WHAT’S ON THE SOCIAL MEDIA GRAPEVINE…IS NOT REAL NEWS
(…it just means you’re wearing green glasses…to look at roses)

There’s a curious and somewhat disturbing sidebar note that has emerged from this recent election of ours. It seems a very large number of people spent their time surfing the social media pool (FaceBook, Twitter, etc.) taking in whatever wild reports and stories about the election and accepting these as the gospel, over that of the real newsfeeds from traditional news sources.

This is disturbing because it strongly suggests that these technologies for communicating are rapidly eroding such folks’ sense of disbelief…conditioning them to blindly accept anything they see and hear from that grapevine…as fact…without question, and passing it on to others in their network…also as fact. It’s our modern era’s version of the old-style backyard-over-the-fence-gossip, with all its insidious perversions of what is really true.

The most troubling aspect of this, of course, is that people who are so immersed in these new ways of communicating are now more susceptible than ever before to calculated manipulation either by demagogues for political gain, or by those simply out to make a fast buck from as many gullible ones as they can stampede into doing whatever they want them to do. It is thus creating a collective dumbing-down effect on those who now live life like walking zombies staring in a trance at the palms of their hands, not realizing that believing in what’s on the social media’s grapevine is not…real news…but only means that they’re now creatures who wear green glasses…to look at roses.

CENTURION