one of the challenges of our era is that technology and our information consumption habits are changing so rapidly but we don't yet understand what they're doing to us in Brazil conversa Guarico alexis Wachowski Alaia pega been seeing something from a Song yi professor Anand Raj Colombia in Nova York Alexis thank you very much again it's a pleasure to have you at the raziel for the second time we are going to talk about something very trendy right the post truth which oxford dictionary is designated as its 2016 word of the year so I get to have three types of viewer right now those who know what it means the group of people who don't and also those who think they know but I'm not sure so let's start with the basics what is it so toast truth as you mentioned was chosen as the 2016 word of the year very cleverly by the Oxford English Dictionary I think to reflect what they were seeing happening in the public which is that people were ignoring facts and reality in favor of opinion or their own perspective on what happened so post truth is not it's I think the phenomenon is more reaction against people wanting to have control over the kind of information that they were consuming but in in truth it's really just another way of saying that people don't want to face reality they don't want to face the facts so they've declared this phenomenon post truth as a way to ignore facts I think that people have always done this to a certain extent ignored evidence that they didn't feel comfortable with but most recently it's become acceptable almost to do this it is because Engram it I think it's in part because of the Internet I think the Internet has allowed the post truths Naumann on to become popular because of how quickly news spreads people guys that people have always denied the existence of certain evidence that they're uncomfortable with I don't want to save but I think that there's easier to find others like you it's easier to seek out the the truth that is convenient for you online because there's just so much information out there so you can find a group of like-minded people who are all accepting the same sense of reality and band together and ignore the rest whereas in 20 years ago when there were only three television stations it was much more difficult to do that and this phenomenon is very good for politicians right it's very convenient for politicians I think it's very poor for our democracies but I think that it makes it easier for politicians to get away with lying because the reality is that that's what's happening is that people are accepting lies as sort of a normal part of the political discourse in a way that wasn't acceptable even just five years ago oddly enough the Internet makes it harder than ever to hide evidence because you can always find it somewhere somehow but it is also made it possible for there to be these alternative narratives that you can buy into so as I said five years ago if a politician was caught lying they would apologize they would say they misspoke nobody ever uses the word lie but now it seems that there's almost an embrace of post truth there's an embrace of this fact that not only our politicians having their own versions of events they're proud of it and they declare themselves almost above the truth like it doesn't touch them it doesn't affect them well in Brazil we have for instance agencia lupa which is the first fact-checking agency in the country lupa means magnifier by the way so for example when a politician says he hasn't made money while in public office the journalist of this agency investigate and verify his statements exposing that his revenue has actually risen over 300 in the previous four years so does that show the importance of not so fast journalists or a good journalist above all I think that good journalism is more important than it's ever been I think there's something very ephemeral about the news cycle these days where a story comes out everyone gets the excitement over it and then it passes very quickly but good investigative journalism that accumulates facts and evidence that doesn't go away and the more of that accumulation of evidence that we have the easier it will be to combat people who are promoting lies or denying the truth so I think that there I just can't say enough that journalists fact-checkers investigative reporters they have a stronger role to play than ever before I think that politicians who are riding this wave of acceptance of post truth acceptance of lies essentially they're they're kind of like shadows you know they cast this big appearance and they seem really larger-than-life but I think they are ephemeral ultimately and they're not going to last I think the public will eventually grow tired of not knowing what's reality and having people try to pull the wool over their eyes or direct them to some sort of alternative narrative I think eventually I and this is I'm an optimist I admit but I do think that eventually that people will recognize evidence for what it is and so journalists have to keep working hard they have to keep doing their work since he's campaigned Donald Trump wages war on the press offering us the term alternative effects what do you think about this it's just another way to say I'm lying there's no other way to put it that's all it is and it's one of the most I remember being so aghast when I heard the word alternative facts first used in public in a serious non ironic way because the very definition of the word fact is something that is real something that is true based in evidence there is no alternative to a fact a fact is a fact it's an absurdity I remember thinking I was reading maybe a parody article not an actual news article but it's just another way to spin this idea that facts don't matter and anything that the administration wants to say it can say and get away with and I again I hope that journalists don't let that happen one of your previous experiences include leading a team at Harmonia Institute where you conduct the research about the impact of media production on individuals and society based on your studies have we become less concerned with the verifiability of what we believe as long as it confirms to our point of view yes and now so I think that we've always wanted to find information that supports what we believe it's called confirmation bias it makes us feel better nobody enjoys being told that they're wrong or having the experience of finding out that some deeply held belief of yours is in fact based on a falsehood I do think that as I said earlier it makes it the Internet makes it easier to seek out information that conforms to your beliefs but I don't think that it's going to last all of that long again there's an appetite now for I think actual news that we haven't seen in a long time one of the only not only one of the positive side effects that has come out of the Trump administration's election is that people realize that there are real consequences to post truth there are real consequences to espousing falsehoods from are having our political leaders espouse falsehoods other countries are not trusting us in the way that they used to it's affected our diplomatic relationships it's affected on the perception of America as a stable country the president of former President of Ireland Mary Robinson is the special envoy for climate change at the UN and after the u. s. pulled out of the Paris climate change Accords she called the u.
