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Of the disadvantages of truth
Truth suffers from two major disadvantages:
- it is often complex and requires effort to be understood, yet few have the intellectual willingness to take an interest in it,
- it is often not overly spectacular in the end, and accessing it does not offer any particular “pleasure”.
Attention is more easily captured by spectacular information that does not need to be significant, not even true. In fact, in an audience-based ecosystem, everything tends to become show, staging, story telling. The average user becomes a lazy observer waiting to be entertained, and less and less a citizen who seeks to be informed.
Studies show that fake news draw more attention than real news. This is the era of “post-truth”. This is not very far from the idea of “propaganda”, but the context is significantly different. The perception of powerlessness “in any case, nothing can be changed” may explain the lack of interest in truth, and the rise in the number of abstainers during elections.
To be able to draw the attention of a largely disengaged audience to important topics requires that much more talent.