My principled position is that we must accept that there are facts and truths in our world, and understand that there is an external, shared reality on which we can agree.
The fact that access to information has become easier and faster does not, of course, mean that the information we are exposed to is more reliable. This trend also does not ensure that we are better able to evaluate the quality of the vast amount of information we consume. On the contrary: more data necessarily means less time to assess its reliability. The information world each of us carries in a smartphone can therefore make it difficult, given how much we consume and produce, to distinguish between what is true and what is fake – so that, paradoxically, we know more but understand less.
Closely related to this is the fact that our rapid access to wide and deep oceans of information is not a guarantee that we interpret all of that information in the same way. As a result, disagreement among us expands – expressed not only in value judgments, but also in factual questions – and we arrive at a world in which each of us lives inside a personal, bubble-like reality. That reality is shaped by the information we are exposed to, the information we consume, and the subjective interpretation we assign to it.
Who maintains these bubble realities, and keeps them from bursting? We live in isolated and polarized bubbles of information also because the “rulers” of the web – Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the like – do not feed each of us the same information of every kind. Instead, they provide each of us with certain information that is personally and specifically “tailored” to us and to what interests us. It goes without saying that the advertisements we see online and the news that constantly reaches us are shaped by these rulers of the web in a way that satisfies our desires and fulfills our preferences. In this way, we are fed again and again with selective facts and selective information that may align with what we want, but do not reflect the full reality – and these sustain our bubble-like reality.
I believe that even in a world of bubble realities, we must accept that outside those bubbles there are shared facts and truths. The line of argument of those who oppose this view – the view that there are objective, shared facts – might be this: we will never be able to burst our bubble reality, because we cannot escape our biases and personal worldviews, which are also well maintained by the rulers of the web. Therefore, objective truth is nothing but an illusion. It does not exist, or at least it exists, but we will never be able to agree on it.
If that is indeed the case, it is no surprise that in George Orwell’s 1984, the Thought Police Officer O’Brien tortures Winston Smith (after Winston has been persuaded that war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength) in order to make him believe that two plus two equals five. This argument – that there is no objective truth – is, in my view, tempting and liberating, because it grants each of us the freedom to manufacture a personal and “legitimate” truth of our own. But my position is that it is wrong, and it does not establish the claim it seeks to support.
The central error in that argument lies in blurring the boundary between the difficulty of being certain about truth and the impossibility of truth itself. With all due respect, our difficulty in being certain about some facts is not proof that those facts do not exist. Moreover, there are many facts on which we can agree, even if we live in an age of bubble-like and polarized realities: slitting a person’s throat may lead to death; without any aids, human beings will struggle to live in the depths of the sea the way fish do; and so on.
There are certain facts where the absence of agreement can be dangerous. That would be the case, for example, if someone were to create a bubble reality with a subjective truth according to which slitting the throat of a healthy and happy person improves that person’s quality of life and increases their health and welfare.
In other words, even though truth and facts that are not relative are under attack and on the defensive, and even though social media, for all its advantages, has enabled the distinction between established facts and opinions or evaluations to be blurred, there are still truths and facts: planet Earth is elliptical and not flat; the climate is changing and not constant; and the singer Michael Jackson is dead and no longer among the living.
