#StrongerTogether ! “Please don’t give up on the truth.” A 2017 Colorado College Commencement Speech by Hampton Sides...

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“Please don’t give up on the truth.” A commencement address by author and historian Hampton Sides.

… Today I want to talk about something that, while perhaps related to Trumpamine, is a little bigger, a little more serious, and a little more urgent. Something that as a journalist, and as a historian, is of enormous concern to me, and something that should be of enormous concern to anyone who cares about the health of our democracy and the prospect for civility in our public life. What I want to talk about today is . . . Truth.

It’s been said that we live in an age of “truth decay.” That we inhabit a post-factual world. A world of Fake News and alternative facts. A world in which every story is tainted, the product of leaks and hacks, black ops and active measures, propaganda and disinformation—spread by trolls, replicated by internet bots, amplified in echo chambers deep in the dungeons of the web. The noun “truth,” it seems, has morphed into something far squishier, what Stephen Colbert used to call “truthiness.”

We see that serious journalism has been all but replaced by the infoscape, the blogosphere, the social network, the Twitterverse. That stories have become merely content, news organizations have become merely platforms, the long narrative has been pecked to death by tiny newsfeeds crawling across the bottom of the screen. We see that the democratization of information, combined with the shrinking of our attention spans and our fast-twitching fingers, has led to a Tower of Babel that threatens to make all of us not only unintelligible to each other, but also, often, insufferable.

Last year the Oxford English Dictionary proclaimed “post-truth” the Word of the Year for 2016. “Post truth. Adj: relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

Some have said that not only is truth under siege, but also the standards and protocols by which we determine truth—the processes we use to sift and strain it, deem it and declare it. It’s a problem at the root of the crises we’ve seen in journalism, and in politics. But it also speaks to something deeper, something perhaps existential. Ultimately, it works its way down to the level of epistemology: What do we know? And how do we know that we know it? Who did the fact-checking? How does your truth compete with my truth? And how does it make me feel? … “

You can read the full commencement address here

You can find a brief biography of Sides here. 

(Per “Longreads” ~ “Hampton Sides, historian and author of bestselling books including Ghost Soldiers and In the Kingdom of Ice, gave the following commencement address to graduating students of Colorado College on May 22, 2017. Our thanks to the author for allowing Longreads to reprint it...”)

(Also, the above meme is a very lightly edited quote for space purposes.) 


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Curated by Gail Mountain, with occasional personal commentary, Network For #StrongerTogether ! is not affiliated with The Democratic Party in any capacity. This is an independent blog and the hope is you will, at a glance, learn more about the Party and you will, with a click or two, also take action on its behalf as it is provided!

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