Iis theDeclaration of Independence, and probably the most famous sentence in American history. It is self-evident. ”Thomas Jeffersonwrote in 1776: happiness. "
Governments exist to secure people's rights, Jefferson continued. When governments stopped doing so, people set them aside and formed new governments." "Let me submit the facts to the open world to prove this," the document states.
The truth. It's self-evident. fact. However, on Independence Day 2022, these words also stand out as anachronisms. In the age of social media, false alarms, disinformation, "fake news" and extreme partisanship, "truth" can be considered "obvious." "Facts" can simply be submitted to the candid world. What does such a sentence mean to us in today's political situation?
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Information about the past we encounter online today isincreasingly shaped by algorithms, platform design, crowdsourcing, and disinformation campaigns. The success of these e–history often has little to do with facts or truth. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the world of facts has been replaced by the world of beliefs. With so much information available to each of us, we no longer need a set of shared facts or trivial truths, and we may not be able to do so. Each of us is rewriting every day the personalized reality presented to us by the recommendation engine, carefully selected from pieces of information scattered throughout the web. We forge our reality and find sufficient justification for why we believe each reality is trivial.
Such a world poses many threats to the professional-centric field of knowledge. As historian Jill Lepore wrote in 2016 inNew Yorker, from law and science to history and journalism, much of the modern world is "fact," something. The notion that it may be clearly known. Our independence, as Jefferson revealed, also depends on that premise. As Lepore wrote, "the origin of any other country ... can't answer the evidence," like the United States.
If the world of facts is collapsing, it's probably also why the American experimental foundationfeelson unstable ground. Our very existence is connected to the world of facts and trivial truths. After all, national history is an imaginary consensus on the facts shared by diverse groups of people. When those agreements are unraveled, we have to find something new — and in fact, we are in the midst of such a turbulent process.
In the public sphere, every day we discuss what information is assembled in what order and reveal the obvious truths that should be the basis of our actions. Conservatives and progressives, respectively, are self-evident, factually supported, and threatened by "repeated injuries," "abuse," and "despotism," depending on what evidence is collected and in what order. We can show each other a compelling belief system. Opposite — A term used by Jefferson 246 years ago.
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Social media and the web have fundamentally reordered our world, but post-truth, post-fact They are not the only ones responsible for leading the era of. As Lepore summarized in that article, the changing sand at our feet has a much longer history, including postmodernism, relativism, and fundamentalism. And now, the era of trivial truth is over, and the new era of debate and belief in us is over.
This may seem dangerous, but it also offers the opportunity to abandon old American stories and create new ones, rather than on the static basis of facts inherited from the founders. increase. A new set of beliefs about human rights and human dignity that can move us forward decades ahead.
Regardless of past American glory and failure, July 4th gives us the opportunity to clarify new beliefs about why we exist and why we deserve independence. .. Nation. Some of Jefferson's words are very helpful in the exercise: equality, inviolable rights, life, freedom. A government whose mission is to protect the safety of those who give legitimacy. Whether those beliefs are factual, true, or trivial in America today is nevertheless secondary to building an agreement that it is worth fighting.
Jason SteinhauerisHistory, Disrupted: How Social Media and the World Wide Web changed the pastandHistory ClubNewsletter.
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