As IF Times

Source: Facebook, Google Crack the Whip on Fake News

Back in the day, if it was on TV or in the newspapers, it must be true.  The modern iteration of this flawed wisdom now is that a story has validity because it was posted on Facebook.

There’s no denying that Facebook has morphed from a quaint social platform where friends posted their activities and kept in touch with distant relatives to become a commercial behemoth generating hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue and becoming the de facto village bulletin board for all types of spam.

For many, Facebook has become a compulsion as people out-do each other with envy invoking pictures of recent vacations or thrilling adventures.  Voyeurs and narcissists alike find reasons to be participants.  Naturally, the sheer size of the worldwide audience begged for commercial capitalization and so ads were introduced into the application and next thing you know, your neighbor’s vacation in Thailand is sponsored by Viagra.

People can post only so many interesting things since, well, most lives are dull punctuated by the occasional vacation episode or rock concert, or baby birth.  Enter the introduction of sponsored links and likes.  Now, users can further embellish their profiles by passing on stories, articles and opinions that they ‘like’, causing their contacts to also ‘like’, much like clapping when someone else starts it.

From liking videos of rescued dolphins,  puppies and cats to passing on interesting recipes for kale, the site became more and more a commercial billboard than personal scrapbook. Running out of original content, people lazily forwarded videos and clever quotes instead.  It became a natural place to distribute faux news under the cover of blessing from the social network.

A recent study revealed that more and more people were getting their news from either Facebook or Twitter, fully 67%, up from only 50% two years ago.  What this may mean is that opinion shapers may not be the mainstream media outlets of years gone by. Stories and opinions may now have to go through the gatekeepers on social media with the largest number of followers.

This is only alarming when you find out that among the people with the largest followers are, Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, Barack Obama, Rhianna, Eminem, Shakira and believe it or not, Michael Jackson.

The Facebook company has denied the distribution of fake news even as they promise to eradicate this practice going forward.  A particularly ironic nugget of science offered recently was a story that claimed that accepting Facebook requests would allow you to live longer. I suspect the global warming crowd are moonlighting in their storytelling.  Next thing you know, décolletage images will get un-likes on user pages.

It’s unlikely that Facebook’s influence on shaping social perceptions will diminish in the foreseeable future since the trend is towards short headlines and soundbites rather than in depth personal analysis.  My guess is that intellectual laziness and the pressure of social conformity will contribute more and more to the naïve population we see today.  The echo chamber of opinions is much like inbreeding.  Convenient at first, but eventually leading to undesirable consequences.

Source: Cleavage goes bust: Vogue declares the décolletage over

Since we’ve been discussing delusion, here’s a story that illustrates how pompous are the opinions of those self anointed culture and fashion gurus.

Decolletage over.  Hmm. Well, if we step back and take a top down view of the issue of cleavage, we’d have to concede that breasts have probably been overexposed as a fashion staple over the past generation.  Fashion runways, teen magazines and of course, certain ubiquitous personalities have ridden the fascination with chest exposure to dubious fame, notoriety and ample rewards.  Let’s not beat our chest on whether this is deserved or not, but I think we can agree that much of this fame is way over the top.

Coy glimpses of femininity never goes out of style, but fashion tastes have veered to the extreme. The de rigueur exposure of chest skin by women, especially those in entertainment,  makes them look like castings for a Russ Meyer film.  Even Russ could not have imagined the grotesque degrees that women would go to in order to ensure that no one would ever see the color of their eyes.

This is mainly an American phenomenon,  for like most things in America, if something is good, then more of it must be better.  Personalities such as Kim Kardashian and Nikki Minaj to name just a few, make the most of this craze for improbably shaped women to great commercial advantage.  Well, Vogue says that this is over.

As in a previous article about the fashion downfall of ‘manly men’, I’d be a bit skeptical of this pronouncement and wouldn’t expect the immediate demise of the push up bra. It’s one thing to dictate fashion affectations as padded shoulders, bell bottoms or short skirts.  It’s another to even consider that some New York fashionistas will dictate what is intrinsically attractive about the natural characteristics of the sexes.

On the other hand, there will always be that contingent of fashion slaves that need to be directed by a small cabal of style mavens as to what’s in vogue.  I’ve always thought this to be quite strange since I didn’t think people needed direction on the appeal of the opposite sex. As for those women who are concerned about being unfashionable after Vogue’s pronouncement; my advice is, don’t be concerned.  I’m sure someone will find you stylish, even if it’s only red blooded men.