries, current and past. A “free press” is a relatively new thing. As well as a “free country” - both are now rapidly disintegrating.
So, rah-rah for the internet and self-publishing! Not so fast. With it come more problems of a different nature. With the advent of the “free internet,” where it takes nothing to get your voice in front of millions, and with no editing to free it from untruths and crappy writing, the responsibility for accurate literature falls on the reader, not on the author or the agency that releases the writing. The crappy writing is the responsibility of AI to correct (ha ha!). That leads to another problem: it is more difficult now to dismiss bad information based on bad grammar as it used to be!
This dilemma, sadly, gives the agenda even more power to announce nearly everything that hits consumers as “misinformation.” Since they now can say that if information does not come from their own established sources (and we all know what those are), then it simply is not to be “trusted” - it is “dis” or “mis” information, and should be ignored, or worse, attacked, deplatformed, etc. The net they cast is wide, intending to capture anything they find that does not meet their own criteria, thus labelling far more than unedited, unvetted nonsense as misinformation.
It makes you wonder if the internet was invented for this very purpose - to make it impossible to distinguish information coming from reliable and accurate alternative sources from information coming from Yahoo-types with diarrhea of the mouth. The same goes for the invention of AI - since everyone is now on a witch hunt to discredit AI writing, we may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater if we believe nothing good can come from AI literature.
Again, I don’t have a solution to this problem (do I ever?). I only hope for more awareness on the part of the consumer of information. As I said earlier, it is largely now our responsibility to weed through the junk and find what is true and makes logical and heartfelt sense. This requires more than a cursory look at Facebook chatter (and similar social media sources). We need to be reading history, science, and medical literature to vet the authors, their research methods, and particularly their funding.
We cannot be like the sheep-types who only look at the source for their vetting of information, who do not “do their research” and only believe verbatim anything their exalted leaders have to say, or their idolized news sources have to convey. And at the same time, totally ignoring, and I mean TOTALLY ignoring, ANY AND ALL information that comes from other sources, even empirical sources such as friends and family who have experienced contradictions in their own lives that the mainstream sources insist on.
We are being forced to take more action in this regard every day, considering the onslaught of AI-created visuals and text. Most of what we actually see now in media is AI-generated, and of course that means that most of what we see now in media is simply not true and is prompted by people who have their own agenda - whether that agenda is just a mischievous prank or a desire to sway masses of people to take certain action that fits a nefarious agenda.
I have no desire to stop the flow of information, regardless of where it comes from; I firmly believe everyone has the right to speak their word (although fewer should probably exercise that right!). I do have a desire to facilitate change in people so fewer and fewer of them find benefit in being liars, evil, or advocates of destructive agendas.
I also have the desire to see people develop more critical systems of thinking, not because the world is out to get them and they have to be aware of such a probability, but because a thinking mind is a healthy mind that is not easily swayed by unhealthy minds. Just as it was before the advent of the printing press, people must begin to rely more on word-of-mouth information, and information coming from uncertain sources needs to be more carefully scrutinized.
The reliance on word-of-mouth needs to come from the expectation that the majority of people we come in contact with are decent and share the same values we do. In my humble opinion, this is the world we must all be willing to work toward."
o
Full screen recommended.
Blues Masterpiece,
"People Get Offended Faster Than They Get Smarter"
“People Get Offended Faster Than They Get Smarter” is a witty, tongue-in-cheek blues about modern life, thin skin, and the disappearing art of laughing at yourself. The singer watches the world with a raised eyebrow, noticing how quick people are to take offense while being much slower to learn from experience. Driven by a rolling blues guitar groove and the sly, sarcastic cry of the harmonica, the song blends humor, observation, and old-school blues wisdom. The voice carries the tone of someone who has seen trends come and go and isn't surprised by much anymore. Everybody's got an opinion... But not everybody's got perspective."
