The face of 'Truthiness'
'Bogus travel writing has a long and inglorious history, but in another way Kohnstamm is representative of a wider and more modern malaise: writers reviewing books they have not read, politicians claiming to have braved dangers they never faced, novelists depicting places they have not seen, memoirists describing a past that never happened, journalists making up stories about people that never existed, and, most pernicious of all, writers simply cutting and pasting words they have not written.
In most cases this is not active deception, but rather a strange cultural blurring of truth and fiction, the confusion of first-hand knowledge with second-hand electronic cuttings, the elision of personal experience with a reality borrowed or imagined from elsewhere.
This is the victory of information over experience. In Wiki-world, where so much semi-reliable information is available at the push of a button, there is no need to see something first-hand in order to be able to describe it with conviction and authority. A comparison of Paris guidebooks reveals entire chunks of identical text for some tourist spots: why actually visit somewhere to find out what it is like when one can merely paste together a version of reality?'
- Ben Macintyre; 'Economical with the truthiness'.
In most cases this is not active deception, but rather a strange cultural blurring of truth and fiction, the confusion of first-hand knowledge with second-hand electronic cuttings, the elision of personal experience with a reality borrowed or imagined from elsewhere.
This is the victory of information over experience. In Wiki-world, where so much semi-reliable information is available at the push of a button, there is no need to see something first-hand in order to be able to describe it with conviction and authority. A comparison of Paris guidebooks reveals entire chunks of identical text for some tourist spots: why actually visit somewhere to find out what it is like when one can merely paste together a version of reality?'
- Ben Macintyre; 'Economical with the truthiness'.
Comments
movies like the mummy/ jurassic park/day after tomo/so many others wud never have been spun.. fukn interesting plots cud never have been woven- like the bourne series/books by david baldacci/even enid blyton..
i wud say- innovation is an accidental byproduct of stolen-in-the-daylight inspiration..
:)
god/superpower shud be darn ingenious to have devised everything first-hand,.
wat irony- for every single invention people arrive an, he must be having the last laugh, as he was the one who chose the inventor and the invented.
ya're right though- dirct rip-offs in a travel guide are teh most blasphemous, i dun know how eevn i had the audacity in college to completely google assignments/even case studies.. :)