s. a rogue state because the only other people who are not signatories are Nicaragua and Syria so there are real serious consequences to the United States experience and inside the United States and also our standing in the world and so I think that people will at some point recognize the value of facts and evidence and truth in reporting and even if it's uncomfortable even if it goes against what they believe in well hopefully at least accept that there's a need for that kind of reality in our discourse those late-night tweets of Donald Trump harms a lot diplomacy in your opinion I think that having a tweet like the KO fifi tweet where it's not even spelled correctly and nobody knows what the term means and clearly it was just a bad typing it's become a joke and by extension the presidency has become a joke the fact that if somebody had said two years ago that the American president would be the laughingstock of the world I don't think most of us would have believed it even people who don't like America I think would not have believed it but that's kind of where we are right now and not having any sort of intermediary step from the mind of the president to the world through Twitter is I think dangerous for the country I think it's bad for the democracy okay so still talking about the habit of confirming news all in social media it ends up leading people to read only the title or perhaps the first paragraph of a news report in already published comments on the subject in this case people are not necessarily getting wrong information but this is clearly insufficient for those who want to comment or make a point yeah what do you think about that analogy I think that it's accurate and I think that it's sort of the information equivalent of gorging yourself on junk food there's not I think a good sense of how potentially damaging it is to just skim a headline and think that you have an understanding of a situation we're shortchanging ourselves by not giving ourselves the opportunity to think for a moment before we respond or to learn a little bit more before it responds now that's on the one hand on the other hand this is the world we're in unless we all decide to throw away our iPhones and stop looking at news on the internet we have to figure out how to contend with the fact that we're being flooded with headlines at all time's now the click-through rate from a headline to an article is pretty low with about 20 percent according to a survey I read into 20 a service conducted in 2015 in the US now considering that you may be exposed to hundreds and hundreds of headlines a day clicking through one to one one of every five is actually not so bad the question is how much of that click-through results in reading an article really thinking about it reflecting digesting before you make a comment and that is yet to be seen one of the challenges of our era is that technology and our information consumption habits are changing so rapidly but we don't yet understand what they're doing to us exactly we have a sense of the trends as you said people are skimming headlines and taking that to be all the news and making comments very quickly but it's not clear that that will always be enough I suspect in the same way that if you ate nothing but junk food you would feel pretty bad after a while your health would suffer I feel like when you only skim headlines when you only consume information rapidly and don't stop to think about what you're doing eventually you don't feel very well there's actually a phenomenon social scientists have dubbed Facebook depression because the more time people spend on Facebook almost by the hour the worse they feel about themselves there's a lot of reasons for it but just the fact that social scientists are starting to understand that all of this consumption of media may be having ill effects on our health signifies that there's a lot more study to be done on the other hand there are people that read all the article but they are always trying to find a site they are used to articles with one opinion and they don't like or get a news report with multiple wheels do you think people are always seeking a side I think that it's very common and I think it's a problem I think we need to be more disciplined in the way that we consume media I really get the sense that we're kind of like where we were in the 1950s when it comes to nutrition people just eight whatever they ate and didn't exercise and that was the way that it went maybe we had a sense that that wasn't good for us in the same way that people smoked all over the place and people thought uh smoking maybe it's not good for us I'm coughing a lot maybe that's not good for me but it had really been studied yet I feel like we're sort of in the information equivalent of that right now where people are engaging in information consumption habits like seeking out news that agrees only with their own opinion looking for information to be sort of like an ammunition and then our argument that isn't necessarily good for our thought processes is not good for the way that we digest information and at some point it's going to feel unsatisfying that's my suspicion I'm an optimist though so I can't say that that's what everybody would say in my position but I do think that people have less appetite for balanced perspectives and they seem to have in the past but the other reality is there's just those options now exist I think the media itself has a responsibility to continue to put out fair nuanced reporting that reflects both sides of an argument even if that's not what people are necessarily asking for I do think the media has a tremendous amount of power and responsibility and it's their duty to exercise that and how can we overcome that one of the things I always recommend is to is an exercise of looking at Google News or any news aggregator that has multiple headlines on the same story and one of the things that you can do with that is find out just how different the headlines can be about the same exact event now the more you do that the more you look critically and take a pause when you read a headline and you realize actually this is just one perspective so when I read in my news sources I always go to Google News first and look at the headlines of the day and for maybe the top ten headlines I will click through to look at maybe the 20 other headlines that relate to that one story then I will pick which story to read I very often try to find the most neutral source like Reuters or The Associated Press not always sometimes I find it very satisfying to just go into my little bubble and and read what it makes me feel good but I do try to be disciplined about it and I tell my students it's like exercise it may not be easy to do it may feel a little exhausting while you're doing it it's work but it makes you feel better afterwards so I think it's worth the effort since we are talking about diplomacy on the petitions and dangers of policymaking the social media area what should government be concerned with and focused on I think that there is and I say this as a communications professional as a press secretary I think there's a need for people in this kind of position I think we need communication professionals because words matter and words mean something so to just have our political leaders are elected officials be able to speak off the cuff whenever they feel moved to do so without thinking of the consequences can be really dangerous and I'll give you one example just today this afternoon President Trump tweet tweeted about the fact that five Middle Eastern countries have broken ranks with Qatar now Qatar has a US military base on it which is very important for the u. s.
in its fight against Isis Trump brags that he his intervention with Saudi Arabia is one of the reasons that these five countries have broken ranks with Qatar now the Pentagon who is responsible for the military base in Qatar is scrambling to say oh but relations with the US and Qatar are going really well right now because we have a military base there and if Qatar kicks out the u. s.
