16AR21-45

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AR 21:45 - Is social media just "cocooning us with our friends?"

In this issue:

BIAS - progressives find fault with news media and social media

ISLAM - looking back at "The Dream of Muslim Outreach"

Apologia Report 21:45 (1,318)

December 14, 2016

BIAS

"The Truth Is Out There" by Charlotte Alter and Michael Scherer -- it's just very difficult to see. The authors focus on political debate in America which "has become unhinged from reality. And it won't stop on Election Day." We've developed into "a world where nothing and no one can be trusted," and one in which any given source "looks just as real as anything else."

The authors theorize: "It's a problem of quantity as much as quality: there is simply too much information for the public to accurately metabolize, which means that distortions - and outright falsehoods - are almost inevitable. ... Mainstream journalists are no longer trusted as gatekeepers to verify the stories that are true and kill the rumors that are false."

In our present era, "the information revolution has eroded faith in the institutions that once served as arbiters of reality. Mainstream journalism, government reports and academic research have lost the weight of truth for much of the population. ... In 1958, almost three-quarters of Americans trusted the government most of the time - now, that number is down to 1 in 5. ...

"Five years ago, people could tell whether a news source was legitimate by looking at [the] site's home page for context. Now all the credibility of publishers is often discarded."

Opposing sides of today's cultural divide blame each other for the current state of their conflict. It's not obvious from the selections above, but the overall article shows that the authors are very comfortable blaming conservative voices (especially Donald Trump). Time, Oct 17 '16, pp28-32. [1]

In her "On Technology" column for the New York Times, Jenna Wortham suggests that social networking feeds this ravenous environment of distrust. "Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that Donald Trump could be elected president, but I was. I live in Brooklyn and work in Manhattan, two of the most liberal places in the country. But even online, I wasn’t seeing many signs of support for him. How did that blindness occur? Social media is my portal into the rest of the world - my periscope into the communities next to my community, into how the rest of the world thinks and feels. And it completely failed me."

She concludes that "Social media seemed to promise a way to better connect with people; instead it seems to have made it easier to tune out the people we don’t agree with." She arrives at this point of discouragement after noting that it was Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, who sold us the dream that "'We’ve gone from a world of isolated communities to one global community, and we are all better off for it.'

"But that’s not what has happened. Zuckerberg’s idealism is belied by his desire to duck responsibility for mediating the content of his site."

We've now reached a point in the road where Twitter, Facebook's rival for digital attention, "is struggling to turn a profit while keeping its main service appealing to advertisers....

"What we’re seeing with Snapchat, Tumblr and Vine reflects a larger shift in the social-media economy. User-generated content, by and large, is not lucrative at a scale that satisfies investors, and as a result, most social-media companies are changing direction toward other revenue streams. One of the more significant shifts is the move into social messaging. Semiprivate messaging applications - group text threads and applications like WhatsApp (which is owned by Facebook) and Slack - have grown in popularity as people move away from public arenas for conversation, a shift caused in part by spikes in unchecked harassment on major social networks. ...

"We are more interested in locating alien species than understanding the humanity among the species we already live with." New York Times Magazine, Nov 27 '16, pp20-24. <www.goo.gl/MYQ9Kw>

Wouldn't it be a classic spiritual lesson in humility if we discovered that, on all sides of our most intense cultural conflict, most assumptions of our opponents' bias are equally lacking in substance? As Wortham writes, we may be discovering the true cost of social media is "just cocooning us with our friends."

Still, the news media has its debts to pay. As late as October 3rd, one could see predictions that Trump had just a 1.6 percent chance of winning. Perhaps the lesson for us is that there is a 1.6 percent chance of finding unbiased reporting from some source, somewhere, in 2016 and beyond.

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ISLAM

"The Dream of Muslim Outreach Has Become a Nightmare" by Victor Davis Hanson, "a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University," who opens: "When President Obama entered office, he dreamed that his hope-and-change messaging and his references to his familial Islamic roots would win over the Muslim world. The soon-to-be Nobel Peace Prize laureate would make the U.S. liked in the Middle East. Then, terrorism would decrease.

"But, as with his approach to racial relations, Obama's remedies proved worse than the original illness. ...

"The new message of the Obama administration was that the Islamic world was understandably hostile because of what America had done rather than what it represented. ...

"In apology tours and mythological speeches, Obama exaggerated Islamic history as often as he critiqued America. He backed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. He pushed America away from Israel, appeased Iran, and tried to piggyback on the Arab Spring by bombing Libya. He even lectured Christians on their past pathologies dating back to the Crusades. ...

"Intelligence and law enforcement agencies got the message and worried more about charges of "Islamophobia" than preempting deadly terrorist attacks. ...

"Radical Islam never had legitimate grievances against the West. America and Europe had welcomed in Muslim immigrants - even as Christians were persecuted and driven out of the Middle East. ...

"In truth, religious intolerance, gender apartheid, illiteracy, autocracy, statism, tribalism and religious fundamentalism all guarantee poverty, economic stagnation and scapegoating. While much of Asia and Latin America progressed through reform, the Middle East blame-gamed its miseries on affluent Western nations and on Israel.

"More disturbing, millions of Middle Easterners fled to the safety of Europe and the United States - but on occasion, only to resist assimilation and show ingratitude once they got there." RealClearPolitics, Jul 21 '16, <www.goo.gl/BLo5Yh>

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