According to Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” You’ve probably heard that before. If not, it’s worth thinking about for a bit.
Things that we take for granted today would have been considered magic just a few hundred years ago. Flashlights, disposable lighters, cameras, plastic, and radios are just a few examples of things that would have completely amazed people just two hundred years ago. If you could travel back in time and bring with you examples of today’s technology, you would be considered the world’s greatest magician.
It’s not that people back then were stupid. They were merely ignorant. If they had possessed an understanding of, or even been aware of, today’s technology, then the technology wouldn’t seem magical.
I’m sure everyone has heard of the term “click bait”. Or, perhaps you haven’t. “Click bait” is an oftentimes outrageous headline designed to get you to click into an article to learn more. But, instead of linking to a legitimate article, you see a fluff page filled with ads. The scam is to get you to click on the headline so they create more ad revenue. But, a lot of people don’t click though to the article to realize the headline is fake, so they believe that JFK was killed by aliens or that Michael Jackson is still alive simply because they saw the headline.
It’s getting increasingly harder to recognize clickbait. Many members of the mainstream media use the same technique to get you to click into an article, because clicking on an article generates more ad revenue for them. But, a lot of people don’t click on the headline to realize that it’s misleading or even false. Instead, they believe things like “President Trump calls deceased members of the military ‘suckers and losers’” or “Joe Biden called the troops ‘bastards’”. The mainstream media is essentially using lies to increase their ad revenue.
If you’d read either of those two articles, you may have learned that the claim made against President Trump was from “anonymous sources” and remains uncorroborated. Joe Biden did call the troops “bastards”, but it was a joke. There’s a video and it shows that every member of the military in the audience laughed at it.
But, after the headlines appeared, they were slapped on to images and sent out into the world as memes. And, because the memes reinforced something people already want to believe, they shared them with their friends. Before you know it, the memes are everywhere, and everyone is talking about “suckers and losers” or “bastards”.
The reason why the misinformation spread so fast was because people were ignorant. It’s not that they were stupid, it’s that they didn’t bother to make themselves aware of the truth. Those that believed the headlines or shared the memes didn’t bother to check their validity and helped to further spread the lies. More people saw the lies and more ignorant people believed them.
Arthur C. Clarke, Newton, Murphy, Moore and a host of others have their own laws and I want one too. So today I’m going to unveil my First Law which explains the propagation of lies and misinformation across social media. Here it is:
Hogan’s First Law:
To a sufficiently ignorant observer, a lie is indistinguishable from the truth.
Here’s a link to Hogan’s Second Law and Hogan’s Third Law
