For many millennia, people could only learn what is happening beyond the horizon, only from the words of other people. Who tend to lie and exaggerate. And if a traveler who wandered into the village told that there, beyond the mountains, people with dog heads live, they believed him. What else was there to do? Do not go to check. Hay is not mowed here, the field is not grubbed, in general, not up to the people of Psoglav.
Later, when people began to gather in the cities, and daily newspapers began to appear in the cities, the principle remained largely the same. Journalists eager for sensations put into circulation such "ducks" that even made their contemporaries laugh. It is believed that the "newspaper duck" comes from the abbreviation NT - non testatur, that is, "not tested"; the abbreviation is consonant with the German Ente - "duck". However, the reliability of this information is also questioned.
In fact, no one is demanding that fiction be passed off as truth. You can honestly mark the material - they say, "not verified", for which we bought, for which we sell. Or put the subtitle "science fiction story", and if the reader does not pay attention to this, then the fault of the journalists is not here. This is quite possible: let us recall at least the famous case of the radio show based on Wells's "War of the Worlds" in the 30s, which American radio listeners mistook for a report about a real invasion of the Martians.
The same can be said for visual images. Paper will endure everything - and various chimeras, dragons and other monsters appear on the pages of medieval manuscripts, the improbability of which was limited only by the artist's imagination.
In the 19th century, technical means of capturing images appeared - photography, and then filming. And the public unconscious rejoiced - at last you can see all the amazing miracles with your own eyes, without leaving the cozy armchair in the cinema.
But simultaneously with these technical means, methods of deception with their help appeared: combined shooting, retouching, and so on. Already at the end of the 19th century, American physicist Robert Wood, using simple improvised objects like a painted tennis ball, illustrated his fantastic story about the flight to the moon with photographs. A little later, in 1912, the Russian artist Vladislav Starevich filmed silent cartoons, giving the necessary poses to dried beetles, reinforced with wire. The London Evening News wrote: “How is this done? None of those who saw the picture could explain. If the beetles are trained, then their trainer had to be a man of magical imagination and patience."
By the end of the 20th century, computers appeared, and in order to create an impossible picture by means of photo or video, it no longer required the non-trivial inventive abilities that were famous for the masters of combined photography of the pre-computer period. It is enough to master the corresponding software package and follow the instructions.
In this era, however, purely computer generated images required a lot of money, clusters of tens or even hundreds of servers. It was then that the film studios began to measure the budgets spent on special effects, this fashion has survived to this day. But thanks to technological progress, computing power is rapidly becoming cheaper, so 3D effects have long been available to amateurs.
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On the other hand, the knowledge that everything can be faked undermines faith in documentary filming. There are, for example, supporters of the theory of the "lunar conspiracy" who are seriously convinced that people have never flown to the moon, and the video reports of the Apollo program were filmed in Hollywood, in the next pavilion where Odyssey 2001 was filmed.
The appearance of Internet sites among periodicals, combined with the bad habit of their designers not to put the publication date on the page in large print, has led to another amusing effect. It has long been a tradition that on April 1 (or in the April issues of monthly editions) all sorts of draws are published. And the more believable, the better - more people will believe. And then this article remains on the site, and a few months later a journalist of another publication or a top blogger finds it and takes it at face value. Perhaps through inattention, but often because it is difficult to determine from the web page that it was published on April 1st. And another sensation went for a walk on the Web.
Recently, Tim Berners-Lee, creator of WWW, cited the ease of spreading misinformation over the web as one of the worst problems of the past 12 months. And the second problem is the impossibility of distinguishing political advertising from neutral texts.
In my opinion, this problem has existed for much longer. Read, for example, the stories of Mark Twain - he regularly addressed this topic, and in the context of election campaigns too. In those days, everything was arranged in much the same way as it is now. But then, in order to spread the news, you had to have access to a printing press. And everyone can get an account on a social network, now you don't even need a computer for this, a smartphone is enough.
As a result, the number of people in the news transmission chain is greatly increasing. Chains are not only longer than in the era of the paper press, when there were no professionals between the news source and the reader, but also longer than in pre-Huttenberg times, when rumors were passed from mouth to mouth. Simply because there are many more people in the world now, and the Internet allows them to communicate over much greater distances. At the same time, we, out of a habit developed in the era of paper, trust printed letters and photographs on the screen a little more than rumors.
Moreover, it is possible to spread false information for various reasons - someone believed, and someone admired the grace of a fake or decided to play a trick on a gullible friend.
What can you do about it? The author, of course, knows a good answer, but he won't tell you (just kidding). And everyone knows the simplest way: evaluate any incoming information for plausibility, compare with other sources, try to fit into the picture of the world. However, this is also fraught with the danger of overshooting - brushing aside the unreliable, not believing the truth. I have already mentioned about the "lunar conspiracy". Even more famous is the decision of the French Academy of Sciences not to consider the message of a meteorite falling - stones from the sky cannot fall, because they are not there. As it turned out later, the stones were absent only in the academicians' idea of the sky, and in the real sky, more precisely, in space, they are quite there and even sometimes fall from there.
It happens that the reluctance to write inconvenient facts into the picture of the world leads to much more unpleasant consequences than simply the loss of valuable evidence. Indeed, based on their ideas about the world, people plan their actions. And the world's reaction to these actions may be somewhat unexpected.
Surely Rodzianko and Lvov, who a hundred years ago persuaded Nicholas II to abdicate the throne, simply could not imagine that not only respected people, with whom one could always agree, but also masses of front-line soldiers and factory workers, would begin to participate in politics.
We observed a similar picture at two major political events last year - the British referendum to leave the EU and the US presidential election. In both cases, the losing side was unshakably convinced that they were right, that they could vote against just for fun. And in general, there were grounds for such confidence. In the USA, for example, in the capital more than 90% voted for Clinton. The Democrats also had university cities and high-tech areas like Silicon Valley. But it suddenly became clear that this point of view is not characteristic of the entire population as a whole, but only for a certain social stratum, and there are enough people with a different opinion to win, albeit with a very small margin.
People tend to believe that their social circle, if not the whole world, then at least well represents the spectrum of opinions existing in this world. And if suddenly someone bursts into this world from a point of view that is considered indecent here, then he probably joked unsuccessfully. But it may turn out that he is a sufficiently visible group, whose actions can interfere with the most beautiful plans.
Therefore, jokes and practical jokes should be taken seriously. How and what people joke about says a lot about reality.
Wagner Victor