What to do about 'fake news'
At the turn of century I explained the rise of the extreme Right and fundamentalist religion as being caused by having too much information. I felt people were overwhelmed with so much information that they threw up their hands in frustration and fell back on listening to people they had historically trusted to make decisions for them such as their ministers and local politicians. They retreated to a formula that worked for their grandparents in a time when there wasn't enough good information. Simple systems are easy to maneuver in. But now we have not only too much information we have purposefully false information amplified by social media networks. The result is the election of Donald Trump, a simple and distorted result from simple and distorted information. Democracy may not be able to exist in the midst of this kind of noise. The use of the internet to amplify, distort and echo these distorted opinions has caused so much sound in the arena of politics that it is no longe