All those boundaries are blurring.

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When it comes to the blurring of boundaries, for the past few months the most prominent internet-related issue revolves around the boundaries of news - real, or fake. Fake, or at least purposefully inaccurate, news has probably accompanied any and all communications technologies, starting with speech. Back before writing we probably were well versed in reading facial expressions, but did we really know whether someone was lying to us? Graffiti became common with the proliferation of literacy, and though I can't make any definitive claims, it's a good guess that people who wrote on walls also tended to exaggerate. I don't know whether the web pages that post graffiti from Pompeii are legitimate, but we do know that people definitely did write on its walls. With printing it became even easier to misinform, and there's no reason to assume that today's outpouring of fake-news is all that different from what other periods have known. There is, however, a significant difference. Our technologies have improved to the point that distinguishing between the true and the false, between the substantiated and the unverifiable, is incredibly difficult. And if a recent Vanity Fair article is true (after all, how can we really know?) it's becoming considerably more so.

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Go to: Making Jack dull.