Farhad Manjoo in his book, True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society depicts studies from various fields such as sociology, psychology, economics, and political science to demonstrate how new information technologies have deviated general public from obtaining the truth. This book encapsulate the idea of a "Better-Never" situation as described by Gopnick (2011), because new information media such as internet, podcast and talk radio are crowded with unreliable information that can mislead the general public. Before the invention of internet, news was once circulated by a few organizations, but nowadays, people can get the information from all direction (Praiser, 2011). According to Pew Research Center (2010), roughly 45% of Americans say that they get their news from the internet and other digital sources. Manjoo argues that the internet and news media do not necessarily present objective truth to the general public. In this book, Manjoo main claim’s is “at the same time that technology and globalization has pushed the world together, it is driving our minds apart” (p.1). He further explores how human make the judgment in selecting and interpreting information in a way that concurrences with their belief.
Manjoo discusses that people regularly process information through "selective exposure"; it is a situation where people pick and choose information that suit with their ideology. This situation explains why fact does not always succeed in the new information media. Providing people with information that challenges their fundamental belief does not necessarily prompt them to reconsider their viewpoint, but instead they will pick and choose evidence that is coherent with their ideology. The unlimited choice of information on the internet has diverted the truth because people need to make the decision on what information that they want to consume. Manjoo quotes a study by Pew Research Center (2010) that reveals people who consider themselves as Republican tend to choose right news media such as FOX News while people that consider themselves as Democrats tend to choose left wing media such as CNN and MSNBC. This act of media selection creates a divergent in the society because people will only stick with their ideology group. This is the irony of living in the globalization age, as our world become more open and interconnected, people become more isolated because they can easily find their social group online and create their own closeted view of “reality”. The second question that Manjoo try to answer in his book is: how people interpret documentary evidence in a world now filled with all sort of information? Manjoo explains this through "selective perception" process; the tendency to interpret evidence and information according to ones long held belief. Manjoo states, “everything that happens around us is as much in our minds as it is in the world” (p.71) and our senses play a vital role in the way we perceive information. In order to discuss how the new media have diverted the truth, Manjoo utilizes 9/11 event as one of his example; This event is an exemplary illustration for media fragmentation because there are so many videos and photographs that record the event, but these still create a conflicting opinion in the public. Manjoo interviewed Phillip Jayhan, a 9/11 conspiracy theorist that believe 9/11 is an inside job, to analyze why certain group of people believes in that particular view. Manjoo founds that Jayhan use the same video and photo that are widely available on the internet and interpret it accordingly to his own view. Based on the Flight 175 videos and photographs that crashed into WTC on that day, Jayhan believe that he evidently saw a missile attached to the plane. Manjoo, however, says that it is very hard to distinguish any significant detail because the image is too blurry and the entire impact takes place in less than a fraction of a second. Even though Manjoo and Jayhan watch the same thing, each of them ends up seeing differently from one another. That is because the way they interpret and perceive the evidence is not the same. In this information age, various photos and videos that are available on the YouTube and Flickr will lead to greater uncertainty because each person has their own interpretation of the evidence.
According to Manjoo, expert opinion is "the soul of modern media" (p.104). Manjoo explains that when a person does not really understand certain situation at hand, they tend to believe and accept what the authorities say. This of course is a convenient way of knowing, however, in this digital age, there are numerous people claiming to be an expert and each of them will say a different thing. With the limitless varieties of experts’ opinion, people need to make a choice on which experts they want to believe. Usually, people will tend to choose an expert that is agreeable to their own personal view. For example, according to Manjoo, reality is splitting over global warming because they are a small percentage of scientist that do not accept the majority scientific consensus of global warming as reviewed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). People that do not believe in global warming will often quote these experts that say there is no conclusive evidence for global warming. With the emergence of social media, these experts can reach a larger group of audience and can divert general public from the truth. Manjoo cites a study by Pew Research Center in 2006 that reveals more that 60% of Americans think that global warming is a hoax. This statistic is worrisome because as we move toward more civilized and globalized society, there are still huge percentages of people that do not want to believe in scientific fact.
Gopnick (2011) states "cognitive entanglement, after all, is the rule of life" (p.1), which means that in the information society, deception and treacherous arguments are inevitable. Certainly, in the global information network, especially through internet, everyone has the right to speak and express their idea freely without censorship. Coll (2011) in his article, The Internet: For Better or For Worse writes "internet can be used for both good and evil" (p. 2). Ultimately, it is up to the reader itself to judge the quality of information and reliability of the sources that they want to believe.
Overall, Manjoo have done a terrific job to analyze the dystopian state of information technology where it creates a divergent in the general public opinion. Manjoo also has used scientific studies and statistics extensively to back up his main claim. Even though, some critics claim that this book is a little bit repetitive, they still praise Manjoo’s book for critically examine the information society issue that we are facing nowadays (Kane, 2008; Johnston, 2008). Personally, I would highly recommend this book to anyone that interested to learn more about the information society because it gives a new perspective on the negative side of the internet and new media.
Farhad Manjoo is a journalist and currently a staff writer for Slate magazine. He recurrently writes about new media, information technology, politics and the role of internet in journalism. He graduated from Cornell University in 2000. True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society is his first book that was published in 2008. The book got a truly excellent review from various critiques such as in CHOICE, a publication for the Association for College and Research Libraries and Columbia Journalism Review. To find more information about Manjoo, you can visit his personal blog, Wikipedia page and his own column in Slate magazine. If you are interested to buy the book, it is available on Amazon.com in both physical copy and kindle version.
Works Cited
Coll, S. (2011, April 7). The Internet: For better or for worse. New York Review of Books .
Gopnick, A. (2011, February 14). The Information: How the Internet gets inside us. The New Yorker .
Johnston, D. C. (2008, July). My facts. your facts: America and the pursuit of wilful delusionm. Columbia Journalism Review, 59-60.
Kane, P. E. (2008, August). [True enough]. Choice, 45(12), p. 2054.
Manjoo, F. (2008). True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Pew Research Center. (2010). Ideological News Sources: Who Watches and Why . Washington DC: The Pew Research Center For The People & The Press.
Praiser, E. (2011). The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. New York: The Penguin Press.
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