A man is sentenced to 3 years in a Merseyside jail after he set fire to a telecommunications mast owned by Vodaphone.
A woman is left confused by Lee Ryan, from the boyband Blue, after he claims on Instagram that our government is controlled by the devil and we are all going to be injected with microchips.
A Sri Lankan astrobiologist professor explains to a newspaper that the Corona Virus came to earth on a fireball from space which could be seen over the northern China sky back in October.
It’s complicated isn’t it?
How can we know if anything is true, or not?
How can a society function if we don’t know if anything is true, or not?
Former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger thinks of newspapers as the former gatekeepers of knowledge, where journalists were once trusted to hand information down to us on a vertical axis.
With the vast spread of inter-connected technological devices, this world has been swept away. And we now live in a world where we all pass masses of information between us, on a horizontal axis.
In an attempt to prevent contracting the Corona Virus a woman is hospitalized with an inflamed throat after eating 15kg of raw garlic.
A graphic novelist who has been shielding since March dreams of attending a comic book fare with Ronald Regan. As the man explores the diversity of stock the former U.S. President swipes his wallet.
A confused man in Coventry googles ‘5G Corona Virus Conspiracy’ after ITV host Eamon Holmes says on live television; 'it’s very easy to say it isn’t true because it suits the state narrative’.
In the first episode of the 1972 television series Ways of Seeing John Berger invites a class of schoolchildren to respond to the Caravaggio painting Supper at Emmaus (1601). The children respond to the artwork on their own terms, relating the painting to their own lived experience. This is a direct attack on the ‘meaningless generalisations’ adopted by art critics.
Berger ends the episode by reminding us, the audience, about the lack of dialogue available within the television format and inviting us to be sceptical of him and his arguments.
A mother puts so much surgical spirit on her clothing that she sets herself on fire while cooking, causing serious burns on her face and hands.
A keyworker on her lunch break reads a tweet written by Kim Kardashian which claims a psychic, named Sylvia Brown, predicted the Corona Virus outbreak back in 2008.
A Russian teen is concerned after hearing president Vladimir Putin has released 500 lions to encourage citizens to stay indoors throughout lockdown.
In his 2016 book How to know what’s really happening? Irish writer and curator Frances McKee suggest differing solutions to his own question.
For the domestic situation, perhaps a private detective? If you are a state, perhaps an intelligence service? A civilian, perhaps try Edward Snowden? If you want to know when you’ll meet your partner, perhaps a fortune-teller? If you are concerned with the trajectory of particles through space, then perhaps a scientist could help?
“With so much information available and hurtling toward us from every direction” writes McKee, “the burden of filtering and interpretation finally lies with each of us… we are all now historians and archivists, selecting and compiling various shards of information to form a reading of the world”.
It’s complicated isn’t it?
PREVIOUS: A Matter of Trust #03
Comments